I thoroughly enjoyed my interview this week with Ward Four contender, Greg Thompson. He’s a wonderfully straight-ahead guy who’s been working hard for ten years in the volunteer anterooms of civic politics to get a few breaks for a section of this town that always seems to get short-changed and dumped on. I’m delighted at the progress he reports on in our interview and none of it is more welcome or surprising to me than the news that the Medallion project to build a swish retail/residential complex on that block of Dundas Street that used to be anchored by the old Embassy Hotel is actually going ahead; that construction has actually begun.

This represents a complete turnaround for what seemed to me about 36 years ago to be an utterly decrepit, doomed, perhaps even cursed slab of London real estate. You see, dear reader, I used to live there. For a mere $135 dollars a month I rented a dilapidated, two-storey, early 20th century townhouse whose front door opened out onto the compost heap behind Lucky’s Open Kitchen. (The story was that there used to be other, matching units attached to the south but these burned down; probably in some Al Capone-style act of arson-ic vengeance between clashing drug lords.) And just across the way, as you tip-toed through Lucky’s mouldering coffee grounds and rotting lettuce refuse, was the west wall of the Embassy Hotel that blocked out all sunlight to my abode on winter afternoons by about three o’clock.

Thompson talks in our interview about the not very furtive sex and drug trade that has flourished on that block for decades. You can imagine what an education it was for a naive aspiring writer in his early 20s to move out of his parents’ commodious and ivy-covered estate in old South London to take up his habitation in that dark corner of the city that common decency forgot. Prostitutes serviced their not very fussy clients in the corner between my front door and Lucky’s back wall. Staggering oafs full of too much beer routinely peed and threw up on that barren patch of ground that was my excuse for a front lawn. In silent disbelief I once watched a young woman take a dump there in broad daylight. The Salvation Army once promoted their Christmas charity drive with a poster set up in a window of Simpson’s Department Store depicting a terribly sad-looking drunk, head in hands with empty bottles at his feet, sitting on my front stoop. “Hey, that’s my house,” I impulsively blurted upon first seeing this poster, causing nearby Christmas shoppers to pull their coats a little tighter round their shoulders and move away from me.

One of the first nights in my disillusioning new digs, my co-tenant (he didn’t last long as did neither of his successors) and I were yanked away from our game of Scrabble by the sound of nearby shattering glass and what sounded like a burglar alarm. We ran out the front door and that bell sound, now winding down, seemed to be coming from the narrow alley (no more than three feet across) that led out to Dundas Street. Amidst the shards of glass, an alarm clock metallically vibrated away in its death throes. Some poor old soak, sleeping off a bender in one of the Embassy’s sparsely appointed rooms, had been rudely yanked to by the blaring ring and pitched the nasty thing through a window. My co-tenant wanted to investigate further and I was propping up his bum as he tried to crawl his way up between the alley walls when a policeman at the Dundas Street end of the alley swept a brilliant flashlight beam across our blinking faces.  “But . . . but Officer . . . We live here. We were just checking out the noise.”

It didn’t look good but thankfully, he believed us. In fact, I think he felt kind of sorry for us. We regaled him for about five minutes with our breathless tales of all the unsavoury things we’d seen since moving into 728 Dundas Street East (Rear) and he looked more amused than shocked to learn what was going on in this neck of the woods. When we finally finished our tirade, it was his turn to speak.

I paraphrase but I swear on a stack of Embassy Hotel Gideon Bibles that the gist of what he said to us went like this: “You seem to want the police to do something about all of this but I might just point out to you that we recently moved our headquarters to the corner down there. And that was no accident. We know what’s going on here and frankly – as long as it’s contained to this neighbourhood – we don’t intend to bother very much about the small stuff. But if it’s a quiet, peaceful life you want . . . well, I’ll tell you what I’d do: I’d move.”

In 1997 I relayed that story to then Chief Julian Fantino and he said to me, “I don’t believe that any neighbourhood should be relegated as a war zone, a drugs-tolerant zone, a prostitution-tolerant zone. That’s despicable. Not everybody can live in the Windermere Manors and the people who live down here are no less entitled to safety and quality of life than anyone else.”

Thirteen years later still, Greg Thompson has told me that things might finally be turning around for Old East London. I hope he’s right. It’s way past time for East London to catch a break.