Last jeweller of Queen West

As downtown street has evolved, Sheryl Genser has survived due to sheer resilience and tenacity

For decades, the short stretch of Queen Street West between Peter and Soho was home to a stalwart band of vendors. They sold all kinds of stuff. Leather satchels. Handpainted T-shirts. Sterling-silver jewelry. Anything that might catch the eye of the pedestrians bustling by.

In the ’80s and ’90s there were more than a dozen of these peddlers, who made a living hawking their wares, becoming beloved locals and a downtown tourism fixture. As Queen West transformed from a slightly seedy, bohemian utopia into a more sanitized corporate strip, the vendors began to drift away.

In 2003, only five remained. Then three. Then two. Now, there’s just the one left: jewelry seller Sheryl Genser, who has dubbed herself “the last vendor on Queen Street.”

She has been selling jewelry on this block for more than three decades. Her current spot is at 292 Queen St. W., in front of Specs & Specs Optical.

Genser works the cart from spring through Christmas. She worked seven days a week for 35 years; she only started taking Saturdays off this year. At least her commute isn’t too bad. She lives across the street.

She has two employees to keep her company: one who first hired Genser to work at his Kensington shop in the ’80s, and Théa Vincent, who has made the trek from Hamilton to work with Genser for more than 10 years.

She used to push her giant cart across the street from her house to her usual place on Queen. In recent years, she added some hydraulics to the cart, so a little tow motor helps her propel it to work every day.

Just as the street has evolved, so, too, has the flow of her days. “There’s not a lot of office workers downtown anymore,” she says. “We used to have a lunch rush, then a lull, then we’d have the evening rush. But now it’s really uncertain times.”

Genser’s cart wasn’t always here. Back in the ’80s, the original group of vendors would sell their goods out of a parking lot where MEC now stands. “It was a very cool scene of all kinds of funky people,” she remembers. “There were musicians and punk rockers and people making art. It was very welcoming, and it was very eclectic. You wanted to be seen on Queen Street.”

“Queen West of the 1980s was still seedy, still sparse,” says Morgan Cameron Ross of the Old Toronto and Old Canada social media pages, which tell stories of local history through images and mini documentaries. “But with the rise of pedestrian traffic and young adults and teens came a new personality for the neighbourhood. Street vendors offered human interaction in spaces such as parking lots, for instance. They created a vibrancy simply from their eclectic nature, often being run by interesting characters.”

They also added a certain worldliness to the area, he says. “If we think about the beauty and excitement of Barcelona, Cairo, Beijing or any large metropolis, we envision vendors. We envision people trying to find creative ways of convincing us to buy things we don’t necessarily need.”

Genser started out selling jewelry for someone else, but after two years, she decided she would try running her own business. First, she’d need some jewelry to sell. A visit to Bali and some encounters with other street vendors on their own buying trips led her to make a go of it, along with Ray cheering her on.

And so, she went to Thailand to find some jewelry to sell. No contacts, no experience, nothing. “I will say in the eleventh hour of being in Thailand for only a week, I found a supplier the day before I was leaving,” she says. “It was a miracle.”

She now travels to Thailand, India or Indonesia once a year to source her wares. Her chunky sterling-silver pieces tend toward the hippieish. There are dangling semi-precious stone earrings, beefy turquoise pendants, little link bracelets. There are bronze pendants on leather thongs, beaded prayer bracelets, an anklet or two. There’s tray after tray of silver rings, some dainty, some thick, along with dramatic silver arm cuffs.

Even as the landscape around her changes and trends come and go, the appeal of these timeless bohochic pieces endures, as do the prices. While she carries a few more expensive pieces, most of her items run between $5 and $26.

Genser says that she is able to survive, and employ others, due to sheer resilience and tenacity. “It’s being out there every day and sticking with it, and not giving up when the times got hard, like during COVID,” she says. “We just kept going, just working every day, making connections with people.”

Over the years, her fellow vendors left. “People aged out, some opened permanent stores,” Genser says. “It wasn’t as popular a place as it once was, and being outside and dealing with the elements takes a toll on you.”

She has seen the neighbourhood undergo dramatic changes. “Slowly but surely,” she says, “it became a sort of outdoor sort of mall with all the corporate stores.”

Before the new MEC was built in 2019, the parking-lot vendors were forced to move down the street. Coun. Joe Cressy and the city’s Municipal Licensing and Standards division worked with Genser and the surrounding stores to find her a place to work.

The number of peddlers is down across the city, not just on this stretch of Queen Street. Currently there are only six active licences, down from 50 in 1997. The price of a licence has risen sharply over the years, making it less affordable.

Ross attributes the loss of vendors to a few other factors, including the rise of online shopping and the loss of MuchMusic, which had been a hot spot.

Still, Genser can’t imagine doing anything else. “My dream is to be here as long as I can, meeting all kinds of great people. I have a lot of energy left.”

‘‘ (In the 1980s) it was a very cool scene of all kinds of funky people. There were musicians and punk rockers and people making art. It was very welcoming, and it was very eclectic. You wanted to be seen on Queen Street.

SHERYL GENSER