A rebellious, colourful and quirky space on Davenport Road

Davenport Road is a rebel. Rather than sticking to the rigid grid that John Graves Simcoe imposed upon the rough land that would become the City of York, then Toronto, it doggedly follows the path of the old shoreline of the glacial Lake Iroquois.

Davenport, especially the portion between Spadina Road and Dufferin Street is rebellious in other ways: it’s part high street and part residential; the north side features, at points, raised homes with tall staircases (they’re higher up the shoreline) from a hodgepodge of eras – 1960s small apartment houses cheek-by-jowl with Edwardian bay-n-gable semis – and the businesses, which pepper both sides of the street, are quirky. There’s Faema for shiny espresso machines, coin laundries, the “guy in a store that fixes leather,” cozy restaurants and cluttered variety stores. And now, there are galleries.