By Vicky Peters

South of Bloor, between Howard Street and the back entrance of the Sherbourne subway station, runs a tiny one-block stretch of Glen Road. There are a pair of low-rise heritage apartments here, an Eden Smith-designed heritage-designated home, and a row of semi-detached historical homes that are the last remaining glimpse of what St. James Town used to be. The historical houses on the west side of the street (numbers 6 to 16) are boarded up, neglected and empty, remaining unprotected by the city's new heritage laws. The house closest to Howard Street - 2 Glen Road - is the exception, and serves as a great example of what sort of exterior condition is possible for the rest of that side of the block.

The row of semi-detached houses were recognized as part of the City of Toronto's Inventory of Heritage Properties dating back to 1974, but it wasn't until the roof collapse and subsequent demolition of another nearby heritage property - under dubious conditions - in 2007, and the pressure of public outcry that followed, that City Council passed an intention to fully designate the houses at numbers 6-16 Glen Road.

http://app.toronto.ca/heritage/main.do

The street wasn't always a pit of despair. Before the Bloor extension was built and the apartments of St. James Town erected, Glen Road was just one of many middle-class streets of three-storey Victorian homes that carpeted the cityscape east of Jarvis. This particular block had been part of Edgar Jarvis' property, purchased by Reverend William Muir some time before 1883. Muir lived nearby at 471 Sherbourne Street and was the chief editor of the Canadian Baptist.

Reverend Muir divided the property into the currently recognized lots. He hired an established local contractor named Arthur Coleman to build houses for the lots - the three pairs of semi-detached Victorians that remain, plus additional homes that were razed when Bloor street was extended across the top of the ravine. Coleman had come to Canada from England as a boy in 1846, and at the time of the houses' construction employed a crew of eight to ten men. He is listed as a co-owner of numbers 6 and 8 in the original tax assessment rolls, but whether Coleman and Muir bought the property together or the co-ownership was part of a payment agreement is unknown.

The two men rented out the homes as single family dwellings for a period of about four years, at which point most of the long-standing residents are listed as the legal property owners. The stories of the houses' first residents offer a good portrait of late Victorian Toronto.

6 & 8 Glen Road - 1913 (City of Toronto Archives, Series 372, Subseries 10, Item 71)

The original tenant at 6 Glen Road was a pharmacist named Francis Despard. His family of six and their dog had come to Toronto from London, Ontario so that Despard, as announced in the 1884 Canadian Pharmaceutical Journal, could take a position as a new partner at Lowden and Company. The pharmaceutical importers had a warehouse at 55 Front Street East (the warehouse is no longer there), and specialized in glassware and dubious but popular pharmaceuticals of the time such as Dr. Austin's Phosphatine, Gray's Specific, and Dr. Van Buren's Kidney Cure. The company were also listed as wholesale agents of the popular "Coca Wine," made from coca leaves and "first class French wines," as advertised in the journal. The 1888 Canadian Pharmaceutical Journal mentions Despard's retirement a few years later.

The Despards lived at number 6 for a year, and were followed by Edward White and his family. Edward White and his brother co-owned a large lace manufacturing warehouse just east of Yonge on Front Street. A Toronto documentarian of the time, Charles Mulvany, must have been a fan of the company, as he dedicates several paragraphs to White, Joselyn & Co in his 1884 directory. He also makes reference within the company's description to both Dr. Johnson and to a crippled Richard III (whom Mulvany points to as a purveyor of bad taste).

6 & 8 Glen Road - present day (Photo by Vicky Peters)

Thomas Speight purchased 6 Glen Road in 1888. He and his family kept the house as a rental property at first, but are listed as the home's occupants in Toronto's 1911 census. Thomas Speight was a land surveyor with Speight and Van Nostrand, a company known today as Speight, van Nostrand & Gibson, Ltd and which is still active in the Toronto area.

Back of 6 & 8 Glen Road (Photo by Vicky Peters)

A young Walter Grand rented and eventually owned 8 Glen Road. At the time he moved in to the house in 1885, he had taken over his father's livery business which had been established in Toronto in 1855. The year prior to Grand's move to 8 Glen Road, Grand & Walsh had sold over four thousand horses at auction. The livery business location took up four lots (47-53) along the south side of Adelaide between Bay and Yonge. The company also ran 25 one-horse cabs in Toronto.

10 and 12 Glen Road - 1913 (City of Toronto Archives, Series 371, Subseries 10, Item 72)

Mr. William Parsons and his family of three, with their dog, rented the house at number 12. The twenty-five-year old Parsons was employed as a travelling merchant at Charles Parsons & Company, one of the largest wholesale leather warehouse and shoemakers' suppliers in the city at the time, located at 79 Front Street East. The building now houses the Lettieri café and the International News store. This is one of the only workplace buildings that remain of any of the first residents of this block on Glen Road.

79 Front Street East (Photo by Vicky Peters)

The Parsons family moved out when Frank Manchee, a bookkeeper at the Queen's Hotel (the Royal York's predecessor), bought the house from Reverend Muir in 1888, moving in with his family of four.

10 and 12 Glen Road - Present Day (Photo by Vicky Peters)

Reverend Muir rented number 14 to Jonathon Keer. Mr. Keer had been a Major-General in her majesty's service in Bengal, and had opened a tea shop at the base of Church Street (number 58, now a parking lot) in 1883. His tea shop imported high quality teas exclusively and directly from India. Keer had recently married his second wife, and his new baby daughter Honoria Somerville Keer would eventually receive the French Medal of honour during WWI as a British surgeon with the Scottish Women's Hospital Foreign Service. The family ballooned briefly in 1887 and acquired a second dog before they all moved out in 1888.

14 and 16 Glen Road - 1913 (City of Toronto Archives, Series 371, Subseries 10, Item 73)

The house was purchased by James Ramsay, who owned and ran a photo supply dealership J.G. Ramsay & Co on Bay Street at King.

The property at 16 Glen Road is listed as "vacant" in the tax assessment rolls of both 1884 and 1885, but there are residents listed in the Toronto directory both years. In 1884, one of Reverend Muir's co-editors at the Canadian Baptist, Reverend Ebenezer Dadson, lives at the house. His name is scrawled above the vacant listing in the tax rolls as an addition to the 1884 assessment, where he is mentioned as a "servant." The following year, the Toronto directory lists Martha Bridgland, widow of James W. Bridgland, as a resident. James Bridgland had been, up until his death in 1881, a crown land and road surveyor, and the main supervisor of road construction in Ontario following David Gibson's death in 1861. When Martha Bridgland moved into the house at 16 Glen Road, she was the widowed mother of four girls, all under the age of twenty-one.

14 and 16 Glen Road - Present Day (Photo by Vicky Peters)

Rupert Simpson, manager of the Toronto Knitting Factory, purchased number 16 in 1888, and moved in with his family. The Toronto Knitting Factory made woollen underwear, and was the largest company of its kind in all of Canada. The factory on Berkeley is now partly known as the Berkeley Castle, next to what is now the Canadian Stage Company's Berkeley Street Theatre. The original Knitting Factory building is described in 1885 by Charles Mulvany as a three storey brick building which houses the entire woollen manufacturing process from raw wool stock through to finished garments. The factory consumed up to twelve hundred pounds of wool and cotton a day.

These first residents were all industrious Victorian merchants, mostly first and second generation Canadians who were continuing on with the family business their immigrant parents had begun, and starting families of their own.

One hundred years later, most of the houses in the neighbourhood had been bought by high-rise developers, purposely devalued to cheapen the area's real estate, and demolished to make way for even cheaper high-density dwellings. These houses on the first block of Glen Road became victims of the popular block-busting practice, run by property management services as low-cost rental units before eventually being boarded up and left to rot. My grandmother (who lived across the street at number 9 for over 40 years) held out until the bitter end, as did her bridge partner Mrs. Morris, living on the even-numbered side of the street.

The area had already deteriorated quite badly by the 1980s. There were rumours of muggings occurring in the tunnel near the subway exit. In 2001, teenage basketball star Justin Sheppard (half-brother of pro player Jamaal Magloire) was shot and left for dead on the Glen Road footbridge that crosses the ravine at the opposite end of the tunnel. According to a Globe and Mail article about the area published in late 2006 following the suspicious roof collapse of a nearby heritage listed property, the street continues to be plagued by prostitution and drug-dealing. The article points to the horrific state of the houses as a contributing cause for bad street crime in the immediate area. If New York's "broken windows" theory proves to be correct, pressure from city and provincial bodies to respect the buildings and their surroundings would make a world of difference.

The city has tried to step up by passing the by-law put forth by Councillor Kyle Rae which requires owners of designated heritage properties to maintain the buildings in good condition. If owners fail to do so, the city can step in and do it for them, and can slap the owners with a big fine.

The problem for the houses at 6-16 Glen Road at this point is that they remain frozen in the designation process. The city council passed a motion stating the intent to designate the houses as heritage properties back in November 2007, thanks in part, no doubt, to public pressure. By law, the intent automatically passes to full designation after thirty days if there are no objections filed. The houses on Glen Road were not so lucky, and objections to the heritage designation were filed for all six of them. The Ontario Heritage Act states that the disputed designation passes to the Conservation Review Board.

Conservation Review Board hearings are publicly announced and open to anyone who wants to attend. City Council votes on the review board's recommendation and makes the final decision to designate or not to designate the properties with full and protected heritage status. Neither of these steps to full designation has occurred.

The fate of the Glen Road houses would have passed to the Conservation Review Board in December 2007. Since then no hearing has been set. According to Kathryn Anderson at the City of Toronto Heritage Preservation Services, an agreement was made between the city, the Conservation Review Board, and the property owners to allow the owners time to present their preservation plans to the city. The owners agreed in the meantime to protect the houses from further damage. Two years later they have yet to present any plans to the city, and a review hearing remains unscheduled.

(Photo by Vicky Peters)

Links:

http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/bylaws/2007/law1027.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_and_Gable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honoria_Somerville_Keer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows

References:

City of Toronto Staff Report, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 and 16 Glen Road - Intention to Designate, Part IV, Ontario Heritage Act, Barbara Leonhardt, Director, Policy and Research, City Planning Division, July 30, 2007

City of Toronto, Reasons for Designation: 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 and 16 Glen Road, Attachment #3,

"History of Toronto and county of York, Ontario: containing an outline of the history of the Dominion of Canada; a history of the city of Toronto and the county of York, with the townships, towns, general and local statistics; biographical sketches" By Charles Pelham Mulvany, Graeme Mercer Adam, 1885

The Methodist churches of Toronto: a history of the Methodist denomination and its churches in York and Toronto: with biographical sketches of many of the clergy and laity (1899), by Champion, Thomas Edward, 1843?-1910

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography On-line, Volume X, 1871-1880, copyright University of Toronto/Universite Laval.

Toronto: past and present: A handbook of the city
By Charles Pelham Mulvany (1884)

"Safe as Houses? Maybe Next Year" by Alex Bozikovic, The Globe and Mail, Saturday October 7, 2006, page M3.