A decade ago, it was an industrial wasteland.
Tucked away above the train tracks, at Dufferin and Dupont, Geary Avenue had long been home to warehouses, factories and autobody shops, along with a thriving underground scene, where revelers congregated for all-night, semilegal DJ sets and raucous punk shows. But slowly, steadily, the area has transformed into a true community hub. As Megan Cassidy, co-founder of design studio Casson Hardware, puts it, “Geary is more than just a street — it’s a feeling.”
That feeling is only growing, as some of Toronto’s most forward-thinking entrepreneurs make Geary their home. Jen Agg, the acclaimed restaurateur known for Bar Vendetta, Le Swan and the late, great Black Hoof, chose Geary for her latest venture, General Public, an English-pub-inspired brasserie. When pizza joint Big Trouble needed to relocate from its original digs in Chinatown, the owners went to Geary. Last summer, Paradise Grapevine, the boutique winery and bottle joint, opened its second location on Geary, complete with a bumping patio.
“People like Geary because it still feels hidden and unknown,” said Morgan Cameron Ross, who curates Old Toronto, a social media account that documents the city’s history. “It’s an area locals will be aware of but not commuters or people in the burbs. Its charm is how little has been done esthetically to change it from industrial past.”
There are also practical reasons for the influx.
“There are obviously economic advantages — cheaper rent, mostly — to opening in an up-and-coming neighbourhood,” says Agg, “but beyond that, so many younger people and people with families live around there, having been priced out of Queen West and Trinity Bellwoods, and there really aren’t that many sit-down restaurants on Geary to serve the neighbourhood.”
Blood Brothers brewery, which opened in 2015, was one of Geary’s earliest hot spots. Co-founder Brayden Jones said their team chose the neighbourhood because they were on a shoestring budget and couldn’t afford a zoning variance. “Geary is unique today because of the variety of businesses,” said Jones. “There aren’t many streets left in our city that offer casual-to-elevated dining, plumbing supplies, water jet cutting and metal fabrication, custom cabinetry, martial arts, CrossFit gyms, barbers, artist studios, urban wineries and breweries. The list goes on.”
Music remains a neighbourhood undercurrent, whether it’s the ongoing dance parties or the success of Standard Time, a listening bar and event space, which expanded last year to include a kitchen residency. “Geary (represents) something really fun and new in the city,” says co-owner Malcom Levy. “It’s like a space for constant exploration.” Levy is doubling down on Geary: this spring, he’ll open a multi-use thermal spa and restaurant, with a menu created by a Michelin Star chef.
The area is also an expanding hub for art and design. In addition to Casson Hardware, there’s the Beauty Supply Room gallery and studio space All Ours; the long-running Bau-Xi Gallery also has a renovated flagship space.
“Geary is one of those rare places where its gritty, industrial backbone is layered with boutique businesses and artistic ventures that pay homage to its roots,” says Cassidy. She cites the Geary Art Crawl as an example of the neighbourhood’s communal spirit: “It’s one of the few festivals that feels truly tied to the street, while other events can feel cookie-cutter.”
Agg hopes that the neighbourhood can maintain its unique industrial vibe as its popularity grows. She’s been through the gentrification cycle before: she opened The Black Hoof on Dundas Street West only to find housing prices on nearby side streets skyrocket along with the neighbourhood cachet.
“I think it will be a blessedly much slower burn than say, Ossington, or Yorkville many decades ago,” Agg says.
Agg, like many Torontonians, yearns for neighbourhoods that are created for the people who live there, not just the people who visit the area. “We desperately need hardware stores and fruit stands and dry cleaners to really enforce walkable neighbourhoods,” she says. “Even though restaurants are my business, that balance can feel very off in some areas, where every other building is a bar or restaurant; it’s boring, but it attracts tourists and people who exist as tourists in their own city.”
Jones says that gentrification has been a worry since the first developer asked them to participate in a promotional video for their latest condo complex. “We don’t like seeing artists priced off the street; we don’t like knowing that our days could be numbered for another demo and build,” he says. “It’s really up to the city to protect this before it all goes somewhere else.”
Some of the longtime business owners have a negative view of the changes, says Kristyn Gelfand, managing artistic director of the Geary Art Crawl and part of the collective Uma Nota Culture, a neighbourhood fixture. Gelfand tried to form a BIA on Geary in 2024 — but it was voted down in a landslide. “The way I see it, lots of the older business owners don’t really want things to change. We at Uma Nota worry about the influx of new residents once the Galleria redevelopment is complete, and the pressure that will put on landlords to maybe rent to national or multinational chains.”
“We started the crawl to assert the presence of artists,” says Gelfand. “And we’re not going anywhere anytime soon.”
