Gentrification is a kind of death. Old friends gather round as the cold, stiff neighbourhood finally slips away, remembering wilder times, anecdotes to be told and retold in years to come. Slightly to one side stand those who have done well in the will—the landlords and developers, faces set in an expression of pious sympathy while cock-a-hoop inside. So we mourn the Yorkville of the 1960s, the Queen West of the ’70s—all the cafés and bistros, the galleries and second-hand bookshops, the bohemian zeitgeist, which made the area so interesting and desirable that rents soared like a fever. And yet, sometimes death is a mercy. Wander down Ossington Avenue these days and you won’t hear anyone waxing nostalgic for the way things were five years ago, when the stretch between Dundas and Queen was dominated by gun-toting Vietnamese gangs and back alley punks dealing drugs. A double murder in a sleazy karaoke bar back in 2003 marked the beginning of the end of that particular era, with police and residents finally collaborating to move the crime out. Thus began the long, slow climb into respectability.

It still has a fair way to go. The street retains a slightly sketchy feel after dark, though most nights there’s nothing scarier than the occasional outpatient from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health down on Queen Street asking for change. CAMH has been a dragging anchor on Ossington’s development since its days as a Victorian asylum, and it was a huge psychological barrier for the artsy gentrification of Queen West earlier in this decade. For years, the hipsters just couldn’t get beyond it, until the pressure of the chain stores and the wealthy elite of Trinity Bellwoods grew so strong there was nowhere else to go. So they tiptoed past the centre and spread triumphantly into Beaconsfield and Brockton and Liberty and all the other realtor-villages of the new downtown. And eventually the first pioneers turned north up sinister, brooding Ossington Avenue, using cheap paint and chutzpah to turn boarded-up storefronts into showrooms for artists. Soon a bar opened, then another; then a café or two. Finally, someone decided it was OK to invest in a restaurant. And that’s where Ossington stands now with Foxley and Delux—a couple of places good enough to lure diners from all over. It’s clear that gentrification is well under way, and if you want to start gathering hip-Ossington stories for your own anecdotage, you’d better get down there fast.

If all this sounds as though hot food is an innovation on the avenue, let me correct the impression. Spilling down from Dundas West’s Little Portugal neighbourhood, Alex Rei dos Leitões (which means, splendidly, Alex, King of the Sucking Pigs) was opened 35 years ago by several families who had been neighbours near the coastal Portuguese town of Aveiro, a region that specializes in gorgeously succulent spit-roasted baby pork. It was the first Portuguese takeout on Ossington and still sells authentic meals of sucking pig, grilled chicken, lamb and codfish. Ossington’s other long-established ethnic presence is Vietnamese. Golden Turtle debuted in 1982, a family business with a menu as long as War and Peace that specializes in 20 or so sweetly meaty versions of pho. Guy Rubino and Claudio Aprile are numbered among the loyal clientele.

But it wasn’t crisp-cracklinged piglet or soup bowls that lured the hip entrepreneurs onto Ossington. It was the irresistibly low rents, courtesy of the decade of crime that straddled the millennium. Selena Cristo-Williams led the way, moving her Queen West gallery to the foot of Ossington in 2003. By the end of the following year, she and her husband, Pol, had transformed the property into a bar called Sweaty Betty’s, a dimly lit space with red walls, eccentric bric-a-brac and fetishistic photos of muscle-bound sailors in the back room. The decor may be a wry homage to the Vietnamese girlie bars that flourished along the avenue a few years earlier, but the cocktails and the crowd drinking them seemed determinedly contemporary on the night I dropped by. I asked the guy tending bar if he served food. “We’ve got nacho chips and dip or turkey sandwiches,” he replied, unconsciously frowning and shaking his head as if in warning. I decided to pass.

At the Dundas end of the strip, Crooked Star could be Betty’s look-alike younger sister, right down to the iconic British Marmite jar on a shelf above the bar. Crooked Star’s exterior is uninvitingly grungy, with windows masked by curtains and a couple of dangerous-looking characters standing on the shadowed steps by the door. But they’re only out for a smoke, and it turns out they’re talking about the plot of Coronation Street. Inside, the regulars seated around the curve of the bar are as comfortably at home as the actors in the Rovers Return, though their conversation has more to do with the Toronto film industry than the stuff of British soaps. And the pub has a menu (nothing over $10), the dishes prepared in a micro­wave and a panini press at one end of the bar. Given the equipment, the house chicken roti isn’t bad—big chunks of tender white meat and soft potato in a Jamaican yellow curry sauce wrapped in a thin, floppy roti.