A drawing by Jake Tobin from his Put On Notice series shows Maitland St. in Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village.Jake Tobin
Jake Tobin Garrett is a Toronto-based artist.
I first noticed just one or two on walks around my neighbourhood, but then they began popping up everywhere, like tufts of grass between sidewalk cracks.
Sunken into the ground on stilts, the City of Toronto’s official development notices were suddenly, it seemed, everywhere in the Church-Wellesley Village, the heart of the city’s queer community. They began to tell a story of a neighbourhood on the cusp of change – not just in the form of tall buildings sprouting from empty lots, but the removal of existing apartment buildings and the residents who call them home.
The signs quickly became a place for people to register their anxieties, scrawled in various messages on the notice boards, which became the bathroom stall walls of the street. The city would scrub these away, but their ghostly imprints remained until something new would be written.
Isabella Street in Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village.Jake Tobin
I started drawing these scenes in April because that is how I make sense of things. The drawings evolved into a continuing series called Put On Notice, which I view as a documentary project more than anything else. A record of a moment in time.
Cities change constantly. We cannot move into a place and then expect it to freeze, because we too are the beneficiaries of change, development and displacement. That is what it means to live in the palimpsest that is a modern city – wherever you are, there was always something there before.
I write these words from the 30th floor of a condominium building in the Village, originally built in the 1970s, where my boyfriend and I live. The Village has been a tower neighbourhood for years. But what feels unique about these new developments is the destruction of existing apartment buildings and the displacement of so many people – a symptom, perhaps, of the way Toronto squeezes development into small areas of the city. Some of these people may return, but no doubt what is built will be more expensive than before.
My friend, the placemaker and author Jay Pitter, often speaks about the tangible and intangible culture of a city. I’ve thought about this a lot on my walks around the Village. The buildings and physical spaces in a neighbourhood are obvious forms of tangible culture, but what about the intangible? The people who inhabit those places and the emotions, energy and creativity that they imprint on their surroundings as they go about their daily lives? In a unique neighbourhood like the Village, with its strong queer history and culture, I think these questions are even more urgent.
That is what I hope to capture with Put On Notice. Along with documenting the development notices, the changing dialogue inscribed on them, and the existing buildings, my aim is to also capture the way the people in these buildings live their lives, and their mark on the neighbourhood. A record of both the tangible and intangible culture of these places before change sweeps in, as it always does.
This is not to revel in nostalgia, but I do think it’s important for cities to have a collective memory. I hope to develop this project into an exhibit, a book, or both as a way to help us understand a little bit about who we were at this moment in the Village, and what we will become.