windsor

Dates traveled: birth – 2007; summer 2008; 2010; July 2013; October 2015; January 2018; June 2019; etc.

I was the prototypical teen wanting to flee where they grew up and all the mistakes they made, and I can’t claim to have changed a hell of a lot.

Justin recently wrote about coming home here, where he talks about how he has the feeling of coming home (in different ways) to two different places. Having not lived there for 12 years, I feel less like it’s coming home when I return to Windsor and more like I am visiting a version of my past that I hardly recognize as myself. I see places I can remember being at, but the self and what I’m feeling in those images is blurry, and in some ways, scary.

I’ve been interested in gentrification since about 2010 when I noticed that a number of hi-rise condos were being built in the neighbourhood I had just moved to, Centretown. It sparked an interest in the socio-economics, philosophy and art of space. Within a few years of that, the neighbourhood I grew up in, Walkerville in Windsor, was starting to undergo its own transition into gentrification.

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As someone who is now firmly in the middle class, and someone who, despite growing up on its fringes and being interested in its activities that I hadn’t yet recognized as class-based (art, hipster things), I have a complicated relationship with gentrification. It makes things that I enjoy more accessible to me; in a sense, it’s being done for me. But I also counter it politically, for the most part, because of the havoc it wreaks on low-income communities. The building just below is just a couple blocks from the bookstore window and theatre later in this post.

The area I grew up in was falling apart. Part of it still is. No one thinks dilapidated buildings are a good thing, and bringing more commerce into the area is generally positive. The problem becomes that for people who are renting in the area, things get more expensive, and the types of businesses that spring up in a gentrified place tend to target middle-to-high income-earners. So even if you’re a home-owner in the area, you likely can’t afford to spend your money in the neighbourhood anymore once gentrification is in full swing.

I wish the only thing running through my mind was eco-politics, but surprise surprise I am also an emotional being, whether programmed into me or organic.

I felt like melting in the Detroit River and floating a million particles to the American shore so I could dissolve into another country whose weather measuring system I grew up with in a neighborhood similar to but even rougher than mine so my context would live up to the exaggerated one-liners I leave cryptically in conversations to show how hard I am. I feel like I finally get who I am because it’s trendy – the gentrified lower-middle class family tip-toeing downtown, the constant outside of a definition, the yearn to be full and cognizantly satisfied.

The Walkerville theatre went through many iterations when I lived nearby. Once I filled in on drums for a high school band during a local emo show. It’s the type of building I’d appreciate a lot more ten years later. Maybe I’d even join a protest now if it were about to be torn down.

Windsor has rich areas, like most places do. The richness is always in juxtaposition to what’s nearby. I’ve been in small town Ontario where the richness was hardly rich even in comparison to ‘rich Windsor’. All that to say is that there is a neighbourhood, near where I grew up, that I think Paul Martin has a family home in. There are a few handfuls of blocks that could be in the Glebe or in Oak Bay. If I didn’t have so much undesired history there it might even seem like a desirable place to live.

Windsor has a surprising number of churches and probably a surprising number of people who go to church. This was all normal to me. Probably the most interesting thing about Windsor, especially with the auto industry crash, is its proximity to Detroit, and all the associations therein. One of the biggest imprints on my mind is the Detroit skyline, the glass elevators of the GM building on a clear night.

Really, there isn’t much reason to visit Windsor, unless you are going on a southwestern Ontario kick or wanting a quirky visit on your way to already-newly turned-quirky Detroit. Before I was legally able to drink me and my buddies would be bombarded on the downtown strip by American 19 and 20 year olds (who somehow even then seemed older than me) and promoters asking us if we wanted to ‘skip the line’. It’s muggy there – my guess is it’s the hottest city in Canada. It’s relatively cheap to live, for a southern Canadian city, and there are things to do there (now), but nothing that screams ‘tourist culture’.

For a long time Windsor felt like nothing because I was too young to compare it to anything then all of a sudden it felt hard. It felt like you had to have thick skin, thick enough to lash out if anyone disrespected you, and the masculinity deeply encoded more than suggested that there were only a few versions you could be, and none of those versions suited me to the point that I didn’t feel like I was in an inception-cycle of rebellion, pushing away from family and what constituted popularity and eventually the sub-cultures that I would’ve been happier in if I could have divorced myself from what the masses and masses of teenagers thought.

I wish Windsor was gentrified when I was growing up because even if I couldn’t have afforded to actually partake in the consumer culture of that gentrified space I could’ve witnessed something that I could recognize as more of a lifestyle I would’ve felt myself in, or a version of myself I wouldn’t have been scared of if I met it on the street.

All that being said it really is one of the most ideal spots for a new counter-culture movement, or a new eco-economy to take form and spew out thousands of creative contributors. The weather is relatively good and it’s cheap and it’s near a lot of things and there isn’t much to grow in the shadow of because both the far-back and recent history of Windsor isn’t anything to be intimidated by.

And frankly leaving all those years ago was probably a good decision, in part because I feel its time is now and upcoming.