Whyte Ave, Edmonton
If Edgar Allan Poe skulked his way down Whyte Avenue in Edmonton, he would have stopped for women’s clothing at Nokomis. Not that I was channeling the author, but a sidewalk placard of a raven—the store’s logo—beckoned me towards the front door. An artist’s rendition, the logo was a black bird, a line drawing painted on a white A-framed sign, with “Nokomis” written in long, drawn-out cursive. It seemed to communicate something. With no knowledge of the establishment, I segued in.
On a welcoming summer day in Edmonton, Nokomis carried only Canadian-crafted and designed clothing from over sixty different designers. Racks, tables, antique dressers and torso mannequins occupied sporadic pieces of real estate inside the place. I spotted a piano bench, an antique sewing desk, mirrors, fitting rooms and beautifully goofy kitsch on the walls, all of which were painted white. The wooden flooring creaked underneath my shoes and the whole place had an oddball Victorian playland sort of feel. I didn’t usually walk into women’s clothing shops, but something about that raven just triggered me to examine the place.
Named after an Ojibwa word for grandmother, Nokomis was one of countless independent businesses scattered along Whyte Ave, the bohemian spine of Edmonton’s eclectic Old Strathcona neighborhood. The Avenue, as locals called it, functioned as Edmonton’s Bohemian corridor of idiosyncratic retail, its anti-Rodeo drive. Street murals appeared everywhere. Many of the utility boxes were painted in glorious countercultural fashion. Musicians set up and jammed at random spots on the red brick sidewalks. Floral arrangements hung from every lamppost. Public ashtrays appeared every 200 feet.
This was refreshing. Most of downtown Edmonton wasn’t known for being any sort of picturesque urban place—this was no Vancouver or Montreal—and much of the city was decidedly oriented around off-street shopping, perhaps due to the extreme winters. Every time I asked where to buy something downtown, I was directed toward a gargantuan shopping mall rather than a drug store, a corner market or anything interesting. “Everything is in the mall,” I was told over and over again. “Everything is in the mall.”
Whyte Avenue, by comparison, exuded a mini-Haight Ashbury vibe, or something plucked from South Street in Philly. I walked up and down the eclectic mile-long road, back and forth, several times.
Every single building seemed of a different architecture, a different decade, a different set of permitting procedures, or a different style of, well, anything. Whyte Ave was a place to smash the monotony, slaughter the cookiecutter aspects of life itself. Even the gas stations seemed interesting.
At Nokomis, the Granny Wall of Fame stood out immediately, occupying one entire corner. Maybe a hundred photos of peoples’ grandmothers were attached to the walls above the counter, in haphazard fashion. Each one was framed. There were many different sizes. Some were professional portraits, but most were amateur shots or Polaroids. Quite a few did not fit the frames that held them. The whole “gallery” was a testament to the glorious incongruity of the neighborhood.
Also behind the counter I saw a doorway to a back area, blocked by a handing drape. This was a makeshift dressing room. The counter wasn’t even a counter per se. It was an old cabinet, or an armoire of sorts, with a glass top.
On the wall, underneath the granny photos, a few narrow shelves displayed a handful of purses and boots, as if someone had just left them there. A couple other walls were stocked in similar fashion— a random blouse or purse hanging on a peg in the middle of the wall, with no apparent rhyme or reason. It gave the whole place a gorgeously imperfect feel.
But the grannies were the focal point. The employee behind the counter, a woman with dyed-red hair and tattoos, told me that any customer received a ten-percent discount if he or she brought in a photo of their grandma. More photos existed where those came from, she said. The extra photos were stuffed in two albums behind the counter—the overflow collection of grannies.
“The original owner of the store inherited it from her grandmother and wanted to show her respect and gratitude for all grandmothers,” Nokomis owner Jessica Kennedy would later tell me over the phone. “It’s such a lovely concept, I had to stick with it. And the other reason I think it really fits, too, is that generations ago, families sewed clothes for each other. Grandmothers would sew clothes for the granddaughters, mothers for their daughters, and that doesn’t really exist in our culture currently.”
Yet as I stood there talking to the employee with the dyed-red hair, whose name I never got, I told myself I didn’t come to Edmonton—the northernmost big city in the Canada—to look at women’s wear at Nokomis, or even a few hundred photos of grandmothers. That raven made me enter the store.
I browsed for a little while longer. The image of the raven logo remained in my head, insisting I remain at the quirky boutique. I never had a relationship with either of my grandmothers, so maybe that was the reason. Something deep was transpiring.
“What we’re here for is to provide clothes for our customers,” Kennedy later told me, “but they also have heart and soul in them, they’re not just mass produced offshore. I know each designer who makes them. I know them fairly well.”
Continuing, she again brought up the family unit, how grandmothers made clothes for their granddaughters. The craft was passed down from generation to generation.
“There’s still that intimate connection and relationship that was once there,” she said. “It isn’t necessarily here in our homes anymore, but I kind of have that in my store.”
Moments later, as I stood across the street from Nokomis, eating a hot link from Fat Franks hot dog stand, I observed a neurodivergent woman screaming at herself while she paraded in a discombobulated fashion down the sidewalk. She managed to approach every newspaper rack and every sidewalk placard, kicking them over with calculated precision. She toppled each one, yelling at the signs and the racks. Shopkeepers began to stick their heads out of doorways to see what was going on. A nearby pedestrian pulled a cell phone out of her purse and began calling the cops.
When the woman ambled in front of Nokomis, she gave a full boot to the raven placard, knocking it flat onto the sidewalk. As I witnessed the raven crash to the ground, another person with a hot dog appeared at my left. He had also been observing the woman.
“That kind of stuff never happens around here,” he said, wolfing down his dog. He knew I was a non-local.
We both then watched her as she moved on down the sidewalk, in broad daylight, occasionally yelling at a newspaper stand, before finally disappearing over the horizon. In a strange way, it seemed like an omen—the raven getting knocked over—although I didn’t know what it could possibly mean. I finished the hot dog, said goodbye to the fellow and wandered down the street.
I trekked up and down Whyte several times over the weekend, going in and out of quite a few establishments. Across the railroad tracks, in a pleasantly seedy stretch of the Avenue, I stumbled into an all-you-can-eat dinner buffet at Daawat Indian restaurant. The Vindaloo was nowhere near hot enough and the seats were much too low for the tables, but I ate enough for three. In order to visit the restroom, I had to slither out the back door into a covered mall-like alley the restaurant shared with an appliance repair shop, a tattoo shop and an old-school greasy spoon diner. Something about the juxtaposition of Mughlai Lamb, wrecked washing machines and the Off-Whyte Tattoo Parlor added to an already palpable do-it-yourself, independent, pieced-from-the-ground-up, business-making spirit exuding from almost all of Whyte Ave, even if there existed an occasional blasphemous presence of Chapter’s Books or a Second Cup coffee chain. I guess no place is perfect.
This was precisely my verdict on Whyte. It was beautifully imperfect. One did not feel pushed into a monstrous shopping mall. A janky life-force ran through the neighborhood, with Whyte functioning like the spine, the serpent energy. Or, to be more accurate, the raven energy. Ravens represented the Jungian shadow, as we connected with the darker side of ourselves in search of balance.
“The raven was just such an image that resonated with everyone here, and our clients,” Kennedy told me. “It’s different. It’s darker. It’s a little bit edgier. I don’t think any of the things we sell are darker and edgier, but we’re a bit of an underdog. We just want to design clothing here in a really unpretentious way. And the raven is obviously really unpretentious too. It just has more grit and more street to it. And I think that’s something, again, that I don’t really think our clothes represent, but our clients represent. They’re just regulars, you know, just regular Joe Schmoes. They don’t have to be these fashionistas.”
Unfortunately for Nokomis, I learned the fashionistas were starting to instigate higher rents on Whyte Avenue. The writing was on the wall. Gentrification was indeed starting to settle in.
To my utter dismay, right as I was trying to finish this story, Nokomis closed for good, due to “economic reasons” just a few months after my visit. I never learned the details.
Kennedy even placed one of the raven images on her blog, made with red line drawings instead of black. The caption said, “red raven flies the coop.” Upon a midnight dreary, all the granny photos were being returned to their rightful owners.
This was quite sad. It happened so suddenly that I didn’t know what to do. To wrap up this story, I only had one more obvious line to type:
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
