News Stories

DUFFERIN MALL, once known as the armpit of the city's west end, is where Lorena Sackaney has always hung out. She was one of thousands of Metro kids designated "at risk." She was bored in school and unmotivated - a dangerous combination for some teenagers.

But her life changed when, unbeknownst to her, the mall got a new manager. In 1991, David Hall moved into an unobtrusive office above the Bi-Way. He surveyed his troubled commercial empire, home to 120 businesses and 7.4 million shoppers a year, and decided something had to be done.

From Hall's diary on March 16, 1992:

"Joe and Jack (not their real names) are members of the L.A.'s, a reportedly 200 member plus gang that frequents the mall. . . . Jack stabbed a rival seven times one recent Saturday night in Jane-Finch. . . . Joe will serve time to protect Jack, to keep Jack on the street as Jack is the 'head boy.' The Jane-Finch people retaliated and stabbed Jack, but only once. He was away from the mall for a day. Jack is a drug pusher."

Today, the drug pushers are gone, and Sackaney still hangs out at the mall, looking like your typical teenage girl - long hair carefully coiffed, chewing gum, checking out clothes in a jeans store.

But her life has changed. She attends high school at Dufferin Mall, and her work at a clothing store there is helping her earn a credit in a marketing course that's transformed her outlook on life.

Dufferin Mall - once overrun by gangs and paralyzed by the threat of violence - is now recognized internationally as an extraordinary experiment in community development. Achieved - it must be noted - by a unique partnership between private business and public agencies, led by David Hall.

He has projects coming out his ears. Committed to community economic development, he started a newspaper - eight pages published in three languages - in December, 1991; a few months later, he turned over The Westend Express, at no cost, to a neighborhood consortium. The community paper is now a thriving venture with 24 pages and lots of advertising.

The mall provided free space to help a company of doll makers establish themselves; reduced rent has been offered to other fledgling local enterprises to help them test market and create workable businesses.

Hall gave space to the City of Toronto's parks department to organize martial arts classes, a dance group, and a Muslim women's self-defence class. It has expanded into classes in English as a Second Language and basic skills training. Frontier College, a pioneer in literacy training, will move into the learning centre during the summer. A youth theatre is starting up.

Everywhere, there are posters trumpeting Hall's battle cry: "We are your community." It's not just rhetoric. An intense outreach campaign into the neighborhood has had dramatic results.

From Hall's diary on June 20, 1992:

"Tuesday morning, we were invited to St. Sebastian School where we received an award for our work on behalf of the St. Sebastian's Children's Breakfast Club. Tuesday night, we were invited to the 25th Brockton High School graduation ceremonies to hand out the athlete of the year award. Wednesday morning, we celebrated an impromptu birthday in the mall for Mrs. Swan, who just turned 100. She comes here regularly with her friends. We gave her a present, No Frills bought her a cake and Eaton's gave her carnations. . . . The T-Shirt Kiosk has stopped selling knives."

Hall's work has created enormous good will - and enhanced the mall's profits as well as its ambience.

Metro police have noticed the difference. "It's a quieter place; we don't get as many calls to Dufferin Mall as we used to," says a police spokesperson.

Malls across North America are curious, sending their managers to Dufferin to see how they've done it.

Hall's employer, Marathon Shopping Centres Group, owned by Canadian Pacific, is delighted. "We had a reputation for not paying attention to people, not relating to the community we were in," Hall says.

He started by identifying four major problem areas in the community: drugs; youth alienation; safety of women and children; loneliness of the elderly.

He discovered there were six high schools within a 10-minute walk of the mall; he contacted school officials to find out what their problems were.

By September, 1992, he'd donated space for the first high school class in a mall in Toronto. The idea caught the attention of the tabloid National Enquirer.

Teachers Bob Nowlan, John Rufa and Rosalind Tamai at West Toronto Collegiate had already dreamed up an idea for a mall school; when Hall approached, they quickly created a Toronto Board of Education Learning Centre opposite the Woolco entrance. Their co-op program requires students to do academic subjects in the morning and store duties in the afternoon, when Brockton high school runs a re-entry program for drop-outs.

Sackaney, who had been skipping classes at West Toronto en route to skipping out for good, liked the idea of going to school in the mall, the place she felt the most comfortable.

The mall school also appealed to Obaid Najen, 19, whose family fled Afghanistan during the civil war; he was having trouble fitting in to a regular class. It also appealed to the Singh twins, Rohan and Mojan, 20, who came from Guyana in 1987; they couldn't find part-time jobs. (Students aren't paid for co-op work but they get "Canadian experience" that helps them with future jobs.)

For Jeff Leal the mall school "was a last resort." Leal doesn't like school, doesn't intend to go to college, but he knows what he wants: to be an entrepreneur.

The co-op program taught Sackaney an unexpected lesson: "I don't like being a salesperson," she says, still somewhat shocked by her discovery. "I'm not good at dealing with people. I gotta look elsewhere, get more education, try something different."

Those words are music to Hall's ears. A tall, somewhat scholarly chap who trained as an interior designer, he seems an unlikely agent of change. He'd spent 20 years working for various developers, including project manager on the Hudson's Bay Centre at Yonge and Bloor; he'd never before been involved in a poor neighborhood.

Back in 1991, he found himself walking through Dufferin Mall, confounded by the kids who hung out and the disruption they caused - the loitering, obscenities, ominous mood.

From Hall's diary on April 15, 1992:

"Sometimes the extremes of this place exert undue stress, leaving one exhausted from the emotional roller coaster ride. The investigation continues into the suspicious death yesterday. The stairwell has been sealed off. . ."

Hall started approaching the kids, asking questions. "Hello, I'm David Hall, the manager of the mall. What's your name?"

The kids would look startled, look away, mumble and disappear into the crowd. They weren't used to being spoken to by adults who addressed them in friendly tones. In fact, as Hall would find out, they were used to being ignored; alienated kids, he learned, were neglected kids. Their parents often worked double shifts, or weren't available for a variety of reasons, leaving the kids to fend for themselves.

"A lot of these kids pick up their morals and values on the street," Hall says. "They don't understand that their behavior affects other people." The successful players in their cut-off world are often kids who become drug dealers: "All they need is a mountain bike and a cellular phone to start making money."

The mall was their turf, the place where they ate, met friends, did deals, jostling about in adolescent rituals. Some would grow up to become dangerous, but before they hit the point of no return, Hall thought, they could be reached.

"We had two distinct choices," Hall wrote in a paper for the City of Toronto, "to adopt a fortress mentality, erecting metaphorical walls to keep all undesirable elements at bay or, conversely, to remove all walls and actively deal with the problems."

Today, Dufferin Mall sparkles. The sun shines through skylights, the green leaves of the olive trees glisten, traffic increased to 8.5 million people in 1993, despite the recession, and the kids still hang out here.

Hall set up a youth advisory group, with the intention of starting a youth centre; his advisers said that wasn't a good idea because an unsupervised youth centre could become a gang hangout.

"David Hall wrote to us three years ago, seeking advice," recalls Dave Dubois, a recreation co-ordinator with the City of Toronto department of parks and recreation. Dubois knew Dufferin Mall well. "If you wanted to find someone in the west end, you'd find him there."

Dubois suggested Hall hire a youth worker to serve as a link between mall management and kids. Manny Correia, a former star athlete at West Toronto, was working for Dubois at Wallace Emerson community centre; Hall offered to pay 60 per cent of Manny's salary to get 40 per cent of his time. (A first-ever such partnership between private enterprise and the city.)

Correia started in April, 1992. He looks like your typical cool guy - diamond stud in his left ear, baseball cap, laid-back attitude, hanging out at the mall.

But he's a college-educated youth worker and his presence makes a subliminal difference at the mall. He keeps an eye on a constant stream of humanity that covers people of all ages and races. Correia recognizes most of the teenagers, knows their history, what area they come from, what they're involved in.

"Manny has rapport with the kids," says Dubois. "He has respect for them, so they talk to him."

Correia is a well-known sports coach. He was asked to join the Scarborough Optimists track club (Ben Johnson's former team), which would have put him in line for a scholarship to a U.S. college. His father wouldn't let him, because Manny had to help his father at his second job, to pay off the house.

At the mall, Correia runs programs and tournaments; Hall provides equipment and trophies. In the summer, when the kids migrate outside to local parks, Correia follows them, sometimes hanging out until 2 a.m.

He sends kids to get tested for AIDS; he talks to them about using condoms and not using guns and drugs.

"The guns come from the States," he says. "The drugs are everywhere, especially around schools. The age of drug users is getting younger. It used to be kids didn't start smoking up (marijuana) until they were teenagers; now it's kids in grade 6 and 7." With too many teenagers moving on to crack cocaine and heroin.

Correia likes his work. "I've been offered jobs other places," he says, "but why move? It takes five, six years to get to know the kids."

David Hall paces the back corridors of the mall, examining recycling bins. He is obsessed with recycling. In fact, he's turned the mall into a giant recycling plant. On a tour of the place, he's forever disappearing down dark hallways to show off more recycling efforts.

Apart from the obvious - recycling bins in the food court, in entrance ways and exits, for recycling all the usual items - there are special containers for various types of paper; behind the food court, Hall - with relish - lifts the lids of bins containing food wastes to be recycled, coffee grounds, raw vegetable cuttings. He makes a long detour to a room in which one man, equipped with rubber gloves, sorts through various garbage bags, separating recyclable items.

Then we're off to Dufferin Mall Youth Services, run by Gail Glatt, operating out of space donated by Hall. Once again, this is a unique venture, bringing together diverse agencies - Oolagen Community Services, Harambee, Centre for Spanish Speaking People, South Asian Women's Centre, Abrigo, City of York Child and Family Centre.

"This is an unbelievable community," says Glatt. "People drop in every day, wanting to volunteer. The merchants are getting involved. I've never seen anything like this mall."

From Hall's diary on Sept. 17, 1993:

"While walking around the centre last week, I discovered several corn stalks growing in our planter outside the food court. Ian (the operations manager) tells me they were planted by an elderly man who lives a couple of houses away and guards them jealously. All the flowers we planted have disappeared, of course. The corn looks good. Ian was planning on being here early this morning to monitor the hazardous materials removal. He was awakened at 2:30 a.m. by a drive-by shooting on his street and, feeling it would be quieter here, he arrived at 3:30 a.m. Somehow, this all seems normal."

Toronto Star -- SA2
NEWS Saturday, May 7, 1994 A1

SUBJECT: Saturday special Toronto youth drug abuse unemployment
By Judy Steed Toronto Star

They're cool dudes, shooting pool in the afternoon - not in school, where they should be; doing other things they shouldn't be doing.

Like: smoking dope and selling drugs to supply their habit; using stolen credit cards to buy leather jackets, jewelry and VCRs, which they sell at deep discount prices to finance the purchase of more drugs.

Take Johnny, leaning over the pool table, trailed by a 3-year-old girl. His sister got pregnant at 15, and Johnny's the only one in the family who spends much time with her daughter. He woke the child at noon today, had a shower and smoked a joint - his regular morning pick-me-up - before watching his favorite soap opera, Days of Our Lives.

Johnny's major role model, growing up, was Al Capone.

"When he walked, people moved aside," Johnny says admiringly. "He could do anything he wanted. Popularity is the word. That's what the gangs are about. The guys who killed that woman at Just Desserts, they just want to be known. You got to show yourself as tough; don't let nobody push you aside."

Although Johnny, 21, wants to get a gun, his bravado is not matched by his behavior. After the soap opera, he heads out with his little niece in tow, takes her to McDonald's for a late lunch, drops her at home before going out for his nightly prowl.

Johnny has a sniffling nose (from snorting cocaine) and three siblings, all of whom have dropped out of school; none of them work. They all have dreams of living in nice houses but have no idea how they'll earn a living.

Here comes Sess, 16, a large, laughing boy, a kid "with so much potential," everyone says, but he dropped out, too, into the drug scene. All he wants is to be one of the guys. He's an only child; when his parents go on trips to Vegas, his friends come over and party all weekend.

With him is Dough, a bandana tied around his gelled hair. Dough is 22, the businessman of the group; as a dope dealer, he worked the streets with finesse. At his peak, he made $500 to $600 a week, he says.

As a student, Dough was a joker, skipping class and, like up to 30 per cent of high school kids across Canada, dropped out before graduating. He started smoking drugs at 13, got into selling soon after, and left school in Grade 11.

"I don't know why people make such a big deal about weed," says Dough. "It's no big thing." Dough and his friends are convinced marijuana is not addictive, although they seem to be addicted to it.

Johnny, Dough, Sess, Dicky, Bob and Charmaine - they're the core of the group, they've got a code, a private lingo, a sense of connection. They come here every day to play pool and pass time, as they move around their turf, from the rec centre to the park to Bloor St., smoking dope, selling dope.

Dough argues in favor of legalizing weed. Sess says as far as he's concerned, it's already legal. "I can get you anything you want, in 10 minutes," he brags.

"People come looking for me, to buy drugs," boasts Dicky. "Wherever I am, I sell."

Because of the constant bombardment of media stereotypes, you may think you know these kids.

You might assume they're non-whites, from broken homes. You may be surprised to know they're white, Canadian-born, the offspring of two-parent families. Their names have been changed, to allow them to speak frankly about lives that don't fit the image. Their parents were, for the most part, born in Europe. They've worked hard to make a better life for their children, and they're confused and angry over what's gone wrong.

The story begins at Dufferin Mall, where Manny Correia hangs out. He's our guide for a tour of his home turf: the west end. Bloor St. runs through the middle - the equator of this crowded little universe. Queen St. is the southern border, Dupont St. the northern tundra, framed by Lansdowne Ave.to the west and Ossington Ave. to the east.

Manny's a youth worker with a mission. With a diamond stud in his left ear, a laid-back attitude and a compassionate heart, he offers a lifeline to alienated kids, many of whom got lost on the mean streets of childhood.

Sal, for instance: Once a hero of the neighborhood, he's now a heroin addict, turning tricks on Queen St. to pay for his habit. And Jerome, only 15, has been busted for selling crack.

At 26, Manny has seen it all. He grew up near Lansdowne and Bloor; he still lives and works in the neighborhood: part-time for Dufferin Mall and part-time for the City of Toronto, as a recreation programmer at Wallace Emerson Community Centre on Dufferin.

The rec centre, as it's known, is - for Johnny and the gang - the main point of contact with mainstream society. That link is diligently nurtured by Manny's boss, Dave Dubois. His experience in native communities back home in Saskatchewan prepared him, in ways he never could have anticipated, for working in an inner-city neighborhood.

Urban teenagers and aboriginal youngsters, he's discovered, often have common responses to feelings of alienation. Turned off education, turned on to drugs to numb the confusion and pain, they flounder in surprisingly similar ways.

In his office overlooking the room where the kids shoot pool, Dubois - good-humored, clear-eyed - keeps track of his tribe. Dicky, 17, moves around the table, cue in hand, looking cool, attuned to the nuances of behavior and expression; of special importance are the clothes, the cut of the jeans, the sneakers, the plaid shirts, the padded vests, the baseball caps.

Dubois waves through the glass at Dicky, one of the first kids he met when he started working here in 1988. Back then, Dicky was a keen hockey player who dreamed of making it in the National Hockey League; today, his dreams revolve around drugs.

Says Dubois, "I said to Dick, 'Why aren't you in school?' Dick said, 'I don't care about school.' I said, 'Why not?' He said, 'My parents don't care; why should I?' "

Dicky struggled for four years in high school and got one credit. He didn't fit in at school, but he does with this group.

Across the pool table, taking aim, is Bob, 18. He's the wild man, crazy about his drugs.

"Bob goes crazy, man," Dicky says later, with a touch of disdain. Bob overdoes it, fries his brains. The guys think Bob's in danger of going over the line.

Which is where Jerome's gone; he's only 15, he's especially cool, in his red and white T-shirt under his blue padded vest, with his red baseball cap backwards and his baggy jeans hanging off his rear just so, and his ambling gait that looks like a limp but is a signature walk, a sign to those in the know.

What's to know about Jerome is that he sells crack and he makes big dough. He's in trouble with the law; his parents don't know he's been arrested. And if this sounds like rap, that's how the kids talk.

They're poets and they don't know it. Though some of them are barely literate, they're all fascinated by language, skilled in the use of fanciful imagery, in love with the cadence and drum beat of words - a hook, surely, to attract them to learning.

But they've never learned how to learn. No one read them bedtime stories at night, as children; in most cases, their parents couldn't read English. They didn't discover, through play, that reading and learning can be fun.

At school, they feel stupid, and that hurts. They don't like being humiliated, and can't abide frustration. If something's hard to do, they'd rather smoke a joint and buzz out. That's how they've learned to cope. By relaxing on drugs.

"Isn't that what everyone does?" says Dicky. "What's the big deal about weed? You can't get addicted to weed. It's natural, organic."

Dicky and the gang also believe marijuana makes them smarter and helps them concentrate.

On what?

"They've got their rules," says Dubois, noting that in their own way, these kids are highly organized; they're not anarchists. He gets them to obey the rules of the rec centre by seeking their input on keeping order. There's no smoking or dealing dope in the centre, and if they do, they're kicked out, "which hurts them," says Dubois. "This place is their social scene."

The guys who are hired by Dubois for coveted part-time jobs have to agree to not make dope-smoking spectacles of themselves in Dovercourt Park, where they hang out in the summer, where Manny often hangs with them till 2 in the morning.

Manny goes where they go, a guardian angel, watching, listening, talking to them about drugs and AIDS and life. One evening at the rec centre, late, Jerome shows up, with his limping gait, cool clothes, jewelry, shades - and a badly swollen, bruised hand.

"Is it broken?" He shows his hand to Manny, and he talks. "Times are rough," he says mournfully. Manny listens as Jerome muses about his fear of jail and of cops; then Manny talks about what a great athlete Jerome used to be. "Jerome loved hockey. When he was 9 years old, I put him on the team with the 12- and 13-year-olds."

Jerome takes off his shades. "I know what Manny wants for me. He wants me to stay in sports and school. I wish I could do it. But I gotta get money. Money is everything. Without money, you're nothing. I don't want to dress in rags. My parents give me nothing. My dad don't like nobody, don't respect nobody."

Jerome's dad is a violent alcoholic.

"This is rough," Jerome says. "I don't wanna be bad. It's not the road I chose. I'm doin' what I have to do to survive. I seen death in front of my eyes many times. I want to get out of it. I don't want to play with the police no more."

Jerome limps off, to the streets.

Is there any hope for him?

"I hope there's hope," says Manny. "If he wants to change, we have to hope. When he turns 16, I'm gonna ask Dave to give him a couple of hours' work a week; we gotta get him doing things he liked doing before, get him on the ice, teaching kids to skate."

How does Manny know how to approach these situations? "You learn about kids through kids. They tell you what you need to know. Every kid is different. If they were all the same, it'd be easy; we'd know the solutions."

Manny's patience pays off, with some of the kids. Dough, for instance, says he's stopped dealing. Nowadays, he's got a part-time job as a butcher, a girlfriend who doesn't like drugs, and he's doing correspondence courses.

Yet while we're talking, he gets beeped, and reaches under his shirt for his pager. A customer? He laughs and says it's his mother.

There are other signs of progress. Johnny is talking about getting a job. Sess is going back to school. Charmaine is doing correspondence courses.

At lunch with Dicky, at the Loose Moose - location chosen by Dicky to celebrate his 17th birthday - Charmaine talks about hanging out at Dovercourt Park with the guys. At 21, she calls herself a tomboy. Like most of the gang, her parents are immigrants with little education, who were able to find only the most unskilled jobs, as cleaners or laborers.

"My mother works like an animal," Charmaine says. Many of the mothers have two jobs; they leave the house at dawn for the first job, start the second at around 4 p.m. and come home late, having left dinner for the kids. Many of the fathers are unemployed (since the recession), and some are alcoholics.

"I got kicked out of seven high schools," says Charmaine, with some pride. "I was very rebellious." But not cliquish: "I hung around with everyone - nerds, dweebs, druggies."

She was a dope freak like Bob, and she still likes to blast her brains out, but unlike many of her girlfriends, who got pregnant, she's stayed connected to school. She's doing correspondence courses to complete Grade 12; she's enrolled in part-time courses at a community college and she works part-time at the rec centre.

However, her boyfriend does heroin - "he sniffs it," she insists, "he doesn't poke it" - and she wants him to stop.

Charmaine's eyes become clouded with sadness as she talks about Sal, who's turning tricks on Queen St.

"Sal grew up at the rec centre," says Manny. "I would get here at 8:30 a.m. to open the building on a Saturday, and he'd be here, waiting, and he'd stay until we closed. He loved baseball and hockey, and then he got into the drugs, and he turned the other way."

Why?

So many reasons: "They think it's cool to smoke your weed and sell it. They're lonely. They're bored at school."

In Manny's opinion, the curriculum should be made more relevant to these kids' lives.

"They don't like school, they don't understand the importance of education, they don't realize what a hard time their parents are having making ends meet. They feel inferior; they get no support at home, they prefer hanging out in the park, smoking dope. Then their parents tell them they're no good; they get emotionally abused (at home), and that can be worse than being hit.

"They ask their parents for money to buy shoes, and their parents can't afford it. They have to get money. They tell me, 'I got to get out of the house. My father says I'm a bum. My father says to get a job.' The parents don't understand that those unskilled jobs are gone."

Manny's parents understand. When Manny failed Grade 7 - "I was lazy, I didn't care about anything but sports" - he was held back in school for a year. "And for a year, my dad wouldn't let me do any sports." At the time, Manny was furious, but he says now "it's the best thing my dad could have done. I was forced to learn."

Manny says his parents are different: "They're equal. They consult each other. My father loves to cook. He does the grocery shopping. If I get married, I want to treat my wife the way my dad treats my mom."

Manny's parents, working as cleaners - she at the Toronto Dominion Centre, he at Pickering Town Centre - paid off their house. But they're unhappy about what's happening to the neighborhood, how it's been overrun by drugs, gangs and danger.

Why?

"It's the family," Manny's father Manuel says, seated in the family's living room. "It's what's going on in the family. Sometimes, the parents don't look after their children. Some of these fathers, they drink too much; they beat their children."

Back at the rec centre, Dave Dubois watches the guys play pool. "I don't know how other community centres handle this stuff, but I try to keep talking to the kids; we've got to understand what they're doing."

Dubois' colleagues are sometimes shocked at the extent of his knowledge of street mores and drug dealing, but he insists that kids need to feel welcome, that society has nothing to gain by shutting them out.

"The underlying problem," he says, "is lack of parental guidance."

There is a consensus here.

But no firm solutions.

Manny took Dicky and a group of guys on an Outward Bound camping trip last year. The kids were "clean" for a week, high on oxygen and life, but within two days of being back on the streets of the west end, Dicky was smoking up.

Dubois knows what hooks them the most:

"A job: That's what grabs them. It's prestigious to work. They don't connect to education, but they want a job."