E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

May/June 1998 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: War on city geese Our Home and Native Tongue Sense of place

Illustration by Daphne McCormack

The nicknames Canadians give their urban neighbourhoods display a cheerful if mocking affection. For example, West Coast Canucks once dubbed the Kitsilano area of Vancouver with the playful tag Kitschilano. Over the years, hippie head shops selling incense and psychedelic posters along with other trinket emporia opened along West 4th Avenue to peddle kitschy ephemera. West Vancouver’s somewhat gentrified Ambleside Park is often called Amblesnide. Hallelujah Point, a spot near the totem poles in Stanley Park, was named after Salvation Army revival meetings held there for many years.

Vancouver had the first Skid Row in Canada in an area presently bounded by Carrall and Cordova streets. Skidroad and its later variant, skid row, come from West Coast lumbering slang. In Vancouver’s early days, the area was the terminus of an actual skidroad, a slideway used to drag logs to water or to railway track for transport to a lumber mill. Skids were peeled and greased logs laid transversely across a cleared pathway so that teams of oxen, horses, or mules could haul rough timber. How was skidroad altered to Skid Row? Unemployed loggers often gathered at the end of these trails to ask a boss for work. When no jobs were available, it was time to party. In Vancouver and in Seattle, Wash., this involved booze and brothels to which gambling was soon added, then cheap lodging for out-of-work loggers and mission soup kitchens for derelicts. Canada stakes a claim to this second Skid Row, but not the first one. That was a street called Yesler’s Way in Seattle, constructed in 1852.

Scotchman’s Hill is a Calgary lookout at Salisbury and 6th streets, where one gets a superb vista of foothills, the city core, the Saddledome and the Calgary Stampede grounds. It is one of the best spots to view the fireworks set off during Stampede celebrations. The name arose because cheapskates can watch many of the Stampede activities from the hill for free, instead of paying admission. Och, that’s nay but a wee libel against the true generosity of the Scot.

A new nickname often indicates a change in the use and population of a neighbourhood. An area of Edmonton once called Dog Patch and now known as Riverdale is an older community of small, gentrified houses. In years past it received poor newcomers who reminded residents of the mythical Dog Patch, a hamlet of hicks where cartoonist Al Capp’s L’il Abner dwelt. Another Edmonton neighbourhood, Packingtown, once had four meat-packing plants. This nickname is now obsolete. The neighbourhood is being transformed and has been rechristened Santa Rosa.

A block of Toronto’s Bloor Street housing Hungarian restaurants is called The Goulash Archipelago by University of Toronto students, punning on The Gulag Archipelago by Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Parkdale in Toronto’s west end was once known as Perkdale, because prostitution and street-drug trade made Percodan pills a medium of exchange.

Mechanicsville, in northwest Ottawa, likely received its moniker from the mill workers who formed the community in the late nineteenth century. Then, railroad maintenance crews moved into the area after the opening of a CP Rail roundhouse in which mechanics repaired locomotives. Later the city of Ottawa operated an industrial garage there to fix heavy road-making machines. In the 1960s sections of Mechanicsville were rezoned for apartments and government buildings. This rezoning was part of an urban renewal scheme that planned to replace some older houses, prompting residents to form "Action Mechanicsville" to preserve the neighbourhood’s character. They had limited success.

St. John’s, Nfld., has colourful neighbourhood names like The Cribbies and Maggoty Cove, but we quit this tour at the peak of Signal Hill, the highest point in St. John’s. It is called Ladies’ Lookout, either because fishermen’s wives climbed there to watch anxiously for their husbands’ boats to make harbour, or because courting Newfoundlanders once liked to "walk out" with their ladies fair to take the sea air.

While neighbourhood names may begin as breezy put-downs, they nest in the sentimental nooks of our hearts to become parts of the past worth fighting to keep.

Bill Casselman’s first book was Casselman’s Canadian Words, recently reprinted by Little, Brown.

top