“The sad truth is that Kensington Market isn’t healthy anymore”: Why this neighbourhood fishmonger is closing up shop

When Hooked co-owner Kristin Donovan first opened a Kensington Market outpost of her local fish chain in 2012, she was prepared to be there for the long haul. Back then, the market was the epitome of the downtown grocery experience and an integral part of the city, as it had been for more than a century. Thirteen years later, Donovan is shocked to be closing up shop. As it turns out, not all is well on Augusta Avenue—or any of the market’s corridors. Businesses are closing, customers are leaving and the neighbourhood’s famed Pedestrian Sundays street festival is on pause after the remaining shop owners became fed up with unlicensed vendors getting a free ride on their hard-earned vibes. Here, Donovan reflects on her time in what was once Toronto’s coolest market—and explains why her departure is just one of many canaries in the Kensington coal mine.

Since I walked its streets as a kid, Kensington Market has constantly evolved. I was first invited to open up shop there by my buddy Pete Sanagan, owner of Sanagan’s Meat Locker, in 2011, after I had opened my first fish store earlier that year. “Please come into the market,” he said. “Kensington needs you.” I laughed him off at the time—there were already four fishmongers in the neighbourhood. But, when he moved his market butcher shop around the corner in October of 2012, I was suddenly able to walk right into his lease at the location he had just vacated.

At the time, it felt like the market was growing. Sanagan himself had breathed new life into it. Many of the existing business operators were older and looking to sell; Sanagan had bought his place from a family that had been running a butcher shop at that location for 60 years. The owner was tired, and the kids didn’t want to take it on. As a young chef with a thriving new business, Sanagan was a herald of rejuvenation.

Back then, the coolest thing happening in the market was Good Friday—a tradition with all the fishmongers in the neighbourhood. They’d set up stalls outside their stores, and the Portuguese guys would cook sardines and squid over huge charcoal grills. It wasn’t an official pedestrian day, but the streets were certainly too busy for anyone to drive down. The spirit was amazing.

Pedestrian Sundays, which started in 2004, were roughly the same idea. On those days, we’d offer buck-a-shuck oysters. That first Sunday, I must have shucked 1,400 oysters all by myself, and it left me with a brutally swollen hand. Every Sunday after that, we’d have a line that stretched around the block.

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But that was then. These days, we’ll do 400 oysters on a given Pedestrian Sunday. The tone of the market has changed. It seems to be mostly tourists and teenagers now, rather than the regular customers we had all grown used to. The neighbourhood is still cool and trendy, to be sure, and the energy is still great. But now people are just coming to walk around with a coffee instead of doing their groceries. They’re not looking to tote around a bag of fish. Combined with multiple rent hikes, that shift has meant less business to go around—and it shows.

The sad truth is that the market isn’t healthy anymore. There’s only one greengrocer left. We lost Reg Natural Foods, which was run by Maria and Alexandru Sandu, after Maria passed away. Amadeu’s Restaurant, a Portuguese place with a great patio by the park, closed this year after 36 years of operation. The other day, I saw a For Lease sign in the window of Hungary Thai. So many iconic places, gone.

A lot of storefronts are up for rent, and the businesses that move in are hardly meeting the needs of the community: tattoo parlours, weed stores, mushroom dispensaries and restaurants that barely last a year. With less and less shopping to do, even the die-hard market-goers have dwindled because they can’t get all of their groceries done in one trip. I don’t know if it’s the rent or the slim margins, but the wave of entrepreneurship that brought all those Asian and Portuguese greengrocers seems to be over.

As a welcoming, affordable neighbourhood, Kensington always attracted people who were financially insecure, and over the years it developed a certain amount of grittiness. When it worked as it should, the ties between regular vendors, their customers and the community at large kept eyes on the streets, keeping them relatively safe. Now, with less local traffic and more boarded-up storefronts, it certainly isn’t somewhere you’d want to be after 2 a.m.

Before they were put on pause, Pedestrian Sundays were supposed to be a celebration of the market. But with so many of the businesses closed, illegal vendors began setting up outside the vacant storefronts, selling tchotchkes like candles and cheap jewellery. Those unlicensed vendors bit into the business of the storefronts that were left, many of which sold similar things. That’s what led to the decision to pause Pedestrian Sundays—not some desperate need for car traffic.

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At Hooked, we weren’t immune to any of it. We saw a steady decline in customers over the years, to the point where we needed just one staff member tending the store six days a week. Even so, we were committed to staying. It was only when, earlier this year, we looked at the financials of the businesses as a whole that we realized the Kensington location just wasn’t working anymore. Four months later, we made the decision to close, announcing it on Mother’s Day. We’re closing at the end of June to focus on our two remaining locations, in Leslieville and Swansea.

I fear we won’t be the last. As soon as the World Cup is over, the city is planning to repair the entire water main system that runs under the market, meaning all of the neighbourhood’s roads will be torn up for two years. There’s no plan in place to support existing vendors through the construction. There are no back alleys, so businesses will lose their only access for deliveries. When we were hit with that big snowstorm last winter, the city didn’t dig out Kensington, so the market shut down for almost a week. I can’t fathom what it will be like with the roads a mess for two whole years.

It seems to me that the city doesn’t care for Kensington. It doesn’t seem to understand the grit or the vibe. I’ve heard city staff mentioning the Distillery District as a model for their plans for Kensington—as if their dream is to make it the new home of Lululemon. For me, that would be a travesty. If the market is going to survive, city council needs to dedicate itself to figuring out what actually made it great in the first place, what’s broken and how to fix it. But I’m not sure that will happen.

It’s a terrible feeling to close our Kensington location. It was the little shop that could, and I loved being a part of the neighbourhood’s history. When we first moved in, we tore the place down to its studs and built it back up because we believed we’d be there forever. Maybe, after all the construction, if it ever seems like a grocery store can survive in the market again, we could return. We were committed, we had a great team and we put in the work. But, in today’s Kensington, that’s not enough.