Due to rise in home prices, neighbourhood gems like Park Snacks café are vanishing
At 81 years old, Morgan Radcliffe has a daily routine. She leashes up her pup Chelsea, and with a walker to steady her, traverses the sidewalks of Cabbagetown, the residential enclave dotted with heritage homes in downtown eastern Toronto where she’s lived for four decades.
Rounding the corner of Winchester and Sumach streets one recent Friday, Radcliffe found herself facing a For Sale sign out front of Park Snacks — the small, jaunty café that blends among the houses. Over the years, it’s a place Radcliffe has stopped to indulge in a frosty scoop of butter pecan ice cream, handed through a window just inside its patio gate.
From the sidewalk, she hollered through the open doorway: “You’re going to be missed!”
This Cabbagetown staple is a holdout of an older Toronto — a small business nestled between detached houses, and the kind of place that today’s planning rules would not allow to be built. Places like this, miniature corner stores and barber shops, tiny pizzerias and coffee counters, many dating back to before the Second World War, freckle the city’s neighbourhoods and often operate with grandfathered permission as long as they’re continually in use.
But in recent decades, these sites have been rapidly disappearing, as red-hot land values in Toronto have made it lucrative to convert them into residential units. Once a property stops being used as a business, city rules close the door behind them, ensuring it’s an uphill battle to ever get the old permission back.
Even before the pandemic squeezed the city’s small businesses, numbers were markedly down — with 1,406 of these little neighbourhood retail and service operations left in existence in 2019 compared to the more than 2,100 that existed in residential areas back in 1989.
It’s a loss not only of the kind of place where you can quickly grab a carton of eggs, but of the local haunts beloved by neighbours like Radcliffe.
And it’s a trend the city is now trying to turn around.
‘The small guy… those days are done’
Inside Park Snacks, longtime proprietor Greg Trieloff knows it’s time to retire. He’s loved this place, with its wide window to hand out hot dogs and ice cream cones on summer days. The operation is just one part of the building, with the rest divided into two residential units.
With a long history as a community staple — since the late 1800s, local records show it’s been home to a rotating cast of grocers, a shoemaker and a laundromat, among uses — he’s hoping the sale isn’t the end.
That afternoon, realtor Anna Terry was preparing to show the property, cheerily highlighting the stained glass windows in one of the adjoining residential units, as well as a loft space and large patio in the other. Trieloff knows a new buyer might want to use the entire property for residential purposes — whether divided up, or converted into one large single-family home.
It’s something he’s seen happen repeatedly over the years in their area, as tiny local businesses like a nearby picture framing shop melted into a more homogenous picture of houses.
The Park Snacks building at 161 Winchester St. first came into Trieloff’s view in the late 1990s, shortly after he’d moved to Canada from Barbados, when his mother stumbled across the property on a walk around the neighbourhood. He managed to snag the corner property for less than $300,000 in 1998 — a far cry from the current $2.8-million price tag.
Over the years since, Trieloff has revelled in connections forged with the local community — something he sees as unique to operating a business next-door to people’s homes. Faces quickly became familiar, he says, like those of neighbours like Radcliffe or the staff at Riverdale Farm across the road, who he says often come by for hot dogs during a hard day’s work.
He grins while recounting how, on one of his earliest days as the building owner, he’d set out to paint the outside walls and a neighbour wandered up to offer their own suggestion: the green hue he’d chosen, he recalls them saying, would look much better with a terra-cienna tint.
For many years, he and his business partner ran a small restaurant inside the building — serving lunches or afternoon teas to a soundtrack of Marlene Dietrich tunes. Since around 2010, when Trieloff had to step back for a while to care for his aging mother, they’ve focused solely on the café window — which would ramp up in May and wind down by October.
It felt much harder to run a small business in Toronto today than when he started, he said, especially competing with retail giants. They were lucky to have Riverdale Farm across the road to bolster business. “If the farm was not there, it would be a tougher time for this to work.”
“The small guy… those days are done,” he said. “This is one of the last.”
A stand-alone store in the old city, a modest plaza in the suburbs
While Park Snacks is now more of an anomaly in Cabbagetown, you can still find small cafés, restaurants, even barber shops tucked between houses across the Toronto map.
In pre-war parts of the city, these establishments often stand alone between homes, says Toronto chief planner Gregg Lintern. They look like Bernhardt’s, a small rotisserie in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it location between houses on Dovercourt Road in Little Portugal.
Another pre-war example is the Monarch Tavern on Clinton Street in nearby Little Italy, where a photograph shows locals gathered to celebrate the end of the Second World War in the same place where residents can nowadays stroll up for a pint. This two-storey brick pub of a similar height to surrounding houses is one of a few small businesses within this curl of west-end homes — adjacent to a tiny sandwich shop and across the street from Bitondo’s pizzeria.
In the suburbs that boomed postwar, you can also find older retail and service spots within otherwise residential neighbourhoods, though they look a little different. Here, Lintern says you’re most likely to find modest strip plazas — using the example of North York’s Rustic Bakery, which operates in a small plaza surrounded on all sides by low-slung houses.
But in the 1950s and ’60s, Toronto began to more aggressively divide its land uses, introducing zoning that set aside large pieces of the map as “neighbourhoods” meant only for detached and semi-detached houses. Other parts of the city were zoned for uses such as commercial sites, apartments, and protected green space. While these new rules made it hard to open new neighbourhood retail sites, those already in existence were given legal nonconforming status — a recognition that they predated the rules and thus had grandfathered permission to stay put.
These operations can change somewhat over time, with a new store and new owners taking over an old site, but if the use switches to something like residential, that permission evaporates.
An untold number of local establishm
ents have this legal nonconforming status, with city hall telling the Star they do not track the total number citywide.
These properties are especially vulnerable to real estate churn. With Toronto’s sky-high prices for homes in these kinds of neighbourhood zones, a new buyer has to consider what makes financial sense — is that keeping the corner store or café window in operation? Or is it using the full property as a residential unit? And if that commercial use changes, even for a few years, it can be a long and arduous process to ever get local retail permission again.
“The cycle gets broken,” Lintern said.
There are economic forces involved that city hall cannot control. “Is someone going to buy the business, and run it as a business, and have the income to support their existence?” he asked.
But city staff are looking at which of its own policies could be changed to preserve places like Park Snacks, which Lintern sees as a “poster child” for the neighbourhood business model.
Old city, new zoning rules
In recent years, city hall has begun to overhaul its zoning system.
The decades-old framework has turned Toronto, over time, into a city of uneven and jagged growth. As much of the city was set aside only for detached or semi-detached houses, denser buildings for a rising population were forced to cluster in areas such as Yonge and Eglinton. To crack open house-dominated neighbourhoods, the city has been opening the door in recent years for more “gentle density,” permitting garden suites, laneway homes, and multiplex developments.
Now, it’s eyeing a zoning change to encourage and preserve local retail and services — with a proposal to be released early 2024.
To Lintern, the city’s efforts to boost housing in neighbourhood zones goes hand-in-hand with the efforts to protect local retail and services. Both are assets in creating complete communities, he said. It was about more than access, Lintern said — the idea was to create more of a civil society, with small local institutions where neighbours could interact.
That intangible sense of community feels especially important after the lockdowns of the pandemic, he said, as more people than ever are working, even partially, from their homes.
Some groups in the city have chafed against the idea. In a recent letter to city hall, the Long Branch Neighbourhood Association drew a distinction between something like a tailor’s office and a café with a patio. “Living beside a café would be like having a neighbour that had a backyard barbeque every single night,” wrote one neighbourhood association board member.
To Lintern, the details will be important. It won’t be a matter of allowing any kind of small businesses in any location, he said — staff are considering potential “nuisances” such as deliveries, loading needs and traffic impacts as part of ongoing work on the proposal.
Last year, council took a first step and approved a change to Toronto’s Official Plan, which endorses these local haunts as part of “complete, connected communities” — so long as they don’t cause a nuisance and fit within the existing scale of an area. But the precise details, such as maximum square footage rules, will be in the proposed zoning overhaul.
Park Snacks prepares for change
In the meantime, Cabbagetown’s Park Snacks faces an uncertain future.
“I hope the new people, whoever they are, continue the same thing,” Radcliffe, the neighbour, said wistfully that Friday afternoon. But Trieloff told the Star he doesn’t plan to limit buyers to those intending to keep the café going — so he knows a conversion to a fully residential property may be in the cards. “It would be sad, but that’s an option,” he acknowledged.
In an ideal world, he would love to see someone continue with the mixed-use model — maybe someone who, like him, was new to Toronto and looking for a foothold to launch a business in a close community.
“I am blessed to come into Cabbagetown,” he smiled, rattling off names of neighbours who’d ebbed through the café and its patio. He’d known 2023 would be their last season when they opened the window in May, as he and his business partner eyed retirement. They were each ready to put down the ice cream scoops, and pass the torch to new hands.
“I worked in here from the very beginning, whether it’s serving tables, scooping ice cream, painting, cleaning,” he reminisced. At 70, he’s prepared to put that to rest. But after 25 years, it’s the neighbours he finds hardest to leave.
“They were all very helpful with anything they could do to help me along the journey.”
This article was reported The Star
