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Chinatown runs along Spadina Avenue from Dundas Street West north past College Street, with a second stretch along Dundas itself between Augusta Avenue and Beverley Street. A dedicated streetcar track runs down the centre of Spadina. Storefronts on both sides carry signs in Chinese and English, and produce and dried goods sit out on tables along the sidewalk.
Spadina Avenue was a Jewish neighbourhood before it was a Chinatown. By the 1920s about eighty percent of Toronto's Jewish population lived here, worshipping at more than thirty synagogues. As Jewish families moved uptown in the late 1950s, houses on Spadina became available. At the same time the city expropriated Toronto's first Chinatown, near Bay Street and Dundas, to build the new City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square. Displaced Chinese businesses and residents moved into the emptying houses through the 1960s. A change to federal immigration policy in 1967 brought more arrivals from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
The , on the northeast corner of Spadina and Dundas, opened as a Yiddish theatre in 1921. It later ran as the Strand cinema, then the Victory burlesque house, then a Chinese language cinema. It is a bank branch today. The Labour Lyceum, a few doors down at 346 Spadina, was a centre of Toronto union organizing from 1928 to 1968.
Streetcars disappeared from Spadina between 1948 and 1997, when the city restored a dedicated right of way and put up two gateway arches over the avenue. Storefronts in the area still use the split level entrances required since the city designated it a Special Identity District in 1979, one door at street level and one a few steps down. Dragon City and , the neighbourhood's two largest malls, sit farther north toward College Street. The , a live music venue that predates the neighbourhood itself, is nearby.
