Toronto cafe owner boards up windows after repeated smashings he calls 'targeted'

A Toronto cafe owner has boarded up most of his windows after repeated smashing attacks from vandals and rising repair costs for the Church and Wellesley storefront.

Church Street Espresso at 585 Church Street has been the target of multiple window smashings over the past few years, and owner Joseph Balloutine says the headaches and costs of constantly replacing his cafe's windows have "become too much," opting to end the cycle of smashings by replacing his windows with boarding.

Photos of the cafe with newly boarded windows are accompanied by a note in the front door window (one of the few not covered in wooden planks) for customers, explaining, "because of all the recent break-ins, the windows will now be boarded up. Sorry for the unappealing look."

Balloutine tells blogTO that he has operated the business for nine years, and past break-ins would come through a side door and focus on stealing beer, tablets, or whatever thieves could carry out.

But the cafe owner suggests the ongoing window smashings have a different motivation behind them.

"The guy that's coming the last few times and broken like six windows, he's on rollerblades, he's wearing a facemask, he's got a crowbar. So it's a totally different situation," says Balloutine.

"Now it's like I'm being targeted. Like somebody is trying to push me out here because they see that we're busy and we're succeeding, and things are good."

He says that due to inflation and the rising costs of window replacement, he is being asked to fork over $12,000 to replace three windows — a difficult cost to justify when this window smasher is still at large and targeting the business.

"The police's hands are tied," says Balloutine. "They say, 'we find these guys, we arrest him and then the courts let them out the same day,' so the police are giving up, they don't care."

"I don't know what to do," said an evidently frustrated Balloutine.

The solution, at least for the time being, has been through boarding up the windows and dressing the boarding with artificial greenery. Balloutine acknowledges, "Obviously, it's not ideal, but, we're just coming out of COVID. Everybody's struggling."

Balloutine has been outspoken about rising crime and concerns about safety in the neighbourhood for some time, and issued a similar plea to officials appearing in a video for CityNews in late 2021 over the same recurring vandalism.

Roughly a year and a half later, Church Street Espresso is still facing repeated vandalism and break-ins.