If for some strange reason you’re craving a heavy dose of snobbery, tell a person who lives in Toronto’s west end that you are moving east. You’ll get your fix and then some.

Trust me, I’ve broken this news twice in my life—once in 2011, when I moved into my first Toronto apartment at Gerrard St. E. and Broadview Ave. for the presently unheard of figure of $600 bucks a month (though the building burned down a few years later). And again, this February, when my wife and I moved out of our Queen West condo and into a building in Riverside that we share with my in-laws—who are delighted.

Guess who wasn’t delighted: our friends in the west and even a few western strangers, some of whom expressed their deep concern about our eastward migration with questions like: “Won’t you get bored out there?” “What is out there, exactly?” And the old classic (as though Broadview Ave. was a street in Siberia and not a 20-minute streetcar ride away): “We’ll never see you again.”

Alas, they did and they do, quite often, because though the debate rages on about which “side” of the city is supreme, east and west aren’t as distant, geographically, nor as different from one another culturally, as the snobs would have you believe.

In the words of urban historian Daniel Ross, the debate itself is “a navel gazing argument fed by real estate agents and the culture industry—also by people wanting to belong where they are.” What’s more, he argues, it’s “totally out of whack with the shape of the city which is huge and complex. The bigger divide is the core and suburbs; the socioeconomic differences. Public housing vs. gentrifying Victorian homes. Suburbs in transit deserts vs. well-connected downtown neighbourhoods.” Or as Star city columnist Ed Keenan put it in a column on this subject in 2014, the more interesting, relevant divide in Toronto exists not between east and west, but north and south.

This is probably true, particularly where downtown neighbourhoods are concerned. Having recently moved from one end of Queen to the other I can tell you that West Queen West and Leslieville are both excellent neighbourhoods when it comes to shopping for the following staples: artisan dog food, $40 socks, and oat milk. Of course, this is an oversimplification. Both neighbourhoods boast rich histories and offer infinitely more than their hipster storefronts, but it’s striking how many similarities they share despite being worlds away in the minds of people who are fiercely loyal to one side of the city or the other.

Says Ross, “People look for points on which they can anchor themselves in a city. They establish their own invisible cities. Their own geographies.” He suspects the east-west debate intensified in the last 20 or 30 years as people “have been coming back to neighbourhoods which previously have been valued a bit less.” He points specifically to “west-end neighbourhoods like Little Portugal and the Junction and east-end neighbourhoods like Leslieville. Areas which may have experienced a decline but have been rapidly reinvested in by middle-class gentrifiers, real estate developers, the entertainment industry, restaurants and bars. There’s a lot of interest in recreating local identities.”

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But nobody recreates local identity, in my view, with more passion and more arrogance than Toronto’s west-enders. I’ve moved east and west and east again in the span of nine years and the same routine repeats itself every time. The east enders in my life say nothing disparaging about the other side of the city when I head west, but the west enders in my life have nothing nice to say when I head east. I’ve lost count of the number of times west-enders have told me in some fashion, and with a hint of pride, that they have never ventured “east of the Don.” Or for that matter, east of the Bloor St. Viaduct.

Amy Lavender Harris, a geography professor at York University, says big city structures like the viaduct make regional rivalries more obvious.

After all, the viaduct is a clear border separating the core from the residential neighbourhoods of the east end, whereas, once could argue, there is no distinct structure separating central Toronto from the residential west end.

But regardless of the geography that influences this debate, Harris acknowledges that regional rivalries are fun. “Of course we have to have these rivalries because that’s what makes Toronto a city of neighbourhoods,” she says. Yes, they may be silly and annoying, but they’re also arguably good for civic morale.

“A rivalry is a sense of ‘we’re better than you’ which underlies a sense of privilege,” says Harris. “You live in a neighbourhood that’s worth defending.”

She’s right, I do. But like a true east ender, I’ll mind my own business and leave the boasting to the snobs on the other side of the valley.