Wrestling with the Realities of Rabbittown

“I’m sure I turned those lights on!”

That was my first thought on a dark December evening in 1995, coming home to the house my husband and I had recently bought in central St. John’s. I remembered plugging in our outside Christmas decorations—evergreen boughs on the railing with large coloured lights strung through them.

Taking a closer look, I realized that while the boughs were in place and the cord plugged in, the coloured bulbs were missing. Someone had taken the time to stand in front of our house and unscrew each of 30 individual light bulbs, presumably to brighten their own Christmas display.

Not every story of property crime—not even every one I’ve personally experienced—is as benignly ridiculous as the Great Christmas Light Heist of ‘95. Over thirty years in this neighbourhood I’ve had my car stolen and my house broken into, along with less serious losses. Still, I resent seeing the city centre depicted as an unsafe, crime-ridden area. 

*** 

A few weeks ago, I saw notices posted online and around my area: a meeting was called to discuss starting a Neighbourhood Watch program. I didn’t go. But wished I had when I read The Telegram article about that meeting, headlined: Are They Ghettoizing the City Centre?

Everything about the article troubled me, from the choice of the loaded word “ghettoizing” to the quotes pulled from the discussion. Residents described the situation as “brutal,” and said they felt “at their wits’ end.” One neighbour depicted drug users on the street as “walking zombies.”

I wasn’t the only one who found the article disturbing. The day after it was published, I saw people reacting on social media to a depiction of their neighbourhood that didn’t ring true. 

“As someone who lives in Rabbittown, this article does not speak for us all,“ one resident wrote on Twitter. She quoted the tweet sharing the article, which led with lurid images: A pregnant woman being assaulted. A man defecating in a driveway. A woman injecting intravenous drugs on a stranger’s doorstep. “These people are our neighbours and community members,” she pointed out. I heard the same concern from others: was the focus on coming together as a community to support those in need, or on further stigmatizing them?

“It is difficult to convey how worrying the recent proliferation of media reports about crime and violence in Rabbittown is,” says Elise Thorburn, who has lived in the area for the last five years. “We are hearing one-sided interviews and being told that petty crime is some sort of crisis, with literally NO evidence to back up these claims. The language used in these articles is dehumanizing.” 

***

When people ask where I’m from, I tell them I’m not just a townie, but a Rabbittownie, born and raised. I’ve lived in other places, but when I moved back to St. John’s in my twenties it was to the neighbourhood I grew up in. My husband and I bought a house here. Our kids attended neighbourhood schools. I served on school council; we helped start a school breakfast program; we learned a lot about challenges faced by families in our neighbourhood.

Later, in the course of a writing project, I took a deep dive into the history of this centre-city neighbourhood, a cluster of streets threaded between and around the three main thoroughfares of Freshwater Road, Merrymeeting Road, and Empire Avenue. Originally settled after the First World War, the area was home to a population ranging from the very poor to the solidly working-class. Over the decades, new faces have been added: students attending Memorial University, recent immigrants and refugees. But even with these new demographics, the socio-economic profile of the neighbourhood today is similar to what it was 100 years ago. Rabbittown stubbornly resists gentrification.

Teresita Dziadura, who has lived “on the border of Rabbittown and Churchill Park” for sixteen years, says that her house “is surrounded by NL housing, MUN students, and homes for new Canadians.” She describes all her neighbours as “lovely.” Her experiences with crime are similar to my own. “Someone rifled through my car twice and stole a set of screwdrivers once. A pair of water shoes was taken from my front step. I don’t feel the need to lock my doors unless I’m not at home or going to bed.” 

Which story is true? I wonder. Am I living in a crime-ridden ghetto where zombie-like drug addicts roam the streets wielding metal pipes? Or in a neighbourhood where problems are real but manageable, and people like me still feel comfortable walking the streets at night?

***

Sometimes when you love a place, you romanticize it. 

I tell people I love Rabbittown because I can walk to the store in under two minutes to pick up bread or milk; I don’t always talk about how often police cars are parked in front of the store because of a robbery. 

I excitedly promote new local businesses moving into the area, but don’t mention that one of my favourite new businesses was hit by two break-ins in its first few weeks of operation. 

I brag about the community garden where I grew my first potatoes, but rarely tell about the needles we’ve found on the ground, or the morning we saw someone take a dump in the trees near the garden. 

I tell my Christmas-lights story more than my stolen-car story.

I know I need to be honest about the challenges of my neighbourhood, which are the same challenges facing the rest of the city and the province.

Two of the main solutions to those challenges that were raised at the Neighbourhood Watch meeting were 1) more policing, and 2) fewer boarding houses filled with low-income residents. To some of us, those suggestions felt like victim-blaming, stigmatizing and further marginalizing people for poverty and addiction. 

The answer to “Which story is true?” is almost always “Both, to an extent.” 

Maybe I feel safe walking the streets of Rabbittown at night, but if a neighbour doesn’t, should my comfort invalidate her fear?  If a senior citizen on my block feels unsafe in his home, I can’t ignore his concerns just because I’m uncomfortable with the language a newspaper uses to describe those concerns.

I love my neighbourhood, but I don’t want to turn a blind eye to its problems.

***

“Everything comes back to poverty,” Teresita Dziadura says, and most neighbours I spoke to agree. “Desperate people do desperate things.” 

Nobody denies that poverty, crime, and addiction are real problems—and not just Rabbittown problems. Beyond the sensational pull-quotes, this was evident in The Telegram article: one resident at the meeting pointed out that crime and addiction are just as prevalent in other parts of the city, as well as in rural areas. 

Admittedly, wealthy suburbs don’t have the same proliferation of poorly-maintained, low-income boarding houses that we have in the city centre. What we see when we look at these lodging houses says a lot about the lens through which we see our neighbourhood—and our neighbours.

Who is the problem—residents of boarding houses, or landlords who force destitute people into substandard living conditions?

Is the problem the woman injecting drugs on your doorstep—or a city that offers inadequate supports for people living with addiction?

Is the problem the man defecating on the edge of your garden—or a housing situation so desperate that using the outdoors as a bathroom seems like a viable option?

***

I enjoy living here, but I don’t want to minimize the neighbourhood’s problems. Neither did any of the other residents I spoke to. As Elise Thorburn put it after reacting to the divisive language of the newspaper article, “There has to be a better way—in fact, there is. We just have to put in the effort to find it together.”

For someone who has lived in Rabbittown as long and loved it as much as I have, the important question turns out not to be: “Which story is true?” Nor is it: “Who is causing the problems in my neighbourhood?” 

The one question that matters, for me, is: “What contribution am I making towards improving things?”

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