Riverdale: East of the Don

Map of Riverdale showing the present Playter Estates area, although originally the Playter land extended further north and east.

Map courtesy of Toronto City Planning Department.

We carry in our very bones the mind and marrow of our forebears. No, a nation cannot separate itself from its past any more than a river can separate itself from its source, or sap from the soil whence it arises. No generation is self-sufficient. It can and does happen that a generation forgets its history, or turns its back upon it; such an act is a betrayal of History.

— Canon Lionel Groulx, Quebec City, June 29, 1937.

For Madailein, Nolan, and Ian, who are growing up in Riverdale.

Contents

Foreward

Preface

One: Where is Riverdale?

Two: A Garden of Eden

Three: Early Settlers In the Valley

Four: Crossing the Don

Five: Leslieville: From Land-Based Activity to Toxic Manufacturing

Six: Despoiling the Valley

Seven: Places of Worship

Eight: Remembering Childhood

Nine: Women in Riverdale

Ten: The Sun Sets on the Empire: Ethnic Diversity

Eleven: Revitalization: Power to the People

Twelve: Streets, Other People and Places

Thirteen: Riverdale Today: Will We Come Full Circle?

Acknowledgements

Appendix — Genealogical Charts

Notes

For Further Reading

Bibliography

Foreword

by Elizabeth Abbott

Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods and the east-end community of Riverdale is one of its most fascinating. But how to tell Riverdale’s story? Elizabeth Muir’s riveting narrative centres on vignettes of its residents that bring the colony to life. Elizabeth Simcoe, the wife of John Graves Simcoe, Upper Canada’s first lieutenant governor, plunged enthusiastically into the backwoods of the Don Valley with its gentle, meandering Don River, and described life there as paradisiacal, with berries and fruit, and an abundance of fish and game. But she and other notable expatriates — Henry Scadding, Thomas Talbot, Anna Jameson — also warned against plagues of mosquitoes and a deadly miasma from the low marsh at the mouth of the Don that sickened the inhabitants.

Though the real culprit responsible for the high incidence of illness was malaria, spread by those mosquitoes that bred so prolifically in the marsh, the reality of enervating bouts of illness stalled settlement east of the Don in favour of the healthier, high and dry north and west.

Riverdale’s most fascinating chapters are told from this environmental perspective. The twenty-two mills — mainly grist and saw — built along the then fast-flowing and powerful Don linked prominent and well-connected settlers. Their generous land grants along its shores reflect Simcoe’s desire to protect the valley land from predatory hands and instead, through the agency of trusted landowners, to keep the Don River free for anyone wishing to use it.

George Henry Playter, a Simcoe relative and a Quaker Loyalist whose valuable American properties were confiscated as punishment for his zealous intelligence work for the British during the Revolutionary War, fled north, and, by 1796, he and his sons had been granted two thousand acres of land, which Playter added to by purchasing other choice spots.

The men of the Playter family were also appointed to public offices and Muir’s descriptions of their duties provide fascinating insights into Riverdale history. As overseer of highways, son James Playter was charged with forcing property owners to keep the usually muddy and impassible road in front of their property clear and stump-free, and convicted drunks were required to pull stumps on public roads. Another son, appointed to the position of fence viewer, had to ensure that all fences were a specified height.

Accounts of the domestic and social lives of these privileged Playter men also shine a light into the historical realities of Riverdale. Their clothes mattered and they dressed fashionably, attended church, partied, and sometimes drank too much, and worked hard on their own farms, growing a multitude of crops, selling timber, hay and potash, bee-keeping, chopping firewood and maintaining and improving their residences. They worked at various other businesses, and were also generous community supporters.

The chapter Crossing the Don River, the story of bridge building, widens the scope of the narrative to include politics, corruption, and the Rebellion of 1837–38, when the rebels torched a bridge, but a quick-thinking female tavern keeper managed to quench the flames. In 1878 a great flood destroyed all but one of the Don bridges. Then came the inauguration of a trans-Don streetcar service linking west and east Toronto, and Riverdale’s population soared as working families with jobs elsewhere in Toronto took up residence there.

Industries also opened up in South Riverdale and Leslieville: Dunlop Tire, Canadian Tire and W. Harris Abattoir among the biggest; paint, glue and oil factories; metal and food processing plants; dairies, brickyards, and tanneries with by-product waste so deadly that had tannery workers lit cigarettes, they would have gone up in flames. Workers’ compact houses lined the streets, sometimes opposite their bosses’ grander ones, despite the air and soil pollution that was contaminating the area. By 1973, Riverdale had more industries than any same-sized area in Toronto, and was so poor that only 12 percent of its residents finished high school.

Social inequality was also rife, with squatters, criminals, and Depression-era unemployed camping on the eastern side of the Don, and other city dwellers using it as a dump. Riverdale was also notorious for The Riverdale Plume of poisonous air. By the 1950s, the Don River had a slimy soup-like consistency and flowed a yellowish green colour from toxic waste of gasworks, petrochemical and other heavy industry.

The chapter Despoiling the Valley details how in February 1931, thanks to the flammable substances polluting it, the river itself self-immolated and destroyed a bridge. In 1943 another serious fire broke out. In 1954 Hurricane Hazel’s devastation triggered an overhaul of the city’s inadequate sewage system. But the stench of the Don was still nauseating and so contaminated with fecal coliform bacteria that in 1983, beaches were shut down. Two decades later, a concerted effort began to reclaim, restore, and revitalize the effectively dead Don.

The chapter Revitalization: Power to the People traces the plight of Riverdale’s inglorious pollution to its happier state, as concerted community action forced the authorities and the polluters to confront and take responsibility for lead levels that sickened children and adults alike, and made the soil so poisonous that the Ministry of the Environment were forced to remove it. Even today, residents keen on vegetable gardens have their soil tested first or opt for the safety of planters filled with pristine soil.

Riverdale’s chapter on churches casts light on the residents’ personal lives. Church-goers in the main, they contributed to and attended dozens of churches. Like the rest of Toronto, Riverdale was subjected to Sunday Laws that prohibited most work and most play and, a British visitor declared, made Sundays in Toronto as melancholy and suicidal a sort of day as Puritan principals can make it.

Except for Sundays, when things were pretty dull and even children were forbidden to run and play, childhood was not melancholy at all, and the chapter Remembering Childhood casts a cheery look back at childhood pleasures: skating, tobogganing, swinging, tennis, basketball, and cheap movie-going. In summer, when children rode free on streetcars, joyous visits to distant beaches were often carried out. When the Broadview YMCA opened with the motto of Building Better Boyhood, boys had access to a gym, swimming pool, billiard room, and bowling alley. On Saturday nights, girls also attended the $0.25 dances.

Riverdale devotes a chapter to the area’s women and describes both their home lives, with details of housekeeping, and their outside work: by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, nearly one-third were employed. Their jobs varied but were seldom well remunerated, and they earned much less than male colleagues. Many were self-employed in their own businesses, and taking in paid lodgers was widespread.

By the twentieth century, Riverdale attracted substantial numbers of immigrants, leading to Greek Town, Chinatown, pockets of Italians and other Europeans, and African Canadians, most famously Willliam Peyton Hubbard, whom George Brown mentored and encouraged to go into municipal politics where Hubbard fought tirelessly for social justice and included for Jews and Chinese in his mandate as well as blacks.

The last two decades have seen gentrification cleanse, polish, and change Riverdale. House prices have soared and new businesses — high end restaurants, bars, and art galleries — predominate where discount stores, fish and chips, and repair and pawn shops once flourished. Heritage in many forms — preserving the facades of favourite buildings, local historical research, restoration projects — has become part of Riverdale culture, and Liz Muir’s Riverdale is a welcome introduction to this bustling, densely populated, activist, and energetic neighbourhood.

Elizabeth Abbott, Riverdale, 2014

Elizabeth Abbott, PhD, is an historian and author whose books include Sugar: A Bittersweet History, A History of Celibacy, A History of Mistresses, and A History of Marriage. Abbott is a senior research associate at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and co-founder of the Riverdale Historical Society, where for ten years she served as vice-president.

Preface

I first saw Riverdale in the summer of 1985, with its wonderfully treed streets — the Norway maples arching over to form a green canopy as if they were plane trees — and the great swatches of green in the Don Valley. I shall never forget that first autumn driving north on Broadview Avenue overawed by the fall colours in the spectacular broad view.

For a time, I lived on De Grassi Street in a charming Edwardian red-brick house; later I moved further north, into a yellow-brick and Credit Valley stone house that was built just after the turn of the century and still had its original woodwork and stained glass windows.

But there were questions in my mind as I strolled the streets of Riverdale. Why was the Don River so small? What was a clock doing in the middle of the Queen Street Bridge? What was it like in the forbidding-looking Don Jail? Why were there battlements on some of the older churches? Who had lived in the magnificent houses on Broadview Avenue?

Discovering the history of one’s neighborhood is like opening a treasure chest — there are surprises and fascinating stories. It becomes even more interesting when some of the facts contradict each other. Whether because of the inattention of clerks; the difficulty in deciphering handwriting; faulty memory or lost documents; the spelling of names, and dates of births and deaths, even rules and regulations are sometimes contradictory. But trying to establish what really happened is part of the challenge.

There are so many stories in Riverdale — from its beginning with the first Don Valley squatters in the late 1700s, through the late 1800s when the area became an official part of the City of Toronto. How do you choose what to include in a history such as this? There are only so many pages and not every historical event can be included. There’s basic information, of course, such as when Riverdale was annexed to Toronto. Then there are the fun stories, the unexpected, and the amazing details.

There are a number of photographs that provide a visual record of the area’s history; perhaps you, the reader, will be inspired to search out other stories.

I hope you will enjoy this journey with me as we travel backward in time, exploring the area of Toronto today known as Riverdale.

One

Where is Riverdale?

The simple answer is just east of the lower Don River. But we need to be more specific than that, for the eastern part of Toronto is a large area.

Toronto was incorporated in 1834, a city of only 9,254 men and women. By its fiftieth anniversary, its population had swollen to almost 100,000 — partly because of immigration, but also because of the city’s insatiable appetite for surrounding lands and communities.

One of these areas was land annexed on March 25, 1884, on the eastern side of the Don Valley, situated between:

the south limit of the Kingston Road — now Queen Street

the easterly side of the River Don

the easterly limits of road between lots nine and ten or Greenwood’s side line — now Greenwood Avenue

and the Don and Danforth Road — now referred to simply as The Danforth[1]

These boundaries made up an area of 1,318 acres; about twenty-three city blocks of varying size from east to west and approximately eighteen city blocks from south to north. The area had grown haphazardly around houses, market gardens, farms, industries, brickyards, and the odd hotel. A lot of blank space was still left on city maps in the 1880s, space that would quickly develop into urban streetscapes.

That annexation created a new administrative and electoral district: St. Matthew’s Ward, later Ward 1. Replacing the undefined suburban areas of Don Mount, Riverside, Doncaster, and Leslieville in the township of York, it formed the new community of Riverdale.[2] City services (sewers, better roads, and public transportation) became accessible for eastern residents; however, more unwelcome City ordinances (formal building codes and higher taxes) were also part of amalgamation. More than 700 residents, ratepayers, and property owners had asked for this annexation, but some large land owners remained opposed.[3]

Two years later, the City added a small strip of land to the existing St. Lawrence Ward, east of the Don River and south of Queen. This strip would also form part of Ward 1.

While St. Matthew’s Ward lay east of the Don River, the new Ward 1 expanded its territory. On S.R.G. Perison’s 1891 city map "Shewing [sic] New & Old Ward Divisions, and J.G. Foster & Co.’s later map, entered according to Act of Parliament of Canada in the year 1895," Ward 1’s boundaries extended westward over the Don Valley as far as Sumach Street in Cabbagetown.

And the city kept on growing.

In 1909, in response to several petitioners, the area north of the Danforth, as far as Browning Avenue and as far east as Donlands was annexed, also to be part of Ward 1. This was part of the land originally granted to members of the Playter family — some of the earliest settlers in the area. Two years later, a city bylaw widened the Danforth, claiming twenty feet from the frontage of these lots.

The Playters had sold much of their land over the decades, but they still owned a few blocks in this area, which are known in today’s real estate market as Playter Estates.[4]

In 1918, Ward 1 was divided into two wards — Ward 1 and Ward 8. Ward 1 retreated eastward out of Cabbagetown, back to the Don River.

With its frequently fluctuating limits, small wonder that there are varying ideas about Riverdale’s exact boundaries. Riverdale is not an incorporated entity itself, but an area that is part of a great city. The answer to the question, Where is Riverdale? is not so simple after all.

In this history, Riverdale: East of the Don, I am treating the boundaries of Riverdale as they were in the days of St. Matthew’s Ward, when Riverdale began.

I’m also adding the areas north of the Danforth and south of Queen Street as far as Greenwood Avenue. People who live north of the Danforth in Playter Estates consider themselves part of Riverdale. Since annexation, this area has been part of the City of Toronto, not East York. At times, I may wander from these limits, but such is the nature of tracing the history of a growing city.

Detail of an 1878 map of the county of York from the Illustrated Historical Atlas of the County of York, before Riverdale was annexed.

Photo courtesy of Toronto Reference Library.

Two

A Garden of Eden

All that in this delightful garden grows,

Should happy be, and have immortal bliss.[1]

Elizabeth Posthuma Gwillim, wife of John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, visited the Don Valley for the first time on August 11, 1793. It was her second week in York, the city now known as Toronto, then nothing much but trees.

The river in the middle of the valley — or creek, as Elizabeth described it — wasn’t called the Don. The Anishnaabe natives told the Simcoes it was the Wonscoteonach, the river coming down from the back burnt country; presumably the land had been swept by fire at some earlier time.[2]

The Toronto area had been marked on French maps as early as 1615, the Don River sketched in by at least 1688. Lake Simcoe had been named Lac de Taronto on a 1675 map. Other early maps referred to the Mohawk phrase, Tkaronto, where there are trees standing in the water.

Other than native encampments, the only building that was located on what is today Toronto city land was a French trading fort — Fort Toronto, or Fort Rouillé as it was formally known. Pierre Robinau de Portneuf, an ensign at the French trading post of Fort Frontenac, had been sent to build it in 1750. When the Simcoes arrived, there were only a few ruins.[3]

But the new lieutenant governor had little interest in French forts, French cartographers’ maps, or native names. He was determined to build a British colony. The new settlement would be called York — in honour of Britain’s Prince Frederick, Duke of York; the river on the east side, the Don, after John Grave’s favourite stream in Yorkshire.

Elizabeth was excited about this posting to the wilds of Canada. Orphaned as a baby, she had grown up in a privileged lifestyle in Devon, England. Yet living in untamed woods did not appear to faze her. Their first winter in York, with two small children and a new baby, the Simcoes lived in canvas tents originally belonging to the explorer Captain Cook. The weather was so cold that December, water spilt near the stove, froze immediately.[4]

Elizabeth spent many happy hours, both in winter and summer, exploring the densely forested Don Valley and the gentle, meandering Don River. When she left to go home to England in July 1796, she was so upset that she was unable to say goodbye to some of her friends, even though the Simcoes had spent only eighteen months in York out of five years in Upper Canada. I was so much out of Spirits I was unable to dine … I could not eat, cried all day, she wrote.[5]

When they came to Canada in 1791, the Simcoes had left four young daughters in the care of a close friend, Mrs. Hunt. To keep in touch with them, Elizabeth kept a diary, mailing portions back to England as often as possible. Her writings provide a colourful and detailed description of life in the fledgling town of York and the neighbouring river valley.[6]

According to Elizabeth’s descriptions, the Don Valley was like a new Garden of Eden. As a woman firmly immersed in Georgian ideology, she did not discuss politics or business, but as a water colourist, she could comment on the everyday details and vivid hues that made up her environment. She sketched or painted hundreds of people and places, often in the valley, making a point of never sketching a place she disliked.

One day while beside the river, she came upon millions of the yellow and black butterflies, New York swallowtails.[7] In autumn and spring, she watched the surprising sight of thousands of wild pigeons darkening the sky, flying low against the wind. She noted that they built their nests close to acorn trees, but left the acorns on the ground until the young flew from their nests. Then the older birds scratched up the acorns for the small birds to eat. The breasts and wings of pigeon … are salted down in barrels and are delicious food at anytime, Elizabeth noted.[8]

Elizabeth picked wild gooseberries; they made an excellent sauce for salmon. She gathered other berries and fruits during her walks, including wild strawberries and grapes, foxberries, tea cranberries, scarlet partridge berries that grew on a creeping plant like stone cress, beautiful white berries with a black eye on a red stalk, cockspur berries, and bright scarlet mountain tea or winter green berries that tasted like barley syrup. There were cranberries as large as cherries, as well as hurtle berries.[9]

Elizabeth admired the wild flowers in the valley: trylliums [sic], dragon’s blood, lilies, the toothache plant, blue lupines, lady’s slippers, gay flowering pulse, May apples and a beautiful shrub known as dogwood.[10]

She rowed up the Don among low lands covered with rushes, abounding with wild ducks and swamp black birds with red wings. The banks of the river became high and wooded about a mile from the bay.[11] Further up, the land was covered in tall pine trees (which her husband hoped to turn into masts for the Royal Navy). There were also butternut trees — the butternuts apparently tasted better than walnuts.[12]

One night they dined outside on wild duck and chowder; Elizabeth had cooked the soup on her stove. They found raccoon very fat, although it tasted like lamb if eaten with mint sauce. They discovered that wolf was not good to eat, and the skin of little value. They ate porcupine meat, wild turkey, roast pigeon, toasted venison, eggs, boiled black squirrel, and other game. Bear meat tasted like pork.[13]

There were fish from the river. One dark evening at eight o’clock in late fall, Elizabeth went by boat to watch the Indians spear salmon. They carried large torches of white birch bark [in their canoes] … the blaze of the light attracted the fish. The artist Paul Kane, who had come from Ireland to York in 1819, wrote that in his boyish days, he had seen hundreds of light-jacks — blazing pine knots and roots in iron frames — gliding about the Bay, and he had joined in the sport.[14]

Elizabeth noted that the salmon had a very red appearance; this place is very healthy, she wrote. They ate whitefish from the lake: they were exquisitely good … they are so rich that sauce is seldom eaten with them.[15]

In her second winter, Elizabeth recorded a great deal of snow on the River Don. She drove in a horse-driven cariole, and fished from the mouth of the river. But the fish are not to be caught as they were last winter, several dozen in an hour, she wrote, the noise occasioned by our driving constantly over this ice frightens [them] away.[16]

I was benumbed from the cold, she wrote that winter, but she enjoyed sleigh rides, watching Thomas Talbot, her husband’s personal secretary, skate on the frozen bay, and the native people fishing. The Indians cut holes in the ice, over which they spread a blanket on poles, and they sit under a shed, moving a wooden fish hung on a line in the water. They caught maskalonge [sic] and pickerel. The intrepid red-haired English explorer, Anna Jameson, wrote that the Indians also caught black bass and whitefish that way.[17]

Henry Scadding, who