544-550 Dundas Street East November 10, 1947.City of Toronto Archives
Living in Scarborough as I do, I encounter most housing types. There are the single-family, mid-century-modern homes of my particular enclave, a smattering of semis, walk-up rental apartments lining the thoroughfares, mid-rises and, of course, the towering high-rises that ring Scarborough Town Centre.
My working-day mid-town Toronto neighbourhood of Yonge and St. Clair provides an opportunity to enjoy the luxury apartments along Avenue Road, from the heavy, handsome Balmoral to Peter Dickinson's light and airy compositions.
So, while I may not need a reminder from the Toronto Archives that this "city of homes" must also be seen as a "city of renters," I may want to check my numbers, as archivist Sarah Carson suggests: "I'd read a stat that was put out by the city's planning department that for nearly the last 40 years, the proportion of renters to homeowners has been about fifty-fifty," she says. "So if you're talking 2.5 million people, that's an enormous proportion of the population."
I'll say. And while her magnificent exhibit, A New Lease on Life: Rental Housing in 20th-Century Toronto, does gently remind us that a shingled gable isn't the only way to provide shelter from the rain, it also addresses the lingering belief that renters are somehow lower in society's pecking order: "It's something today that still persists, that somehow there's more value being a homeowner and paying property taxes, and that's really where the exhibit started from."
After reading the opening panel (under which are vintage suitcases, a nice touch), gallery goers journey back a century to uncover the roots of this prejudice in a 1911 report penned by then medical officer of health Dr. Charles Hastings. A catalogue of "overcrowded tenement houses" that constituted "an offence against public decency," it was just the sort of document practically every large city commissioned in the first few decades of the 20th century. While doing wonders for Bauhaus graduates in justifying the dream of razing ramshackle inner cities to build a new vertical world, such reports did little to encourage the upper classes to abandon their backyards.
Even handsome public-housing projects, such as Cabbagetown's Spruce Court apartments (Eden Smith, 1913) did little to sway public opinion. While altruistic in its motive to provide "decent, affordable housing for the working class," it would take until the Roaring Twenties and glam Avenue Road projects such as Charles Dolphin's Clarendon (1927) and its neighbour, Baldwin & Greene's 1928 Claridge (both still rental buildings today), to make an impact. "These are fantastic examples of a more cosmopolitan approach to city living," explains Ms. Carson. "What it offered people was some of the amenities that they were seeing in places like New York, Chicago and even Montreal, where they had a more advanced apartment culture than we do here." The Clarendon, for instance, offered a restaurant, billiard room and a gym, while the Claridge sported a lobby decorated by the Group of Seven's J.E.H. MacDonald.
Moving to the postwar period, Canada's first slum-clearance mega-project, Regent Park, is given ample coverage, including a wonderful section on the Bluett family, the first to move into the complex in March, 1949.
Toronto's first modernist apartment complex, Peter Caspari's 1955 City Park Apartments is featured. (Peter Dickinson's Benvenuto Place, also completed in 1955, is widely considered to be Toronto's first stand-alone modernist apartment.) Touted to be "as modern as tomorrow" in advertising copy, these three 14-storey buildings at Wood and Church streets stress similarities to home ownership and the spaciousness of apartment living even four decades after the Hastings report. "You're not living like sardines, you're not stacked on top of each other - don't worry, this isn't a tenement, you have plentiful personal space," says Ms. Carson, laughing, as she reads between the lines.
Before the political winds of change seeded the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood (1977-1982), the exhibit treats us to a 1967 photograph of the last gasp of slum clearance, St. James Town, and a billboard portraying a swinging couple who would soon be laying down shag carpets and beanbag chairs in this "all-electric city within a city." Comparing these two projects is instructive: "It doesn't jump out at you like an aerial photograph of St. James Town," says Ms. Carson of the low-rise, red-brick St. Lawrence project.
Not to be missed are the exhibit tables: In one featuring trailer camps (declared an official "dwelling" in 1941), there is an angry 1946 letter to Mayor Robert Saunders from a camp resident defending his choice over a "cold, drab room"; in another, Toronto's first and second purpose-built apartment buildings are identified.
The exhibit is rich, well researched and worth a trip to the archives. While it serves to remind us that a lack of larger rental units for families has been a problem since councillor Adam Vaughan was in short pants, it also ignites nostalgia for those who remember carefree years as a renter.
"Today, even if you own a house, it's very likely you have rented at some point in your life," says Ms. Carson. "Rental housing is not synonymous with public housing, there are different kinds. Some people, maybe they're choosing rental housing because that's what they're able to afford, but sometimes it's a lifestyle decision."
Admission to A New Lease on Life: Rental Housing in 20th-Century Toronto is free. The City of Toronto Archives at 225 Spadina Rd. is closed Good Friday through Easter Monday, reopening April 6 at 9 a.m. (www.toronto.ca/archives).