If it was a character in a book, the neighbourhood in search of a name would be a classic existential hero. It's more than a century old, as old as the Annex, but nobody knows what to call it. It doesn't even know what to call itself, despite hesitant efforts over the years to acquire a name.
Once it was the heart of a thriving factory district, with trim worker housing clustered as close as possible to the job-spinning smokestacks, railways on three sides and spur lines everywhere. No name was necessary. Now that the factories are almost all closed, it is a rail-bound nowhere - south of the CPR tracks, west of the GO Newmarket line, east of the Georgetown line - badly in need of identity.
Newspaper accounts of anti-pollution activism in the last days of the factories referred to it as the Junction Triangle. In official parlance, it is part of the nebulous Dovercourt-Wallace Emerson-Junction. A past effort attempted to name it the Wallace Junction.
But none of those names stuck, which is why a committee of local activists convened a public meeting, to be held this evening, to launch what promises to be the long and controversial process of naming their orphan slice of the west end.
"We think of it as a community improvement process, something that pulls the neighbourhood together and gives a sense of pride," says Kevin Putnam, a Perth Avenue resident and leader of the unusual initiative, named Fuzzy Boundaries.
The group is proposing a formal consultation process culminating in multiple votes to create a short list of potential names, which will then be submitted to a distinguished panel charged with selecting a winner. All suggestions are welcome, according to Mr. Putnam, and nobody is trying to "jam" the process with preferred names. "That is a no-win proposition," he says.
He admits, however, that opponents have already appeared, mainly in the form of old-timers who say it's the Junction Triangle, as ever, and gentrifiers be damned. But Mr. Putnam, a public-relations consultant who has lived in the neighbourhood for five years, has done his homework. The name Junction Triangle first appeared in a 1976 article by Dick Beddoes in this newspaper and petered out, along with the factories, in the early 1990s.
He doesn't like the name because it suggests submission to the Junction, a better-known neighbourhood with a distinct identity, separated from the orphan triangle by a busy rail corridor. The so-called Junction Triangle is older and quite different from the comparatively suburban Junction, according to Mr. Putnam, echoing sentiments once expressed by former residents of the South Annex, now known as Harbord Village.
But Triangle is also problematic. There is already the West Queen West Triangle to the south, along with something now called the Brockton Village Triangle - both of them artifacts of the same crosscutting rail lines that bound the nameless quarter to the north.
That geography has suggested one of the early favourites in the hunt for a new name: Railtown. Mr. Putnam likes it because it isn't another village. "Everything in this city is a village," he complains. "There's way too many villages."
A case in point - and a brilliant example of the power of identity - is newly named, hotly gentrifying Roncesvalles Village. "It's Parkdale," he notes. But not any more.
Left to its own perverse devices, the real-estate market would probably name the orphan tract Upper Roncesvalles. If nothing else, the Fuzzy Boundaries initiative will forestall such creeping embarrassments.
