I went for a short walk this morning, despite the miserably
cold-and-clammy fall weather, and spotted, to my dismay, the latest addition to
my ‘hood’s main commercial strip: an “upscale romance” store. Now, I’m not sure
exactly what an upscale romance store is, but it sounds suspiciously like a sex
shop without any of the fun stuff.

You might be wondering why I’m upset about this. I don’t
object to having a sex shop within easy walking distance, but it’s the angle –
the niche that they’re carving out for themselves by marketing it as “upscale
romance” – that bothers me. This is just so typical of the way my neighbourhood
is going: upper-middle class but progressive, with a conscience - with some
personality, some flair or zest for life. Again, I don’t object to this vibe in
theory, but the problem is that I’m pretty sure it’s just an affectation, a self-styled
identity for the area that’s been cultivated so self-consciously that it kills
any sense that it’s genuine. I can just picture my neighbours saying to each
other, “Sure, we’re middle-aged Audi-driving WASPs with full pensions, but
look! We’re not total prudes. We have an upscale romance store.”

Am I making sense? Let me give some more examples.

In the last month or so several new places have opened: an
outdoors/travel clothing outfitter, a high-end maternity wear store, a juice
bar, a pan-Asian tea house and café, and now the romance store. They join a
vegan/vegetarian restaurant, a fair trade/organic coffee shop, a small
by-appointment-with-your-personal-trainer-only gym, a nouveau-diner serving
gourmet takes on meatloaf, mac’n’cheese and BLTs, and a handful of seriously
upscale take-away joints, where for the price of a sit-down meal in a mid-range
restaurant you can take your salmon fillet, grilled asparagus and wild rice
home with you in Styrofoam. Oh, and don’t forget about the new highrise
development of “luxury eco-condos” that just opened, with a “theater space” in
the ground floor.

The number of restaurants and bars on the main drag is
spiraling. But don’t be fooled: none of them are actually restaurants or bars.
They are, instead, resto-cafés, bar-bistros, and gastro-pubs. Hyphens,
apparently, are a prerequisite.

Meanwhile, the old businesses – you know, the ones that
actually provided services to residents, as opposed to making the area a
gastro-destination for outsiders – are being forced out. The independent car
mechanic, the used sporting goods store, the drycleaner that also makes
photocopies and sells milk, bus tickets and stamps – they’re closing in droves
as rents skyrocket and their old buildings get renovated or torn down entirely.

When I moved back to Ottawa
at Christmas and started apartment-hunting, I was thrilled to find this neighbourhood.
An $8 cab ride to downtown, tucked between Chinatown and Little Italy (and the
rougher neighbourhoods of Mechanicsville and Hintonburg) to the east, and the
posh residential nooks of Westboro and the “Civic Hospital area” to the west
and south, it seemed like the perfect mixture of working- and middle-class,
starting to gentrify but not too far gone yet. (Read: cheap rent and cheap
eats, but not too many crackheads.) But the balance in that mixture is tilting,
and tilting fast. How much longer will it be, I wonder, before my neighbours in
this aging low-rise rental building get forced out, too? The young families,
not-so-well-cared-for senior citizens, and recent immigrants that I ride the
elevator and the bus with every day – what will happen to them when the
building gets sold, gutted, and turned into condos? The answer is that they’ll
move to the suburbs, where services are further apart, transit is worse, and
the schools are in rough shape – one of the major benefits of a mixed-income
neighbourhood, of course, is that all the kids wind up getting a quality
education; the Audi-drivers make sure of that.

Okay, okay. But the economics of all this aside, you might
be wondering why I’m labeling those Audi-drivers as frauds. Am I being too hard
on them, seeing bad motives and intentions where there are in fact good ones?
Maybe they really feel strongly about vegetarianism, and want to save the world
one fair trade latte at a time?

An interesting way to get to know a neighbourhood is to work
a service job there, and when I moved to the area I spent a month in the local
deli making bagel sandwiches from 6am to 2pm, and another two months working the
brunch shift in an Italian resto-café. I’ve worked a lot of service jobs in my
day, but I’ve never encountered fussier customers or been treated more rudely
than I was in those two gigs. “Do you serve ANYTHINGthat doesn’t have carbs?” “I’d like a flax-seed bagel, put through the
toaster three times, and lightly buttered, on one half only. LIGHTLY buttered,
alright?” “Can I get the chicken panini, but hold the panini?” “Do you REALLY think that that’s an appropriate
way to present a cup of tea?” “Can I have some fresh-ground pepper here – here
– here – here – nope, you missed a spot – here – here…”

It seems impossibly contradictory to me that someone who
really, genuinely cares about their fellow man and wants to “save” the
environment, the Third World, whatever, would also treat their waitress like
shit. So somewhere in between learning how to slice smoked meat and figuring
out the difference between a short and a long espresso, I came up with my
theory that most of the people around here are just posturing, dressing
themselves up as progressive and eco-conscious and cultured because it’s the
latest trend – the grown-up equivalent of buying a Che Guevara t-shirt at Le
Chateau because Communism is totally bad-ass. And that, for some reason,
strikes me as an even more superficial lifestyle than the suburban,
minivan-driving, Walmart-shopping alternative.

Sorry for the rant. It’s cold and I haven’t seen the sun for
a week. Plus, I haven’t had my coffee yet today. Maybe a fair trade Chai Latte
would perk me up – or better yet, a little something from the upscale romance
store…