The ghost of Jane Jacobs scowls upon us

Now that the endangered birds are being moved out, the Family Thrift Store and Lee's Convenience in downtown Guelph will feel the wrecking ball in short order. I wrote this in 2009 shortly before Ray's eviction but it was never published. In memory of my favourite downtown shop and hub of the arts which we are not likely to see again anytime soon, here's a look back.

Urban renewal can be a slow process. One day you’ll notice a hole where the clapboard cornerstore or dilapidated garage once stood. Other times, it comes swiftly. A sweeping fire will dispatch a beloved landmark in minutes or machines will move in early in the morning and raze a structure before anyone is out and about. It is the latter version that’s the hardest to accept. We get attached to buildings and places in ways that may seem irrational but are unshakable. One person’s eyesore is another person’s gem.

In the post WWII drive for modernization, many sturdy stone marvels in smaller town Ontario were replaced with ho-hum banks and now departed department stores. In 1964, Guelph’s Carnegie library was unceremoniously knocked down and a modernist box quickly sprung up in its place. There is a display in the front foyer of the current building that depicts its predecessor’s destruction in a sombre montage. The most telling image is that of the iconic 1905 dome crumbling on demolition day. More than one patron has been overheard saying; “they knocked that down to build this?” Bookbags and T-shirts sold to raise funds sport a photo of the intact version, no longer just a faded image but a brand, the “Free Library”. The current version needs an upgrade and few will lament its passing, yet its pending demise is about to unleash a wrecking ball that will displace quite a few more people this time around.

Adjacent to where the Griffin Royal Opera House once stood (built in 1894, flattened for a Simpsons in the 50’s) is a row of shops and apartments where the City of Guelph is planning to build its new library by levelling a section of the main street. Most of the businesses have accepted that the sledgehammers are coming and have relocated. Thirty affordable rental apartment units will disappear and those tenants are never factored in to any gentrified redesign, anywhere. One of a handful of holdouts on the block is the Family Thrift Store. What sounds like a nondescript little shop is actually a home to a thriving artistic hub and a bona fide family. And no family in history has ever given up their home without a fight.

Ray Mitchell bought Family Thrift 18 years ago. Daughter Jenny, now twenty-two and a mother herself, virtually grew up in the place. Her baby Otis probably would have done the same. The store resembles a well-stocked attic that is open to the public.

Any amount of time spent there will nurture a creative urge. “Every artistic thing that has come out of my store has been because of my daughter, her friends and the people that I sell to” he told me in February. “If I move I lose one of my components, either the students or the welfare people or I lose the rich people who buy antiques and make the rest of it possible. Or I lose the artists but I don’t really want to lose anyone.”

Jenny, also known as Jenny Omnichord, is a member of the Barmitzvah Brothers, one of the bands that evolved within the store. This symbiotic relationship is celebrated on their 2007 album “Lets Express Our Motives – An Album of Underappreciated Job Songs”, right down to the sketch of the store on the CD’s cover. Each track is a testimonial to a specific job that friends and family have had over the years. Studs Terkel’s “Working”, a collection of stories about people in ordinary and ignored professions, provided additional inspiration. In the song “Thrift Store Owner”, Jenny lovingly sings of the “father and daughter team” that run the store as background singers rhyme off the amazing litany of items available there. The song was penned well before the impending demise of the block but you can almost hear a retroactive tinge of sadness in its delivery now. No Wal Mart produces paeans such as these.

It’s unlikely that anything will stop the project now, short of an outright global depression. Ray labours on for now, a retail Damocles waiting for the sword to drop. “The war is already over. If I do lose this business, I guess I’ll lose my house. This is all that I have.” he said. The Family Thrift family spoke at city council on the night the plan was debated but it was not enough to change the outcome. The project was given the blessing of the progressive majority with the tiny right leaning minority voting against it, citing the usual cash concerns. Initially, there were other amazing possibilities but the final choice became the destructive option or nothing at all, which would have sent millions of dollars and years of debate down the drain. It will take time to line up the permits, expropriations and evictions but soon enough the diggers will arrive and create a new hole. Perhaps someone strolling by with a cellphone on demolition day will snap the consummate image that will find itself enshrined in the new foyer, where a future patron will surely say “they knocked that down to build this?”

Guelph is proud of its yearly Jane’s Walk on May 4^th that honours civic champion Jane Jacobs, the tiny powerhouse behind many infamous battles against vainglorious freeways and brutalist monuments. Jacobs said that to generate exuberant diversity, cities need “a good lot of plain, ordinary, low value old buildings… New ideas must use old buildings.”

No doubt she would be scowling were she still with us.