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A Walk Around South Rosedale

L

LowPolygon

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Yesterday was a beautiful day to take in Toronto's most gorgeous residential neighbourhood: South Rosedale. Its amazing to me that this lush and elegant little burg is a two minute drive from Yonge and Bloor.

South Rosedale contains a staggering number of examples of beautifully maintained late 19th-early 20th century, and is well worth a walk--especially when the leaves are changing!

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Beautiful pictures! One gets a sense from some of the shots what Jarvis and Sherbourne must have been like in their heyday.
 
thecharioteer said:
Beautiful pictures! One gets a sense from some of the shots what Jarvis and Sherbourne must have been like in their heyday.
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thank you! thank god the city put a stop to the the construction of apartment buildings in the area when they did.

from the looks of it, the law must have been passed by around 1960, since the apartments all look to have been built in the mid to late 50's.
 
Wow. Thanks for these. I'm reminded that, for my money, Toronto's best detached residential architecture (Rosedale, Rathnelly/South Hill, parts of the Annex and Yorkville) stands up to anything on the planet--and would certainly hold its own rather easily in the North American champions' league with Georgetown and Beacon Hill.
 
Definitely Toronto's best neighbourhood. I wish I could live there. I always get lost in Rosedale's curvy maze of streets and don't mind it at all. Thanks for the photos.
 
South Rosedale-A nice Toronto neighborhood!

Deepend: Good pics from the South Rosedale area-classic brick and stone construction looks to be the rule here. A nice place to explore...LI MIKE
 
Cooool said:
What streets are the houses in the 1st and 4th picture on? Thanks, curious to know.
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ABOVE is 20 Elm Street, just west of Sherbourne.

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ABOVE is the H.H. Fudger house at 40 Maple St. Walk east along Maple from Sherbourne about 5 minutes, until you come to Powell Ave.

"Forty Maple Avenue, commonly referred to as the H. H. Fudger House, is a landmark in the historical neighbourhood of South Rosedale. Toronto City Council designated the house as historically significant in the 1970’s in great part because of its association with a prominent businessman and philanthropist of the late 18th century named Harris Henry Fudger. Mr. Fudger commissioned the mansion in 1895 and the mansion was completed in 1897.

Burke and Horwood, one of the most renowned Canadian architectural firms of the time designed the mansion. Forty Maple was created according to the Queen Anne Revival style that blends elements from both medieval and classical architecture. Rising two and a half stories above a red sandstone base, the building is constructed of red brick with red stone and brick detailing. The house displays a variety of flat-headed, oriel and segmental-arched window openings. Its intricate Flemish gables recall the "scrolled" silhouette of Richard Norman Shaw's Albert Hall Mansions of 1879 in London, England.

Mercedes Homes chose to undertake the task of conducting major renovations to the mansion following its purchase in 1999. The property had undergone several changes since its original construction, most notably when it was divided into twelve apartments following the Second World War. The changes of Mercedes Homes meant partitioning the 10,000 square feet mansion into four units with an average living space of 2,500 square feet. This redesign made the structure suitable for 21st century living while also succeeding in preserving the building for decades to come."
 
My favourite house in Rosedale is at the end of May Street. It looks like a castle, it's my fantasy house.

Also, I believe the Bronfman Mansion is in Rosedale somewhere and is huge.
 
Queen Anne ( a misnomer if ever there was one ), High Victorian, Mock Goth, Richarsonian Romanesque - dead-end styles created from bits of everything else that had gone before, the heavyset and sometimes bloated McMansions of their era.
 
Urban Shocker said:
Queen Anne ( a misnomer if ever there was one ), High Victorian, Mock Goth, Richarsonian Romanesque - dead-end styles created from bits of everything else that had gone before, the heavyset and sometimes bloated McMansions of their era.
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why the snobbish disdain for old beautiful things that are a hundred years old? let it go, man!

maybe in the UK these things are thick on the ground, and therefore worth dismissing, but in newer countries like ours, these kinds of homes are, i think, very valuable, mainly since we have so little grand architecture that predates the 20th century.

also, Mcdonalds didn't exist in the 1890's, so i don't really see how they can be called "Mcmansions".

"McMansion is a pejorative term used to describe a large house, particularly in the United States, that is rapidly constructed using modern labor-saving techniques in a manner reminiscent of food production at McDonald's fast food restaurants."

they may not meet your standards for architectural purity, but you'd be hard pressed to claim that they were shoddily constructed.
 
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Indeed not, they were of their time. And I'm not dismissing them, merely putting them in context as hefty homes expressing the values cherished by the new rich mercantile class who lived in them: status, solidity, respectability, immovability. I don't think the McMansion link is tenuous, because they're status buys too.

Downtown, starting in the late 1880s, Toronto saw the construction of a number of office buildings ( a new kind of structure made viable by technological changes including steel frame construction, and the invention of the telephone and telegraph which allowed office workers to earn their living in specialist structures located at some distance from the factories ) that parallelled similar values to these hefty homes: The Board of Trade building at Yonge and Front, for instance, and our first skyscraper the Temple / Foresters Building at Bay and Queen. Neither were particularly elegant either and, in the latter example, almost impossible to demolish because of the massive masonry and brick walls that so unnecessarily framed the steel frame construction that held it up. All heft, little elegance - as befitted the rapidly expanding, muscular, capitalist world of late 19th century North America.
 
Urban Shocker said:
Indeed not, they were of their time. And I'm not dismissing them, merely putting them in context as hefty homes expressing the values cherished by the new rich mercantile class who lived in them: status, solidity, respectability, immovability. I don't think the McMansion link is tenuous, because they're status buys too.

Downtown, starting in the late 1880s, Toronto saw the construction of a number of office buildings ( a new kind of structure made viable by technological changes including steel frame construction, and the invention of the telephone and telegraph which allowed office workers to earn their living in specialist structures located at some distance from the factories ) that parallelled similar values to these hefty homes: The Board of Trade building at Yonge and Front, for instance, and our first skyscraper the Temple / Foresters Building at Bay and Queen. Neither were particularly elegant either and, in the latter example, almost impossible to demolish because of the massive masonry and brick walls that so unnecessarily framed the steel frame construction that held it up. All heft, little elegance - as befitted the rapidly expanding, muscular, capitalist world of late 19th century North America.
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these are good points...i don't doubt that these homes were conservative in the context of their time--as was Toronto itself.

the only point i would make is that, unlike the shoddy and nonsensical design build EIFS garbage that surrounds us today, these homes are exceedingly well built; constructed of very expensive materials; finished and detailed to an exacting degree; and conceived by highly skilled professional architects, according to the conservative tastes of their clients.

in any case, there is indeed no evidence that the Protestant burghers of Victorian and Edwardian Toronto were even remotely aware of the avant-gardist architectural movements of their era. its clear the Viennese Secession was not shaking up the the Toronto of the 1890's, and Peter Behren’s name crossed no one’s lips…

(to be honest, i've always wondered why there is virtually no evidence of Arts and Crafts style and especially Art Nouveau in the city. its seeming TOTAL absence seems slightly strange to me.)

anyway, i like these house a great deal, in the same way and for some of the same reasons that i like other similarly devalued historicist forms, and other bête noires of the modernist era. But that’s just me: I basically reject the whole concept of 19th century kitsch as it is typically proferred.

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