By Tom McLean
A part of Centretown once considered a haven for prostitution, drug-pushing and panhandling is enjoying a revival thanks to police, residents and Ottawa’s self-proclaimed gay village.
The area around Bank Street and Gilmour Avenue has long had the reputation of a city slum. Robert Giacobbi, a part-owner of Wilde’s sex shop on Bank, says the reputation was somewhat warranted.
“A lot of people were doing their drugs and just hanging around, and there was prostitution,” says Giacobbi.
He says secluded Bank Street pay phones were used for drug deals, while prostitutes took advantage of 24-hour cafés and street-side benches to keep business open for the johns all night long, no matter the weather.
But not any more. Giacobbi says business owners, many of whom have been instrumental in creating Ottawa’s Gay Village, were successful in pressuring the City of Ottawa to get rid of the benches and move the phones to an exposed area of the street.
“If the area has improved it’s because everyone has worked to make it better,” says Carol Toone, a co-ordinator at the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation. “Awareness has increased, and various neighborhood groups have come together to identify problems and work with police and businesses to solve them.”
Part of the solution has been the replacement of the 24-hour cafés by new gay-owned businesses such as Screaming Mimi’s coffee shop, which closes at 11 p.m.
Sgt. Joe Simpson of the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police says the force has improved Bank Street considerably thanks to the co-operation of business owners. Part of the strategy includes police monitoring of Centretown bars pegged as “problem areas” — places where illegal drugs are circulating.
“For any particular problem area we first meet with the business owners, and then we try to rectify the people who are the problem as best we can,” says Simpson.
Simpson says in late 1996, officers at the District One Community Police Centre at Bank and Somerset began working with Bank Street businesses to address prostitution and panhandling.
“Since December 1996 we’ve operated a number of john and hooker sweeps. The last one was in November of 1997, and since November, I have seen very few prostitutes out and about,” says Simpson.
But Peter Thorn, a resident of the area, says police can’t solve the problem alone.
“Cracking down on panhandlers and prostitution does clear the problem up,” says Thorn. “But there’s two problems with that: One, it’s temporary and once they stop (cracking down) things will go back to the way they were; and two, it just shuffles the problem somewhere else.”
Thorn says a healthy mix of residential and commercial influence is a better and more permanent solution.
According to Giacobbi, that’s what has been happening with the gay village.
“Myself, I know of at least 500 gay people who live around this store, and there are even landlords who specifically want to rent to gay people,” says Giacobbi.
He says a gay-owned, fully licensed massage and body parlor will open above Wilde’s by March, and the owner of a business in Montreal’s gay village is hoping to open a gay book store somewhere in the area.
Giacobbi says there is a high population of gay and lesbian residents around Bank and Gilmour, and these new businesses, on top of the existing ones, should attract an even larger crowd.
“Any good business that draws people in . . . is a good thing,” says Thorn.