Erasure of urban detritus: Toronto’s Sin Strip

In the decades that followed the Second World War, as suburban residential developments expanded and city centres became less desirable areas, these spaces entered periods of decline. While for many in the emerging middle class a single-family home was seen as desirable, the city centre remained a destination for artists and then societally repressed LGBTQ communities, populations unable or willing to take part in the twentieth-century exodus to the suburbs. This article explores an example of a red-light district that emerged during this time in the city of Toronto. Campaigns to clean up vice districts began as early as the late 1970s. Toronto is a noteworthy example, both for the swift eradication of adult entertainment businesses (massage parlours and adult film theatres) in 1977 and for the upstanding reputation the city cultivated in the twentieth century. LGBTQ communities became an adjacent target as part of this campaign in Toronto. Beyond the city’s swift urban sanitisation efforts in 1977, larger-scale urban gentrification processes have continued since that time. Assimilation into dominant North American societal norms is arguably impossible – and perhaps undesirable – for many artists and nightlife participants. With the gentrification and subsequent continued eradication processes of urban non-mainstream cultural spaces underway, artists and marginalised communities are inevitably less able to gather or intermingle, coexist and co-create in nocturnal venues when there is less physical space to do so. Furthermore, I argue that cultural creative potential was lost for marginalised artistic and LGBTQ communities with the eradication of Toronto’s red-light district and rampant gentrification of the city.

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