Side view of the Leaside Viaduct. Date: November 1928. Looking east along the Don Valley from the North Toronto Sewage Treatment Plant (under construction). City of Toronto Archives.
In 1956, the most dramatic change came for Leaside and the growth of traffic. Eglinton Avenue was extended eastward across the west branch of the Don River and out to the growing suburbs of Don Mills and Scarborough. Eglinton Avenue, a residential street, instantly became a high volume, high speed arterial road running through the heart of Leaside.
Laird Drive which had served only to give access to the factories, now connected into arterial Eglinton. South vale and Moore would never be the same again. McRae Drive, once dead-ending in the factories, now gave a direct connection to busy Eglinton. McRae, too, would never be the same.
Paving Bayview Avenue north of Eglinton in the 1940s converted a neighbourhood shopping street into a busy arterial road which led to the expanding suburbs of North York. Bayview’s extension south in the late 1950s made it possible for commuters to get downtown directly. However, it simply added more traffic to a stop-and-go Bayview.
When busy arterial roads get clogged, commuters flow into the adjacent residential streets looking for a way around the tie-up. The first attempt in Leaside to control such infiltration was the use of the ubiquitous stop signs. Leaside became famous for its stop signs! These stop signs were soon followed by the many no-turns-during-rush hour signs.
In the bigger picture, Eglinton Avenue is the source of the traffic problem. Costly plans have been proposed which are designed to draw commuter traffic away from Eglinton and divert it around Leaside, plans such as the Leslie Street Extension and the Redway Road Extension, plans which to date have not materialized.
One wonders how Frederick Todd might have responded to Leaside’s traffic issues today.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEASIDE’S RESIDENTIAL AREA
Toronto’s growth in the early 1900s was north along the Yonge Street corridor. By 1912, this made the Leaside location potentially one of the most attractive areas in the city for residential development. Todd’s town plan for Leaside was made public in 1913. A glance at the original 1913 plan reveals some salient features.
Outside of the large industrial area, the town plan was an absolute myriad of thousands of housing lots. The farmland gathered by the York Land Company represented an investment of over $2,000,000.
Each open acre of land by the design standards of the day, could be subdivided into four residential lots. In Todd’s plan, however, probably more than four lots were created on average for each acre. Mackenzie and Mann, always operating at the financial edge, needed to re-coup huge profits from the Leaside project to fund the major capital improvements being made to their Canadian Northern Railway. The imperative was clear for Frederick Todd – load as many residential lots into the plan as possible.
Today when visitors from the suburbs see Leaside, they are struck by how close the houses are. The use of many attached houses and smaller bungalows also enabled smaller lots to be used. In general, land use was quite different from nearby Rosedale to which Leaside had compared itself in the early marketing campaigns.
In the 1913 plan, there were no areas designated for schools, parks, stores, library, fire hall, churches or some form of municipal town centre. If the town council, which would eventually govern Leaside, wanted those amenities, the council would have to buy the property from the York Land Company (The Canadian Northern Railway). Mackenzie, Mann and colleagues knew how to make a dollar!
Even before the formal plan was made public, the York Land Company began selling land to developers and industries. In May 1912, Winnipeg real estate investor, J. F. Hansen, purchased 1.5 million dollars worth of the planned Leaside lots. Later that year, in December, the CNoR announced that more than two acres of land secured by a Montreal firm would be for the construction of a brass foundry. It was to employ 3,000 to 4,000 men.
In February 1913, the Bayview Land Company purchased $340,000 worth of land (300 odd lots) in the residential and business sections. Finally, in March of that year, Neelys Limited purchased land for a cost totalling one million dollars. They formed a syndicate to build 125 homes on their lots in the spring of 1913.
In summary, by March 1913, the York Land Company had sold over three million dollars worth of land to developers and industries (about half the land available in the new suburbs).7
By March 1914, with the spring construction around the corner, Leaside was soon to become a physical reality.
“What an orgy of construction, what a hammering of nails and tearing of saws there will be when Leaside wakes up for the season and the will of the giants is fulfilled… A few years from now the ‘Tally-ho’ man will be bawling thru his megaphone as he shows visitors to Toronto the prosperous homes at Leaside.”8
The CNoR had felt Leaside should be annexed to an existing municipality to add prestige and to provide costly streets, sewers, water and public transportation. Consequently, in June 1912, they had approached the Town of North Toronto only to be refused. The following month, North Toronto became annexed to the City of Toronto.9
As another option, the York Land Company, under the direction of Colonel Davidson and Randolph McRae, initiated, in March 1913, the procedure whereby Leaside would be incorporated into a municipality by an act of the Provincial Legislature. At the same time, the York Land Company approached the City of Toronto to request annexation of Leaside. The City of Toronto also rejected this request and, on April 23, 1913, Bill No. 55 of the Provincial Legislature incorporated the CNoR property into the Town of Leaside. Leaside was “on its own.”
When incorporated, Leaside had a population of 43 and an area encompassing 1,025 acres of surveyed land. On May 8, 1913, Leaside’s voting citizens met to nominate a Town Council. Five CNoR employees were acclaimed. To provide a certain degree of stability, the Mayor, Randolph McRae, and the four Councillors, Harvey Fitzsimmons, Laurence Boulton, George Saunders, and Archibald McRae, were to serve a term of two and a half years. Thereafter, elections would be held each year.
Leaside had no money in the bank, and no source of revenue for 1913. Any money would have to be raised by municipal debentures. By April 1914, the town had acquired over $150,000.00 in debentures to be spent on the supply of services. Throughout the war years, Leaside would experience financial problems.
South Leaside, looking north. Date: circa 1948. South Leaside’a curving streets show well, with Hanna Road winding graciously through the centre of the photo. Only a magnifying glass reveals it, but all of South Leaside has its new trees. For some reason, homes on Leacrest Avenue have yet to get theirs. City of Toronto Archives.
By the end of 1917, Leaside’s financial situation had reached catastrophic proportions. The York Land Company was the major culprit, having accumulated a string of unpaid taxes. However, they still owned half of Leaside. By the end of 1919, the Council threatened to sell off the York Land holdings.
Although the first sale of home sites was advertised in The Toronto World on June 12, 1913, construction, however, had ceased with the outbreak of the war. Few of these houses were ever built.10
Under the auspices of the 1919 Ontario Housing Act, the newly formed Leaside Housing Company received a provincial loan of $100,000.00 to build working-class houses.
North Leaside was developed without having a park area designated. The schoolyard of Northlea School has served as the community park. Early in Leaside’s growth, the town fathers saw the need for parkland and ensured that each Leaside school (Bessborough and St. Anselm’s excepted) had a large park-like schoolyard.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Todd’s plan, as with Mount Royal, was the curving street plan, most prominent in South Leaside; striking because town planning of the day relied mainly on a grid pattern. Adjacent Toronto reflected that grid pattern. This imposed some restrictions on Todd,