Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall takes a haphazard shack, a crew of less fortunate souls, and a 27-acre tract of garbage-filled land and turns it into a...more

Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall takes a haphazard shack, a crew of less fortunate souls, and a 27-acre tract of garbage-filled land and turns it into a heart-wrenching human tale in Down to This. In November 2001, with nothing more than a knapsack and a few supplies, Bishop-Stall entered Tent City, a lawless area in downtown Toronto claimed by a group of people with nowhere else to go. In the ensuing 10 months he lived there with the strange and often lost people who together built their own little city within a city. Bishop-Stall was welcomed into the fold and also subjected to its cruel realities: drunken brawls, crackheads, forgotten children, and the repeated broken promises of those who said they were leaving once and for all. Down to This is a diary-form chronicle of Bishop-Stall dealing with the personal demons that brought him there, and with the decay of Tent City and those around him when the crack dealers move in. "The man with all the drugs and the power, and no doubt the police's attention, had proved to be as unpredictable and crazy as any of us. So really, nobody's in control of anything down here," he writes after one encounter with Big G, the resident crack dealer. Just months later Tent City would be torn down by the landowner, sending each resident off into an uncertain future. Luckily, Down to This offers a lasting, true portrait of a squatters' city that could only have been understood by someone who lived there. --Craig Silverman   less