Image: Jeff Halperin
By Jeff Halperin
I live between Little Italy and Little Portugal, but before that, Forest Hill was my home. Believe it or not, there was a time before the high-brow affluence, and I’d like for this to be a record of the fun village it once was.
When Superman died in 1993, I ran to In Advance to buy the comics. I got my X-Men comics and Pogs there too, but this respectably grimy spot specialized in all video games, usually getting them in before anyone else (hence the name). They also got Nintendo rarities from Japan nobody else got. Inside, kids scrounged up loonies and lined up to play the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat arcade games. Skateboarders hung out there, smoking butts outside and speaking colourful profanities. When I was about 10-years-old this place was gritty and exciting, and mentioning In Advance now to someone who lived there gets a huge smile every time; not only haven’t they thought about it in years, but the current Village is so different now it’s easy to forget a place like that ever existed. In Advance probably shouldn’t have sold kids fireworks, as everyone knew where they came from. It resulted in Roman candle fights and many distressed but polite calls to the owner, “please stop selling my kids fireworks.” In Advance shut down and I understand its failure remains an ugly memory for the owner to this day. I hope his disappointment is at least tempered, however slightly, by the knowledge that he supplied that special nostalgic gift to countless kids that’s impossible to quantify.
The now defunct Village Idiot was a charmingly greasy restaurant (curiously, even after its renovation) offering cheap pub food to kids years away from getting into pubs. We always ordered small sized drinks knowing that the short squat “small” glasses contained the exact same volume as the “large” tall and skinny glasses. One day we tested this and laughed at the amusing miniature-scale swindle. I spoke to my friend’s older brother who laughingly recalled eating there while skipping prayers at UCC (“weird Anglican hymns”) to eat bacon and smoke butts at the table.
Across the street for an all too short period was Fantasize Sports. They had all the Leafs and Jays gear you could want. I probably got a couple things, but I loved taking in all the hats and jerseys, most of them bearing the name of some new guy, Sundin.
But for years the Village staple was Bonanza Video, which had a wide selection of Super Nintendo and Sega games to complement their movies. In retrospect, their organizational principle for VHS titles was wonderfully quaint and primitive: the movies for rent were stored in their original case on a shelf in alphabetical order. This was before generic Blockbuster cases or little Velcro tags on a shelf (Queen Video). If you could see the movie on the shelf, it was available. Famously, an old-fashioned popcorn machine provided free servings to both patrons and hungry kids walking around the area. Late fees were never issued. The screens showed movies the employees wanted to watch, not a montage of new releases. We got a thrill out of running into the little adult section in the basement, and scampered out embarrassed and laughing whenever we found an actual adult inside.
Alas, science can tell us about glaciers that arrived here after millions of years, but having lived and died before Google these places of my childhood have disappeared largely without a trace. In Advance became a café, then another café, but now the space is surely undergoing its final metamorphosis as a condominium. Blockbuster bought out the old-school hardware store directly across the street from Bonanza. They competed for a while, and in the end it was considered almost a charitable act, a corporate kindness, when Blockbuster bought them out rather than let them die a slow and public death, ironically sparing Bonanza of the fate they themselves suffered. Now Blockbuster is an Aroma coffee shop, which competes against Starbucks and Second Cup, but forgotten is the Coffee Tree, whose existence predated my coffee addiction by years, and whose run ended abruptly in a suspicious fire. But I was heartened to see that the Hasty Market, the convenience store since time immemorial, still stocks cap guns and a surprising quantity of ammunition. Their comic rack, hockey cards, and loads of chips and candy are all still there, but there’s no Big League Chew and Hubba Bubba has scandalously doubled in price (10c a piece).
The village was always an affluent place, but it was not always exclusively posh. It was a community with heart and soul, and I ask for this to be graciously taken into consideration before Forest Hill people are written off wholesale as dull bourgeois snobs.
But the village has changed, and it is now mostly child-free. Perhaps modern kids are shuttled to Future Shop to buy games. More likely, they buy everything online, making exposure to rapists, sunshine and other like-minded children impossible. In Rome years ago before the crumbled stones strewn over Palatine Hill, I said “this city’s best days are behind them.” Such is my thought when I see the sleek new advertisements for spas or travel packages. They are ruins to me, and I imagine past glory.
As communities are being planned and built across the city, I hope local children are given more than a sterile jungle gym and a patch of grass in a park, and developers remember that what kids really like is simple: comics, cards, video games, cap guns, fireworks, free popcorn and a surreptitious dash of porn.
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Jeff Halperin is a Toronto-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter @JDhalperin.
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