Then came the art galleries. After all, that southern stretch of Ossington featured no shortage of abandoned storefronts ripe for the plucking. Suddenly, the area at the bottom of Ossington and Queen was adorned with galleries opening and closing at seemingly random intervals. We enjoyed walking down Ossington now, which featured drunkards having trouble keeping their pants on staring into windows at the kind of lo-fi art your friends might make. What was happening on Ossington? Something like gentrification but, since the neighbourhood wasn’t exactly a poor hovel in the first place, something more like art-ification or hipster-fication. For the most part, I liked the shift. It made a bleak stretch less bleak and did little else to the flavour of the neighbourhood – the Vietnamese, the Portugese, the bums and crazies and prostitutes ignored the art displayed in their midst just as the gallery proprietors and their hipster clients ignored the outstretched hands of the destitute. And anyway, Ossington and Queen was a different world – misformed fringe of the ultra hip Queen West. My headquarters at Ossington and Dundas seemed uninterested and unaffected, 5 blocks north but in an entirely different world.