THE DANFORTH (to whose inhabitants the definite article is as essential a badge of class as the “the” in The Mall or the “el” in El Prado) is an avenue about four miles long running through the east end of Toronto. To the startled visitor its glittering lights, waving banners and brightly colored pillars and pylons give it the appearance of a midway or headquarters for an old-home week. But the Danforth’s gunk and glitter pay honor to something more prosaic—the second-, thirdor even fourth-hand automobile.
The Danforth is Canada’s largest and brightest used-car market. Its acres of vacant space are covered with brightly polished cars on sixty different. lots ranging from two-hundred-foot expanses to corner strips of only a few feet of frontage. More than four thousand cars worth nearly five million
dollars are on sale there at any given time. All of them stand in ordered ranks from the sidewalk edge to the rear of the lots, seventy-five to a hundred feet back. Moving slowly through the rows of cars are hordes of buyers, slamming doors, kicking tires, peering at speedometer readings with unconcealed and well-justified scepticism and gazing under hoods at motors which could probably tell much but are exasperatingly dumb. And the buyers buy. More than forty thousand cars a year are sold on the Danforth for a total turnover of about forty-five million dollars. From under the glow of the Danforth’s multi-colored wattage a buyer drives away every five minutes of a twelve-hour day, every day m the week. Between two and five o’clock on some Saturday afternoons, the peak buying hours of the week, an estimated twelve hundred cars are sold.
The Danforth’s pre-eminence is not difficult to explain. As the centre of a huge consumer market which is also close to the source of supply, Toronto offers the lowest used-car prices in Canada. Although dealers elsewhere in the city dispute it, Danforth dealers claim their heavy turnovers enable them to undersell dealers elsewhere in Toronto. In prewar days there were fewer than twenty dealers on the street. Then its potentialities seemed to be recognized all at once by a lot of people. The two acres on which two of the street’s larger dealers, Stoney’s Car Market Ltd. and Ted Davy Ltd., are doing business side by side were priced at twenty thousand dollars in 1940. Two years ago Davy refused six hundred thousand for his lot alone. The average lot east of Pape Avenue, which intersects the Danforth at its first mile, was priced at fifty dollars a foot in the early Forties. Now you’d have to go at least three miles beyond that point to get land for fifteen hundred dollars a foot. Early this year Pat McSweeny sold a hundred and fifty-six feet of street frontage to Jack Leonard for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. For more than ten years vacant land has been worth more on the Danforth than land occupied by buildings. In that time a dairy, an animal hospital, a dry-cleaning plant, two apartment buildings and two houses have been bought up and demolished to make way for used-car lots.
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