Toronto At Home with Strangers.

• Author: Gee, Marcus
• Position: Multiculturalism - Statistical Data Included

THIS QUIETLY OPEN CITY INVITES ETHNIC GROUPS FROM AROUND THE WORLD TO PUT DOWN ROOTS WHILE MAINTAINING THEIR CULTURAL IDENTITIES

I live on Beaconsfield Avenue, on the west side of central Toronto. The street is named after the first earl of Beaconsfield, known to most of us as Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria's favorite prime minister. The next street over is Gladstone, after Disraeli's old adversary, William Gladstone, of whom the queen was less enamored. They were the grand old men of British politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when my house was built to lodge officers from nearby Fort York; so it is fitting that these streets should have been named after them. But I sometimes wonder what they would think if they could visit Beaconsfield and Gladstone avenues today.

The tall, narrow Victorian houses that line these streets are filled with people from every corner of the world. Harry the accountant on the corner is an ethnic Indian from Trinidad. Carmen the tailor down the street is from northern Italy. Lars the handyman next door is the son of Danish immigrants. Many families on the street are Portuguese immigrants from the Azore islands in the Atlantic. When they make wine in their garages in the fall, the back lanes run purple with grape juice. The newest group is the Vietnamese. Many of them fled their country in rusty boats in the 1970s and 1980s in search of something better. They found it here on my street.

Around the corner on Dundas Street--named after a late-eighteenth-century Scottish politician--Madam Hoang Nguyen has set herself up as a psychic offering tarot card reading, palm reading, and astrological guidance. Across the street from her, a gray-haired Indian cook with a genius for making giant chocolate chip cookies runs Gayley's lunch counter. Just down from there, Nova Brasil offers imported Brazilian delicacies and Alota Seafood sells slabs of dried salted cod, a local Portuguese favorite.

Torontonians have grow blase about the change that has overcome this once staid, monochrome city. The variety around us is so familiar now that we barely remark on the incredible thing that has happened here: the transformation of Toronto into the first tree world city.

According to a recent local study, Toronto is now the most ethnically diverse city in the world. Half of the three million, people who live here were born in other countries. That is nearly twice the level of New York, that famous magnet for...