Micro-Nostalgia

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

— Big Yellow Taxi (1970) by Joni Mitchell

I remember the exterior bricks as being an earthy yellow colour,

But I could be wrong.

Jawbreakers, Tar Bubbles, and A Lost Shoe

I remember riding my bike, or walking, to the convenience store in that tiny plaza, a dime in my pocket, looking forward to buying a Sweet Marie, some Smarties, a Coffee Crisp, or a Jawbreaker. The Jawbreaker was, of course, more fun. It lasted longer, and turned your tongue different colours as you sucked your way down to its heart. But which to choose? Such were the hard decisions of that time, that place, my bucolic suburban world.

There were more wildflowers then: Queen Anne’s Lace, buttercups, thistles. The side streets were gravel with tar bubbling up in the summer heat. As children, we would stomp on these tar bubbles — an old-school form of bursting plastic bubble wrap, but far more satisfying, as the resulting “pop” was a matter of choice, picking just the right black bubble, and applying just the right amount of pressure. But, like most things, there was a price to pay — black tar residue on your shoes that must be carefully scraped off before going home, otherwise deep trouble. Which brings me to the lost shoe…

I want to record some small moments tied to this particular place — a place whose name I’ll get to, shortly. I was minorly assaulted there once, if one can ever term an assault “minor,” and I lost one suede shoe in the mud — both events happened behind the plaza. Between the plaza and the nearby senior public school, there was an open field. Not actually a field — more of a muddy space that was being razed for a townhouse development. I would cross it as a shortcut coming home from school, and just before I reached the plaza, the mud became very soft, and my leg plunged into the mud up to my knee. With childhood fears of quicksand and other disasters running through my mind, I quickly extracted my leg, but the shoe was sucked right off my foot. So Crestview Plaza has the archaeological remains of my brown suede shoe — which I used to think of as being preserved like the bog mummies in Denmark. But I digress…

Crestview Plaza

Crestview Plaza. Such a workaday, ordinary name. And it was such a place, and places such as these hardly exist anymore, and for the most part are poorly documented. No one took pictures for posterity; no one wrote elegiac think-pieces about them. A small place, mostly erased from history. And yet it had seen such history over its lifetime, and those who now live in the rather posh townhouses recently built on the site likely have no idea what ghosts went before.

What’s in a name? Crestview. Which crest, and which view? Even when I first came to the area in 1961 I do not recall either a crest or a view, and yet there likely was one, and perhaps there still is, in someone’s fenced backyard.

The plaza — a rather grandiose designation for a tiny strip mall — sat just south of the Queen Elizabeth Way (formerly the “Middle Road”) and in between what used to be called “Saul’s Creek” (now rather flatly called Cooksville Creek) and Silver Creek — a name no one seems to recall, other than a few businesses upstream using the name as something pleasant and mildly evocative.

Now it is no longer, gone the way of the farmhouse that predated it, and gone the way of the Anishinaabe presence that predated the farmhouse. What is there now are relatively upscale townhouses, part of “Mineola.” But a few decades ago, no one called this area Mineola — if it was called anything, it was called Port Credit, or Toronto Township. There was no cachet to living here. That came much later.

The Goldthorpes

The Crestview site does have some documented history — that of the Goldthorpe family. In the 1840s, a settler named John Goldthorpe cleared this exact parcel and built a log cabin on it — the same ground where the plaza would later stand, and where the townhouses stand now.

While ploughing, he turned up a medal in the soil, one given by King George III to the father of a local Mississauga chief. The chief recognized it instantly and pressed it to his chest, saying only, “My father’s — my father’s.” The story survives in a single source: a 1972 newspaper interview with Mildred Bellegham, a Goldthorpe descendant, who heard it as a child from her own grandfather — very possibly Thomas William Goldthorpe, the family’s most prominent member, who served as Reeve of Toronto Township in the early 1900s and for whom nearby Goldthorpe Road is still named, though I can’t say for certain which of John’s sons was doing the telling.

No other document of the exchange exists. It survives only because a woman once told a reporter a story her grandfather had told her — which is, I suppose, exactly how the best of history actually survives.

At some point the Goldthorpe land was subdivided, and in about 1955 the plaza was built. As I mentioned earlier, I arrived in 1961, and from that time until the early 1970s I would go there, often along with my mother. We would do grocery shopping at the “anchor” store (another newly coined term, unused at the time), splurge on fresh bread and pastries from another shop there (I believe the bakers were Polish, but my memory may be flawed on this point), and of course get treats and forgotten little things from the convenience store.

The Dentist and the Dinosaur

The upper portion of the plaza, which you entered at ground level through wide glass doors, housed various medical and professional offices. Our family dentist, Dr. Sidney Weinrib, was there. His waiting room was unremarkable except for a wondrous aquarium. It was wonderful not for the fish, but for the clever little dinosaur-shaped gizmo that blew air bubbles out its mouth. Somehow that dinosaur made the dentist less fearsome.

I recall quite vividly that Dr. Weinrib had a large poster in his treatment room. The poster showed a narrow and treacherous path that eventually led to Heaven, contrasted with a wide and elegant path that led directly to the monsters in Hell. First a dinosaur blowing bubbles and then a little moral lesson served up with your fillings.

Years later, after the plaza was mostly deserted, I had been seeking some storage near my home for my book inventory (I’ve been a bookseller for many years), and had the upstairs shown to me. It was broken up, with dangling fixtures and generally a mess, but what remained, in all its glory, were the bright appallingly orange Arborite (such an iconic Canadian product) bathroom partitions. I never would have remembered them had I been asked, but the moment I saw them decades later, I was immediately transported back to my childhood dental visits. Now of course those partitions are long gone.

The bubble blowing dinosaur, oddly, had a second chance at life. He ended up in Sidney’s brother’s dental practice further north on Hurontario Street. The aquarium had been moved there, but no longer housed water, nor fish, The dinosaur sat there, inert, like a player in a very small and silent diorama. I don’t think that office is there any longer.

Where the dinosaur ended up, I do not know.

The Barber and the Fortune Teller

Shortly after the founding of the plaza, one of the first tenants was Joe, the barber. Much later I leaned his name was Joe (or Giuseppe) Nemi. My father occasionally went there for a haircut. Joe remained for roughly sixty years — closing, as best I can place it, sometime well before the pandemic, and at some point after the mayor herself came by to shake his hand and cut a cake in his honour. When I viewed the site for storage possibilities, I saw the remains of his chairs, and a few of the more famous portraits of customers still on the walls.

Several years later, before the plaza was torn down, a movie crew converted his shop into a set for a fortune-teller. I’m not sure if this is some strange form of symmetry. Or not.

Where History Lives

What, one might ask, is the point of writing about this one tiny corner? As I often believe is the case, the crux is beside the point. I suppose one could write another history of the Goldthorpe family (which, I believe, has already been done), or an analysis of the demise of the strip mall. But what lives beside the point is all the real substance: the Arborite partitions, the jawbreakers, the buttercups, and the placing of those humble flowers under each other’s chin to see “if you liked butter.” My lost shoe, the assault, the dentist with his dinosaur, the barber who cut the hair of a famous CFL player (Nick Volpe, a former Argonaut) and a possibly-Polish bakery: all these are beside the point, and fascinating for exactly that reason. No one remembers any of this, except perhaps me (and now perhaps you, Dear Reader), and I find it poignantly sad that we lose the little things that create the texture of life.

No one will ever see those ghastly Arborite panels again and have an instant recall of a place fifty years gone.

I don’t believe history is merely a collection of political movements, wars, sociological analyses — although those things matter. What we often forget, to the point that it becomes almost irretrievable, are the little homey things — the Jawbreakers, the pheasants that ran in the field behind the plaza, the perhaps-Polish bakers, the exuberance of buttercups — these, these are the memories I cherish, and hope will, in some way, endure here, in these words.