Between the shelves of Type Books on Queen Street West across from Trinity Bellwoods Park, Joanne Saul and Samara Walbohm can talk for hours — literary fiction, Michael Ondaatje’s legacy, what makes Toronto special to be a reader.
The academics-turned-booksellers met exploring the dingy confines of U of T’s Robarts Library and founded Type in 2006. It has since expanded to locations in the Junction and Forest Hill.
“We knew we wanted to do something engaged with literature and engaged with the community,” Walbohm said. “The community just embraced us right away.”
Type and the city’s other independent bookstores are more than just places to pick up a beach read or grab the latest Sally Rooney novel; they’re cultural hubs designed to foster a love of literature, which is welcome at a time of increased isolation and social withdrawal.
The largest city in Canada, it turns out, is one the country’s loneliest places with residents old and new consistently reporting high rates of isolation from their communities.
According to a 2023 report by the Toronto Foundation, 37 per cent of adults in the city feel lonely three or four days a week, contributing to a host of mental health issues.
More than just places to spend money
Now, in our increasingly digitized age, small businesses are striving to become more than just places to spend money.
As Saul puts it, they’re trying to help the city engage in a “cultural dialogue,” hosting book launches, author panels and book clubs to stimulate minds and exchange views.
“Let’s hear about new ideas,” she told the Star. “Let’s share new ideas, let’s talk about them, and these are spaces that we can do that, as are other indie bookstores in the city.”
Community-building is also good for business, since those wading through the shop for events are likely to pick up a book or two and come back for more.
As Claire Foster, the shop’s manager and events co-ordinator puts it, “the more we give, the more we get.”
For Mandie Murphy, who owns baseball-themed Left Field Brewery with partner, Mark, Toronto is more a selection of pockets than a homogenous metropolis, which lends itself to community-building for a small business.
‘We want to be that welcoming third space for folks’
A Brampton native, Murphy has spent much of her life in and around the city.
“It feels like we live in a small town within a big city,” Murphy said. “You can’t walk through the park without running into someone you know or a dog whose name you know.”
Though not all the brewery’s offerings are explicitly Toronto-themed, they’ve had their fair share of direct homages, including the bestselling Greenwood IPA and the Bird Watcher Lager.
The brewery partners with the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team, and since its founding in 2013, has likewise become a mini-cultural hub at both its Leslieville and Liberty Village locations, hosting everything from cross-stitching workshops and baby showers to trivia nights.
All told, Murphy estimates they hosted more than 100 events last year, with dozens more planned for 2025.
“We seek to be a place about more than just beer, food and baseball,” she said. “Anything goes and we want to be that welcoming community third space for folks.”
The idea of a third space (or third place) that Murphy invokes has long been romanticized in the eyes of millennials and zoomers longing for their version of the iconic Central Perk cafe from the ‘90s sitcom “Friends.”
In the social media age, the concept has been plastered everywhere from nostalgic listicles to trendy Instagram infographics.
In his 1989 book, “The Great Good Place,” American sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who died in 2022, coined the phrase ‘third place’ for locations other than home (‘first place’) or the workplace (‘second place’) where “those with special interests find one another.”
A third place, according to Oldenburg, can be wide ranging from a cafe or barbershop to places of worship and city parks.
Studies show that third places anchor communities and enhance psychological health making them all the more valuable for a lonely city.
Toronto’s busy streets have long been fertile ground for business and have evolved to now include more third place-oriented enterprises.
In the words of journalist Pat Fellows, who wrote in April of 1969 in what was then the Toronto Daily Star, “Toronto is not only where the money is, it’s where it goes round and round.”
Diversity has allowed a vast array of businesses to thrive
“You may love Toronto; you may hate it,” Fellows wrote. “Either way, you’ll have to agree it’s where the money is.”
Since that writing, the city has grown to house a diverse and strong economy, shaped both by its evolving populace and its rapid expansion thanks to the flight of big business from post-October Crisis Montreal.
“There’s a liberty in Toronto to be who you want to be,” said Dimitry Anastakis, a professor of Canadian business history at the University of Toronto. “Certainly, there’s been ups and downs, but relatively speaking, this is an economy that has been really strong for most of the period in the postwar era.”
That diversity has allowed a vast array of businesses to thrive, including those that are driven both by profit and a desire to better their communities in the cultural, artistic, and even linguistic realms.
“It’s another way that the community can also get involved in the area,” adds Saul Navarro, who owns La Gloria in Cabbagetown, the city’s first Mexican coffee house that earlier this year hosted weekly meetups for Spanish speakers to improve their English. “They make new friendships here.”
Back at Type, Joanne Saul foresees having more events and panels going forward, both to continue to grow their reach in the community and put themselves in a better spot to succeed as the year gets going.
“It’s a big part of our business model, for sure,” Saul said. “I think there was a dearth of that when we first opened because of the rise of the big box and because of the rise of the online. And so, I’ve realized that there really is a curiosity and an interest and a hunger.”
