land will be used.
Looking back, Frederick Todd’s industrial urban plan for Leaside functioned well for about 80 years. That’s not bad in a century which has witnessed tumultuous change in the industrial and transportation sectors.
THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES—THE COMING OF TRAFFIC
When Frederick Todd laid out Leaside’s town plan in 1912, both the adjacent townships of Scarborough and North York were sparsely populated open and productive farmland. Cut off by the Don Valley and distant from downtown, the Leaside lands were truly isolated. The train provided the only easy access from North Toronto.
Leaside’s location and the nature of the plan for the town combined to cause Leaside to function as a giant urban cul de sac. Well into the 1950s, Eglinton Avenue stopped at the western brink of the Don Valley and became a dirt path leading down to the west branch of the Don. Bayview Avenue was unpaved at Moore Avenue and still a dirt country road beyond Eglinton into the 1940s. McRae Drive led into the industrial area and stopped there. Millwood Road dead-ended at the north side of the CPR tracks until 1927.
With the automobile and the bus in their infancy, the railway and street railway were the only means of transportation. Mackenzie and Mann had planned to run a streetcar line into the Leaside area. It never happened. If a person entered the Leaside lands from the west, there was no easy and direct way out to the north, to the east or to the south and, added to that, there was no particular destination to go to in any of those directions.
Innovative for its time, the Leaside town plan contained many of the elements of present day subdivisions – curving streets, crescents, cul de sacs, no through roads, zoned commercial/retail areas and industry separated from the residential area.
Leaside Transportation Company, 1925. From the Archives at Todmorden Mills Museum.
Photograph of early bus is entitled “Smashed up 1925. Burnt up 6 months later.” The man shown is idenified as Albert Pilcher. From the Archives as Todmorden Mills Museum.
The newly-opened Leaside Viaduct. Date: April 1928. Looking south from the undeveloped Leaside lands, across the viaduct towards the Township of East York. By 1928, Leaside had many factories, but the homes were yet to come. The bridge was widened to six lanes in the 1960s. City of Toronto Archives.
In 1912, Todd could have no inkling of what impact the automobile would have on North America generally, or on Leaside specifically. Rather, Leaside’s early problem was a total lack of traffic. People could not get there and, as a result, the residential lots lay empty throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.
The first attempt to create traffic into Leaside came in 1927 with the construction of the Leaside Viaduct6 across the Don Valley and the opening of the Millwood underpass which carried the road under the CPR mainline and south to the new viaduct.
There was now a road from Leaside that led somewhere—to east end Toronto. There was now a road through Leaside, from Moore Avenue to Southvale Drive to Millwood Road.
The two aspects of the automobile which Frederick Todd could not have imagined were its numbers and the mobility which it created. The automobile resulted in the massive development of distant dormitory suburbs from which thousands of residents each day made the double trip by car from their homes to their place of work downtown. In travelling from home to work (and back again), the commuters had to go around or get through the ring of old inner suburbs of Leaside, North Toronto, Weston, Swansea and Mimico.
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
