North of Princess

The crime-infested slums of Kingston.

Kingston, Ontario, the area around downtown, is roughly a square dissected diagonally by the main street, Princess Street, running from bottom right (or Southeast) to top left (or Northwest). And whether you live north and east of that line, or south and west, means everything to everyone. Everyone knows that “North of Princess” is an area of crime and slums, into which decent people must never venture. 

This is, objectively speaking, false; at least in that the crime rate in Kingston is actually quite low. If the place is poor, surely merely being poor is no reason to stay away. The area north of Princess is historic, and has a fascinating layout. Elsewhere, so close to downtown, it would probably be prime yuppie real estate.

I have not seen this kind of radical social divide in any other Canadian city or town in which I have lived—with one exception. In Montreal, it was always forbidden when I was a child to venture into Point St. Charles, a smallish neighbourhood near the waterfront.

The common denominator?

The first Irish settlers, dirt poor, found work building the Rideau Canal, finished in 1832. The final locks on the southward end are just north and east of Kingston proper, at Kingston Mills. So they would naturally have settled there, the nearest urban centre where they might find work. At the canal’s north end, in Ottawa, the original Irish settlement is similarly hard by the last locks, which in this case run through the city itself.

The typical accent of “North of Princess” still has a distinctly Irish sound.

The same thing seems true of Point St. Charles. This was where the Irish settled once they came off the fever ships, right near the docks. Here they found a livelihood in the transport trade, and digging the Lachine Canal.

Anti-Irish prejudice, the original racial prejudice in English Canada—for no one, contrary to popular myth, was ever prejudiced against the Indians—endures. It remains one prejudice that is perfectly acceptable, indeed required, in polite Canadian society.

And anti-Irish prejudice was the issue in Montreal, too, among the Anglos; and not anti-French prejudice. No problem as a child going into poor French neighbourhoods, or Craig Street, with its pawn shops, or Old Montreal, which used to be pretty gritty. But not Point St. Charles.

Even, or perhaps especially, in my own ethnically Irish family. Having learned to “pass,” perhaps, they were that much more afraid of any possible associations with the place. It is as if the area still had cholera, and you might catch it.

In fact, that is exactly what people used to say, decades after the cholera ships, about “North of Princess.”

The same seems true in the USA. It is intolerable to say the word “nigger,” for example, or “redskin”; but nobody objects to the term “hillbilly.” And everybody thinks it is right and proper to look down on such trash.

The people we call hillbillies are essentially the earliest Irish settlers (they call themselves, to partly obscure that shameful fact, “Scotch-Irish”). Once they had survived their initial indentured servitude, they were obliged to eke out a subsistence in the thin soil of the hills and mountains.

I doubt I will live to see the end of this anti-Irish prejudice. I doubt my grandchildren will.