This week we bid farewell to Edmonton’s downtown Italian Bakery, which has turned out to be one of those nice things we can’t have anymore. The bakery’s been in the same location in the city’s Chinatown since 1960 — our Chinatown has some Vietnam, Italian and Portuguese seasoning. In 2020, with social conditions in the neighbourhood in free fall, the building fell victim to arson, but after a prolonged renovation it reopened 13 months ago.
I liked the new version of the bakery enough to visit occasionally — but not too often. On a recent trip I got eyeballed good and hard at the adjacent bus stop by a bum. He approached to within a few inches, and studiously minding my own business wasn’t working, but when I asked him in a cheerful way if he was looking for a fight, he answered yes. He was a little fella, shrunken and undernourished, and pretty obviously on multiple substances, so this didn’t faze me too much. It’s probably just as well that I couldn’t come up with any reply cleverer than “Well, sorry, I’m not.” He moved on, presumably to find someone more his size.
So, yeah, the old established local bakery that You Must Be This Large and Intimidating To Visit has gone out of business, rather unsurprisingly. CTV’s coverage of the closure notes that the city poured police resources and money into Chinatown after two Asian seniors were beaten to death (with some inadvertent assistance from the RCMP) in 2022, just a stone’s throw from the bakery.
There was an ephemeral improvement in the atmosphere of drug use and hobo socializing, and beat cops were more visible all throughout downtown, but the scene in Chinatown is now even less pleasant than ever. Three levels of government are all busy blaming the other two for the problem, and there is zero prospect of another retailer moving into the abandoned location.
If you live in a prairie downtown these days, a lot of news reading involves squinting at stories from elsewhere and trying to figure out if things can possibly be as wretched as they are where you live. I don’t think Torontonians have any earthly idea what certain parts of north Edmonton are like, but then I see news items like the one that ran yesterday in the Winnipeg Free Press. It describes a Greek Orthodox congregation being “driven out” of its church by burglaries and fires before the building itself was obliterated in slow motion, and reading it makes me feel as though my city’s interior is actually well behind in the race toward total ruin and chaos.
National Post