FROM APRIL/MAY 2024 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

CAAM United Hardware is filled with unexpected treasures: patterned duct tape, coloured string, stone spice grinders and other gems hidden among the proletarian plumbing supplies and rolls of carpet.

It’s one of those quiet, unglamourous institutions that welds a neighborhood together, and Jenny So, 40, is its solder. Presiding in her tool apron, she knows exactly where to find each item. She’s also a jack of all trades, providing advice on every type of renovation or fix-it project – and that includes telling people when the repair they’re attempting to tackle is maybe more than a DIY job.

So grew up in the store, which opened in 1984. When she was a little kid, she used to crawl into the carpet rolls to sleep, in the back of the store near the brooms and mops. Back then, CAAM’s was on Dundas near Kensington Avenue, where Win’s Flowers is now. In the mid-’80s, So’s family moved the shop to the building on Augusta, south of the park, where they are now. In those days, So attended Lord Lansdowne Junior Public School. After class, she’d come back to the store to study or work a little or hide – there was more hiding when she was younger and increasingly more working or homework as she got older.

Her parents are getting older now, but they still work in the shop, as do several other relatives. Mom – that’s Fui Yin – and sometimes an auntie work the cash and cut keys. Then there’s Ying, who is a cousin’s husband’s brother. So’s older sisters occasionally drop by. So do a teenage niece and nephew who work the odd shift, partly to hang out with their grandparents.

Dad, who is originally from Hong Kong, putters around, organizing things and feeding his prize fish, Oscar Blue, a giant elderly tilapia who lives in a tank in the back of the store. Contrary to a common neighbourhood misconception, his English name is Herman, not Cam; CAAM is an abbreviation of the store’s Chinese name, Ga Mei, which means Canada America. He still answers to “Cam,” though.

“We have a mix of people,” says So of the regulars who frequent the shop. Some, she says, “have been coming here for decades. At least once a day we get someone thanking us for still being here. We get workers from the big construction site across the street [at Alexandra Park]. We also get people who googled ‘hardwares store near me,’ which is nice. I feel like people remember us after they leave.”

So wasn’t always sure she would take over the business, gravitating to film and theatre studies, which led to construction and trades work. She found it complemented her part-time work at the store, giving her skills, as well as contacts for purchasing, and a knowledge of which small items are hard to source.

It also deepened her connection to other business owners in Kensington. She names several other second-generation shopkeepers who are still keeping the lights on in the Market. For a lot of them, as for CAAM, “it’s about the community – not just the business,” she says.

Among those still going – and who, like CAAM, were in operation back when chickens roamed Kensington’s streets – are two construction workwear stores, Daniel Safety and the iconic Harry David. And there’s Amadeu’s Restaurant, with its wraparound patio on the north side of the park, where construction workers – some long retired – still gather for a beer at 4 p.m., after working hours, on the bar side, and bring their moms and wives for a special dinner of codfish or mussels and Portuguese wine on the restaurant side. CAAM hardware is part of that legacy left by immigrants in Toronto’s construction history, and especially in Kensington Market.

While So believes that rumours of the Market’s demise are exaggerated, she knows stores like CAAM walk a fine line, and she counts her family lucky: “We own the building. If we didn’t, the hardware store wouldn’t survive. We don’t make that much from it. It’s kind of a labour of love.”

It’s also a bellwether. So says she often thinks about something she heard long ago: “that you know a neighbourhood is healthy when the hardware store is still there.”