This small corner of Victorian Toronto is easily overlooked amidst the freeway ramps, auto shops, and assorted stores of lower Cabbagetown. But if you head east on Queen Street, and turn right a block or two before Queen crosses the Don, you will find yourself on Bright Street, a short, bending lane running south to King.

Small scale and lined with narrow row houses, Bright Street is peppered with tiny gardens and potted plants, chained bicycles, gates of various kinds, and bits of rubbish awaiting collection. The general effect is unexpected and haphazardly charming. In recent years Bright Street has attracted film location scouts seeking the old, the genuine, and the vaguely trans-Atlantic.

The street we see today is, in fact, mostly 19th century. Apart from a short row of brick and mansard-roofed cottages built in 1901, it is made up of groups of two-storey gabled houses from the 1870s. These were the homes of shoemakers, carpenters, and labourers who worked in neighbourhood industries such as the Gooderham and Worts distillery.

Now these houses are occupied by writers, students, real estate brokers, clerks, cartoonists, and musical agents. Despite the ongoing revival of the surrounding area as a desirable zone of lofts and studios for nouveau-urbanites, Bright Street seems to change little. A prominent sign still forbids ball playing in the street. A pocket park on the west side still attracts workers at lunch, children after school, teenagers at dusk, and down-and-outs pretty much any time at all. Bright Street is short of space, short of parking, sometimes noisy, and not particularly beautiful, but it is still interesting and attractive and it reminds us of a kind of ordinary urban life mostly gone from other parts of the city.

Kelly Crossman