Yonge Street at York Mills in 1936 and 2013

I never had this problem while blogging about the any of the communities from Rainy River through to maybe Richmond Hill.  For those communities, it was simple.

But as this blog started making its way into Toronto, a new issue arose –how do you title a blog post about a relatively amorphous and randomly selected portion of a big city?

What’s in a name?  Some neighbourhoods get named after their first settler.  Or are titled by their original developer.   Some names get adopted organically over time.  Or are imposed, directly or accidentally, by the powers that be.

And I think that’s the case here.  The local TTC subway station is named York Mills, but I’m not sure that everyone who lives in this area would actually say that they live in York Mills.  (Certainly not those that live close to Lawrence Avenue.)Yonge Street between Highway 401 and Lawrence Avenue is a confluence of different neighbourhoods.  But when you’re blogging the world’s longest street, you can’t have a separate entry on every intersection.

When the even the “wrong” side of the tracks is still really really good

Driving north up Yonge Street, once you hit Lawrence Avenue building heights drop and empty spaces widen.  Lawrence is the signal that you’ve made it into some of Toronto’s first suburbs.

The story of this part of Yonge Street is one of west vs. east.

The area west of Yonge was developed in the early 1900s with the intent of attracting middle-class families whose breadwinners were professionals that used the Yonge streetcar (and later subway) to go to work downtown.  Take York Mills west (York Mills becomes Wilson Ave once you cross its bleak intersection with Yonge Street) and things will become less fancy as you approach Avenue Road and very working class once you hit Bathurst.

The east side of Yonge Street, however, had plans for big things.  Early developers set out to attract Toronto’s rich and wealthy, and boy did they ever succeed.

This is a house in York Mills on Old Toronto Road. It’s so expensive that they don’t even list the price in the listing!

The area is chock full of private schools like Havergal, Crescent, and Toronto French, and is home to both the Rosedale and the ultra-private Granite Country Clubs.  There’s a specialty York University Campus and the Canadian Film Centre nearby.

Despite Hearst’s claims, this stretch of Highway 11 likely has the most millionaires per capita.  There is a stretch of road east of Yonge Street called Millionaire’s Row and the average family income in York Mills hovers around $657 000.  The not-exorbitantly-wealthy-but-still-pretty-wealthy parts of York Mills have boomed – house prices have risen nearly 100 percent since 2001.  Local neighbourhoods have become synonymous with money, like Lawrence Park, the Bridle Path and Hoggs Hollow.

And no, Hoggs Hollow is not a derisive political or populist commentary on the rich and wealthy gathering in one place, as has happened in the neighbourhoods east of Yonge Street, just south of the 401.  It’s named after Joseph Hogg who first settled the area in 1824 and set up a distillery.

The part of Yonge Street near Lawrence started off much more middle class than it is today. With middling rents and lots of space, some of the art deco apartment buildings are great places to rent near Lawrence.

Despite its more downmarket beginnings, however, the west side of Yonge Street rapidly gentrified and is now home to one of Toronto’s most solidly upper-upper-middle class neighbourhoods.  (I’m not sure if there is such a thing as an upper-upper-middle class.  Maybe people with big salaries and hefty RRSPs but are still a few missed paycheques away from poverty like the rest of us?)

A neighbourhood dominated by detached houses and really nice semis, Yonge Street north of Lawrence Avenue is one of those neighbourhoods where you wouldn’t expect homes to nearly reach the million dollar mark.

Unless you live in Toronto.  If you do, you immediately understand the appeal of a place like Yonge and Lawrence, even if you’re not keen on living amongst the almost-rich and not-so-famous.

Park at Yonge and Lawrence

“I don’t’ get it…what’s so great about this place?”

Walkable access to the Yonge subway has made getting downtown quick and easy.  The housing stock is well kept and just a bit more spaced-out than communities further downtown.  It’s not dominated by rental apartments like Yonge and St. Clair.  Condos have squeezed in, but they are not as ubiquitous or as imposing as they are at Yonge and Eglinton. There’s a community feel to the main drag along Yonge Street north of Lawrence, in the sense that although some of the stores up here are fancy, by and large they’re still pretty useful.

And it’s that last point that is such a big deal.  Because if you live in Toronto, you’ll know that the main drags of residential neighbourhoods fall into one of four categories.

1. Grotty, storefronts either empty or full of things like cash for gold places and flea markets.
2. Grotty, but full of useful stores that you need to run your everyday life like cleaners, fruit stands, drugstores, hardware stores, flower shops, etc. (I need the latter to get out of trouble.)
3. Gentrified, but full of useful stores like above.
4. Gentrified, and full of useless crap like art galleries and copper-plated kitchenware stores and gluten-free cupcakeries and $45-a-chicken butchers.

I know this, because right now I live in an area that’s a solid Stage 2.  And you wouldn’t believe how quick things can change in a place like Toronto.  I know this, because I used to rent in an area that went from Stage 3 to Stage 4 in less than two years.

Homey, everyday but upscale retail along Yonge just north of Lawrence

Some of the city’s most desirable residential neighbourhoods are served by a main streets that are downright beautiful but, unless you find yourself needing an eco-friendly feminist pharmacy once a week, are absolutely useless and require the worst of both worlds – car-based living in the big city.

So the people that live north of Lawrence have it very very good.  Particularly when compared to those who live just seven or eight kilometres east of west on Lawrence – out in Weston or in Scarborough – where neighbourhoods around Lawrence are some of Toronto’s poorest.

Toronto.  Ontario.  Both are always a land of contrasts.

Dog park just south of the 401 at Yonge and York Mills / Wilson

The sleek glass office complex at York Mills and Yonge Street is the most noticeable part of this windswept, lonely intersection. Even inside the building feels well-kept but forlorn – the GO Bus terminal, the York Mills subway station and the mini mall on the main floor nearly are always nearly vacant unless it is rushhour or lunch time.

Five Italian workers were killed in a tunnel fire in 1960 at York Mills. They are commemorated in this tapestry on display in the York Mills subway station.

Willowdale.  Riverdale.  Rosedale.  Bracondale.  Parkdale.  Rexdale.  Armadale.  Bendale.  Keelesdale.  Bloordale.  Erindale.

I was hanging out at the Pacific Hotel in Wiarton one rangy Halloween night, when one of the locals we were talking to mentioned that he had grown up in Willowdale.  “Oh, that’s the part of Toronto that had a soap-opera named after it?”  I said.  No, that was Riverdale.  “Or is that in Mississauga?”  Still no.  “Is that that Rexdale?” another non-Torontonian amongst us asked.  No.

“Is it kinda grotty?”  someone else chipped in?  No, that was Parkdale.  “Is it really fancy?”  I asked.  No, that was Rosedale.  We gave up.

There are so many ‘ales’ in the Toronto area that I get mixed up.  To be clear, Willowdale is the one at the north-central end of Toronto.  For the purposes of this website, I’m going to define Willowdale as everything north of the 401 up to the border with York Region at Steeles.

(Oh wait, there is Maryvale.  And Cedarvale.  And Meadowvale.  Ale.  Ale.  Ale.  Hank Snow could do a whole song just using GTA neighbourhoods. )

Juxaposition of the old and new in Willowdale. Settler cemetery surrounded by glass and concrete. (Credit: Simon P, Wiki Commons.)

From carriages to condos

Lansing was the first community developed in this area of Yonge Street whilst Willowdale, if I am correct, was actually located a bit to the east.  The first person to settle Willowdale was Joseph Cummer, the son of a Loyalist Germans from Pennsylvania.  Another returnee from America, David Gibson, helped develop Willow Dale village after he was pardoned by the Upper Canada government for his role in the 1837 Rebellion.  Gibson House still stands on Yonge Street to this day.  It is a museum now.

One of Toronto’s inner burbs, Willowdale was once a pretty sleepy bedroom community just north of the limits of the Old City.  People moved to Willowdale because they didn’t want to live downtown, or in a semi-detached, and/or couldn’t afford Don Mills.  Willowdale from 1950-1970 was your pretty standard family suburb: a bastion of single-family homes, relatively anglo-saxon with a smattering of Jews and Italians.  David Clayton-Thomas and two-thirds of Rush are from Willowdale, as are comedians Howie Mandel and Gerry Dee.  Dee, the son of Scottish immigrants, has a great bit on growing up in Willowdale next door to an Italian family.  (I’m not normally into ethnic comedy.  It is not terribly hard to mine stereotypes for worn-out laughs.  But some comedians have the talent and analytical ability to poke fun at different groups in an inoffensive but still critical manner.  Gerry Dee does this.  That clip is great because it is funny yet respectful, and there is a subtle critique underlying its kernel of truth that is hard to miss.)

Today, Willowdale is drastically different.  Yonge and Sheppard has boomed upwards.   First came the institutional development – The Toronto District School Board and the City of North York built head offices there.  Today, Mel Lastman Square (named by the former mayor after the former mayor) is home to a theatre, offices and a pile of public events.  The plazas and strip malls of Yonge street have been replaced by condos north of the 401.   The side-streets have not escaped unscathed; the old ranches, bungalows and sidesplits are being bought up for their large lots and replaced with massive infill homes covered in stucco and fake stone.  Just east of Yonge on Leslie big box stores have gone in, like IKEA, Home Depot, and a massive Canadian Tire.

Rob Ford makes Mel Lastman look like a statesman. But who goes to Mel Lastman Square? Nooooooooooobody! (That’s not true, but I had to do it.)

Out goes brick veneer, in goes another floor and textured concrete veneer. (Credit: Simon P at Wiki Commons.)

Part of this change is due to changes in local governance.  Like most Toronto neighbourhoods, Willowdale has been shunted around a bit between different municipal administrations.  In 1922 it was incorporated into the Borough of North York, in 1953 North York was integrated into the Metro Toronto, in the 1970s North York became a city, and in 1998 North York ceased to exist thanks to the forced municipal amalgamation program pioneered by Premier Mike Harris.  This has opened some communities to greater influence from central planning, and reduced the influence of to plan according to the wishes/needs of local residents.

The Stubway

But the biggest part of it is the subway.  The TTC expanded to Sheppard and Finch in 1974.  North York Centre was added in 1987.  More stations were planned, but were never built.  And then came the subway to suburbia.  The line to nowhere.  The stubway.  Aka – the Sheppard Subway.

The Sheppard Subway line was one of four lines proposed by the government in 1995.  When it fell, the Conservatives took over and cancelled all but Sheppard – which was strange, since it was the least useful of all the lines, but not-so-strange, given that the local area was Conservative-voting and Conservative-inclined North York mayor Mel Lastman was elected the first mayor of the megacity.  The Sheppard Line was so unpopular that they even filled the existing tunnelling underway for the Eglinton line, because the Conservatives knew that the City would vote to continue building Eglinton if it wasn’t filled with rubble.

Today, Sheppard is the least used subway line in the city, with a lower ridership than some bus or streetcar routes, so much so that in 2008 there was a proposal made by the city to shut it down entirely.  One can only imagine how different the city would have been if the Eglinton line had proceed instead of Sheppard.  Hi-rise development has followed the subway all throughout Toronto, and the Sheppard line is no exception.  Sure, house values went up as developers sought land for condos and residents sought subway-accessible lots to build megahouses, but driving a subway through a suburban neighbourhood has essentially fractured the nature of the area.  The Leona Drive Project documents this.  As one website puts it, Willowdale is uptown living at downtown prices.

Honestly, what were they thinking? That they were playing Sim City?

Platform at the Sheppard subway station, beneath Yonge Street / Highway 11

Condos in Willowdale on Yonge Street

I was into maps as a kid.  Anytime I came across place that I hadn’t heard of before, I always took time to find it on a map.  But I remember this one place that I could never find, long before the time of Google Maps or GPS.  I subscribed to a magazine whose offices were in this town, or was it a hamlet, or a village, or whatever it was?  I could never find it.  It was Gormley.

Now I understand why.  Because, like so many southern Ontario municipalities, Richmond Hill is more of an agglomeration of former communities rather than a town gone big.  R.I.P. Gormley.  And Langstaff, Dollar, Carville, Headford, Elgin Mills, Jefferson, Bond Lake, Lake Wilcox, Temperanceville, and Richvale.  While I’m sure there are some that continue to self-identify as residents of those former hamlets, today they’re all part of Richmond Hill, a city of almost 200 000 people in the Region of York.Not your average suburb

Another in a string of wealthy suburbs that straddle Yonge Street north of Toronto, Richmond Hill is a largely suburban bedroom community.  Fueled by reasonable house prices, pretty big lots, and the GO Train, Richmond Hill was Canada’s fastest-growing community in the 1990s.  (They passed the crown to Barrie in the 2000s.)  Today, Richmond Hill is having to grow up a bit, figuratively and literally.

Figuratively, as Richmond Hill isn’t the brand-spankin’-new suburb that it used to be.  Nothing stays new forever.  Richmond Hill’s had to deal with the decline of some of its more urban areas in ways that other GTA towns haven’t.  For a while there the main drag started to get a little grotty, with Richmond Hill being the home to the first strips clubs on appearing on Yonge Street north of the famous ripper’s-strip in Toronto.  The presence of adult businesses on the main drag can really empty out an area, particularly when coupled with the rise of the suburban mall and later the suburban power centre.  One strip club burned down, and the other(s) eventually packed up and hid elsewhere.  Today, Richmond Hill is revitalizing the streetscape, including new residential development and a fancy arts and entertainment centre.

The Emerald Isle Motel puts the old in ‘old school’, harkenening back to the Yonge Street of auld. So much so that they’ve filmed movies here. (I got these photos from the internet.)

Richmond Hill has also had to grow up and deal with a decline in homogeneity.  Those affordable houses aren’t so affordable anymore.  A friend of ours bought a house in Richmond Hill in 2007 and we couldn’t believe how much she paid.  Now, we can’t believe how much she’d get if she sold it but even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to afford anything else in the area.  Though the average household income is 34 percent higher Richmond Hill versus the province at large, 15 percent of Richmond Hillers qualify as low income, more in-line with the provincial average than with communities to the north, where that rate is half.

And most notably, Richmond Hill is the most ethnically diverse community north of Toronto on Highway 11 / Yonge Street.  Whereas 85 percent of residents in Newmarket and Aurora are white, in Richmond Hill, one community to the south, this number is 53 percent.

And this means that, if you can get past the sprawl, Richmond Hill is kinda cool.  Twenty-five percent of residents are Asian.  More than fifteen percent are either Jewish or Muslim. Richmond Hill is still home to a smattering of Italians that left Toronto’s three Little Italies in the 1960s and 70s before all the Italians decided that Woodbridge was the place to be.  Ten percent of the population speaks Farsi.  Five percent speaks Russian.  Places like Richmond Hill can easily look homogenous to outsiders.  Considering the tendency of Toronto suburbs to take on a very ethnic-specific bent (I’m looking at you, Woodbridge and Brampton) there is a level of diversity here that’s not replicated in other Toronto sattelite towns.

There is normal Chinese food, there is Northern Ontario Chinese Food, and there is real Chinese food. Richmond Hill has some of the best real Chinese food in the country, with restaurants from all regions of China.

Richmond Hill is also having to grow up – literally, up – as the community approaches build-out.  Much like Willowdale and Thornhill before it, Richmond Hill is not immune to the pressure to find places for residents both fleeing Toronto house prices and coming from elsewhere.  Condos are being built on Yonge Street in Richmond Hill, and can be found dotting other areas of a community largely known for its plethora of single family houses.

Except Richmond Hill has it a bit different.  Willowdale is part of the City of Toronto and Thornhill is split in two between Markham and Vaughan.  Richmond Hill, on the other hand, is its own municipality.  This means that Richmond Hill has pretty unique opportunity to make some decisions as to how they’re going to handle the onslaught of hi-rise residential development that’s now jumping off the Toronto subway lines and into the first ring of outer suburbs.

If the Observatory becomes a condo they’ll have a bunch of out-of-this-world names to choose from.  Maybe they can ship it to Moonbeam or Nipigon?  (Photo taken from spacing.ca.)

Despite these developments, Richmond Hill is still very much dependent on Toronto for employment.  It was once known as a flower town like Brampton (the greenhouse industry left Richmond Hill in the 1970s and 80s for the Niagara region where land is cheaper and development pressures slightly more subdued) and later for the David Dunlap Observatory, at a time the largest telescope in the world, recently shuttered and sold by the University of Toronto.

These are a few of my favourite things

Today Richmond Hill is home to Apotex, one of Canada’s largest drug companies, and the head office of my favourite store in the world, The Bulk Barn.  If you’ve ever worked at the Bulk Barn, please accept my apologies.  I’m one of those customers that buys about twelve grams of sixteen different candies.  I really don’t mean to make life hard for the staff, but I just can’t help it.  I can’t make up my mind when presented with a selection like that.

Mayo?  This ain’t a sub.  All you need is ketchup, mustard, lettuce, onions, banana peppers and extra-extra pickles, plus a few more pickles on the side if they’re willing.

Richmond Hill is also home of the first ever Harvey’s restaurant.  If you have been navigating this site for a while, you’ll realize that I’m a fan of Harvey’s.  Well, of any fast-food, particularly the second- and third-tier restaurants that aren’t available in every mall or plaza.  Sadly, the first-ever Harvey’s no longer stands.  Like seemingly everything in Toronto, it’s been razed for a condo development.

I’ve never understood why chains don’t develop their “first stores” into tourist locations.  I’d been to the Tim Horton’s on the corner of Ottawa and King in Hamilton probably twenty times before I realized that this was the first-ever Tim Horton’s.  Why not make it a tourist trap?  Why not make it a restaurant-slash-museum?

Why not restore it to make it look like it did when it first opened in 1960-whatever?  It’s not like having one store deviate from the bland overarching brand design will get everyone all confused.  Who wouldn’t want to sip a coffee sitting at one of those super-low counters on a tangerine-cushioned stool from a Tim Horton’s circa 1983?  I mean, think back to those terrible photos of teens, awkwardly staged hanging out on the woods or a tire-swing that every Harvey’s used to have on the walls?

Now this is an old school Harvey’s. I can only imagine what they looked like when they were founded in 1959.

…oh, this may not go over too well.  Yes, despite having webpages for places that aren’t settlements (The Temiskaming Ottawa Highland Trail), or that no longer exist (Lowther), or that I thought no longer existed (Kitigan), I’m going to profile the communities of Newmarket and Aurora, total population around 130 000, all in one go.

I have nothing against either town.  One of my favourite coworkers lives in Newmarket.  Or is it Aurora?

But that’s just it.  It is not that towns like Newmarket and Aurora aren’t important.  Quite the opposite, Aurora is home to the head offices of State Farm Insurance and Frank Stronach’s autoparts giant Magna.  Newmarket seems to have produced so many pro athletes that it’s giving Thunder Bay aka The Staal Family a run for its money.  It’s not that the towns aren’t nice.  More people live in these two communities than live along the 700 kilometres of Highway 11 that arches through Ontario from Matheson to Nipigon.  They both seem like great places to live.  Newmarket was ranked the 10th best place to live in all of Canada in 2013.

But in the context of profiling the quirks of Yonge Street / Highway 11, it’s more difficult to uncover the unique and the memorable when you’re dealing with a place the size and type of Newmarket or Aurora.

To think that all regional highways used to be dotted with mom-and-pop motels like this one, found at the north end of Newmarket on Highway 11 / Yonge Street

I’ll come clean – though I’ve driven Yonge Street in both of these communities, I’ve never completed any drive of Yonge Street between Barrie and the Toronto city limits all in one go.  Each time that I give it a try I end up giving up and heading to one of the 400-series highways on either side of both towns.  It’s not their fault that these towns hug the northernmost edge of Toronto’s sprawl, however, suburb fatigue starts to hit once you’ve left Thornhill.

This part of Yonge Street is messy urban driving.  It’s chock-full of stoplights.  You get stuck behind every third car turning right into a plaza or power centre.  It’s hard to stop to take photos, or to know what to take photos of.  It’s impossible to make u-turns.  In sum, it’s not conducive to exploration and discovery.  Ok, that sounds cheesy, but I think you know what I mean.

Aurora’s Old train station is now a GO Transit station

Newmarket was first settled by Quakers from Vermont and Pennsylvania.  Surprisingly, the local community was a hotbed of political discontent, eventually serving as the starting point for the ill-fated 1837 Rebellion march down Yonge Street.  Aurora’s beginning was as Machell’s Corners, an intersection on the newly extended Yonge Street, that eventually grew into a small industrial town.  The railway brought prosperity to both rural towns, but even back then their focus was largely southward.  Both were served by the Toronto and York Radial Railway up to the 1930s, which provided service with something like a big slow streetcar.  In the 1950s highways and the 1970s GO Trains cemented their status as bedroom communities of Toronto.

Historic Hillary House in Aurora, home to the area’s first doctors (Credit: User Fralambert at Wiki Commons.)

Both are affluent, with household incomes approximately 20 percent higher than the provincial average.  Both have arts, culture, entertainment, and sports facilities and all the services you could need, including the Upper Canada Mall in Newmarket.  Both towns have kept some of the built heritage alive.  Newmarket’s can be found on Main Street South, while Aurora has the Northeast Old Aurora Heritage District and the historic Hillary House at 15372 Yonge Street.  Both have produced their fair share of Canadian hockey players and other celebrities.  Canadian soccer player Jim Brennan, Indycar driver Scott Goodyear, comedian John Candy and bands Glass Tiger and Tokyo Police Club are all from Newmarket.  In addition to the Stronachs, former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, Olympic skiier Brian Stemmle, the guy who oversaw the construction of the Empire State Building, and China’s most famous western television personality are all from Aurora.

I hope I haven’t done either community an injustice.  But with towns like these, anything you need is right at hand, anything you wanted to see you’ve probably already seen, and anything you wanted to know you could find easily online or in Wikipedia.  I’d be happy to live in either one of these communities – I grew up in one just like it – and I think that’s the best thing anyone can say about any place.

Historic Newmarket town hall (Credit: User P199 at Wiki Commons.)