Leaside. Jane Pitfield
original 1912 concept for the Town, called for a separation of the residential area from the zoned industrial section. This was Canada’s first planned industrial development park and the concept has become the model for most new communities.
The industrial area was defined by Laird Drive on the west, Wicksteed Avenue on the north and the Canadian Pacific mainline on the south and east. This zone represented about one quarter of the Towns acreage. The remaining land to the west and north was designated for residential use.
Aerial view of Leaside, 1929. This view shows the sprawling yards of the Canadian Northern5 Railway’s Leaside repair shops. The steam locomotive, its passenger coaches and freight cars required massive maintance and repair facilities. Can you pick out Laird Drive? the Durant Motors car factory? Beyond Laird Drive lies mainly open land. City of Toronto Archives.
The relatively large industrial area was established with the intent of using its property tax assessment to maintain low property taxes for the homeowners. The industrial zone became a highly utilized area almost immediately. This was some 30 years before the residential area began to take form. In 1912, Leaside had only 43 residents and many acres of open, undeveloped farm land for housing.
In 1913, the Canada Wire and Cable Company became the first industry to locate in Leaside, on a large tract of land running east from Laird Drive and south of Wicksteed Avenue. With the opening of World War I, the Leaside Munitions Company (a subsidiary of Canada Wire and Cable) built a large factory directly south of the Canada Wire site. In 1922, the Durant Motor Company purchased the Leaside Munitions factory which had closed at the end of the war.
In the pre-war period, the Canadian Northern Railway constructed its massive repair facilities and marshalling yards off what is now Esandar Drive. This was industry at its heaviest and smokiest.
In 1917, the need for an airfield to train pilots for the Royal Flying Corps caused Todd’s industrial area to be expanded well north of Wicksteed Avenue to accommodate the field. After the war, the airfield closed and Eglinton Avenue replaced Wicksteed as the northern boundary of the industrial area.
The Leaside industrial area, looking southeast. Dated circa 1930. The aerodrome is gone. Eglinton Avenue (which dead-ends at the edge of the West Don Valley) is now the northern border of the busy indeustrial area. The open land of the residential area still awaited development. Canada Wire and Cable Collection.
In the 1920s, a host of regional, national and international industries settled in this desirable part of Leaside, drawn by the cheap land, low taxes, access to the Toronto market and the excellent service of two railways. In 1931, Leaside’s industrial zone was home to 29 companies and, by 1939, this number had grown to 52. All of this simply to say, the industrial zone was a thriving area of employment and manufacturing activity long before the houses appeared in the residential area. However, in attracting labour to the town, this industrialization became the impetus for the urbanization process.
When residential development did begin in the late 1930s, Todd’s rationale of a large, industrial assessment used to subsidize residential property taxes did, in fact, take place. From the 1940s through to 1967, Leaside residents were envied for their modest property taxes—well below those of the surrounding municipalities. Leasiders were very happy with “the factories” as the area was called.
In 1967, with amalgamation with neighbouring East York, Leaside property taxes jumped abruptly over five years. Leaside residents had angrily opposed that amalgamation, citing increased taxes and loss of the Leaside identity as the inevitable outcomes.
Today, the so-called “factory area” has undergone significant change. Much of the heavy industry and manufacturing which had been its hallmark has gone, being replaced by light industrial and commercial businesses. Since the late 1990s there has been some re-zoning to introduce retail and residential use into the old industrial area. However, many successful enterprises do remain and the area has been re-named the Leaside Business Park, to reflect the new purposes for which the empty 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.