Zoltan Zimmerman shuffles across the linoleum floor of his discount store and uses a black marker to scribble “$1.99” on cartons of breakfast cereal stacked near the cash register. It’s mid-morning, and customers trickle through the glass doorway off Augusta Ave., Kensington Market’s well-trafficked spine.

“Get some jeans there,” Zimmerman calls to a cluster of women browsing the clothes, toques and plastic sandals hanging on the wall. “$19.99!”

This has been the scene at Zimmerman’s Discount, more or less, for decades, a family business that the 88-year-old — later joined by his son Danny — has poured his energy into since he was a young man, a newly landed immigrant in the bustling market of the early 1950s. And now, as the white-haired proprietor scans his store from his post behind the cash register, his shoulders slightly hunched and his hands shoved in his pockets, it’s clear this is a man readying himself for a big change.

Come New Year’s, Zimmerman’s Discount will be closed for good, replaced by an organic food market set to open in the coming months.

“I was here over 60 years,” Zimmerman says. “Sure, I’m going to miss it. Everything has to end, though. You know that.”

The imminent closure of the longtime Kensington Market mainstay is the latest iteration of a now-familiar story in the well-loved and iconic downtown neighbourhood. What was once a bustling hub where recent immigrants to Toronto came to live and start businesses — a panoply of butchers, fish mongers, fruit sellers and more, hawking wares in many tongues — the Market has transformed over the years into a hotbed of alternative culture. Many argue the area has its own special vibrancy that should be preserved in the face of the march toward gentrification seen in other downtown areas.





The inevitability of change in the neighbourhood — and how it is dealt with in the community — therefore becomes political.

“We’re obviously always concerned whenever there’s a turnover,” said Dominique Russell, a spokesperson for the community group Friends of Kensington Market. She cites recent closures of a local bakery and meat shop, saying there’s anxiety that a big chain could set up and taint the independent character of the neighbourhood.

The prospect of a Loblaw’s grocery store on the fringe of the Market drew the opposition from residents, while Russell’s group successfully agitated last year to prevent the installation of a Walmart on the outskirts of their neighbourhood, out of concern it would sink local shops.

But at the same time, there’s acceptance that things can’t stay the same forever. For Danny Zimmerman, it’s important to change in the right way.

“Look how everything is getting upscaled,” says the 53-year-old, as he walks through the Market, answering first-name greetings from shopkeepers and passersby. He points to Sanagan’s, a recently installed boutique meat shop, as the type of business that caters to a younger generation, yet maintains the “vibe of the market.”

“If we’re going to leave the market, we can’t mess with its flavour,” Danny says.

Enter Potsothy Sallapa, the proprietor of 4 Life Natural Foods, a fruit and vegetable shop just up Augusta from Zimmerman’s. Even though they heard from big chains who wanted to set up shop in their building, Danny said he was won over by Sallapa’s plan to expand his organic store into a larger supermarket with a greenhouse on the roof.

With a nod to the democratic and alternative character of the Market, Sallapa plans to run the business as a workers’ collective. “Everybody who works there will own it,” Sallapa says, piling produce into bins at his store.

“I’m excited, and people in the neighbourhood are excited.”

But even if it proves to be the right fit, leaving the market isn’t going to be easy for Danny. Back at Zimmerman’s, he calls it a “sweet sorrow.”

“We’ve been here forever and ever and ever. I’ve known nothing but this business,” he said with a soft smile. “It’s an opportunity for us to change completely.”

Zimmerman came to Canada in 1951 from Czechoslovakia. A Holocaust survivor, he lost his parents at Auschwitz and came to Toronto to start anew, having promised his mother before her death that he would take care of his brothers and sisters.

He started his business two years after moving here, partnering with his brother and two brothers-in-law. The shop grew and grew, at one time having seven cashiers, a butcher, and rows upon rows of produce and canned goods, Danny recalls. “I hung out here and I loved the market. I loved the atmosphere.”

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After high school, Danny joined his father and eventually, with the original partners leaving the business, the two became co-proprietors. They’d rise together before dawn, pick up goods at the Food Terminal, set up shop, and often work late into the evening. “He’s the hardest working man you’ll ever meet,” said Danny.

Looking back, Zimmerman sighs and says if he could do it all again, he’d spend less time at the shop. Dinners with the whole Zimmerman family together were a rarity, and Danny says his relationship with his father is an entanglement of the familial and the entrepreneurial.

That’s what takes the sadness off the prospect of closing shop, Danny says. Now they can relax, having toiled for decades in the neighbourhood they love, and just enjoy being father and son.

“The business isn’t part of the equation anymore,” he says, with a glance across the store at his dad, who’s standing — as always — behind the cash register.