The Globe and Mail

In most respects, Toronto's Jameson Avenue has precious little going for it. This short residential street in Parkdale enjoys a reputation for shabbiness and rough stuff that's extreme even for its generally rough part of town. The tidying-up and gentrification that's been sweeping along nearby streets has left Jameson largely untouched. Around the middle of the last century, when Parkdale's once-elegant Victorian family homes had become flophouses, developers put up a lot of modern, architecturally mediocre apartment buildings, six or seven storeys tall, on both sides of Jameson, then let many of them peel and crumble into their present state of dilapidation.