will you recognize me

[the_siobhan]

You get two posts in two days because I am procrastinating.

So the neighourhood where I live used to be a village called Brockton which was swallowed up by Toronto as the city expanded west. (This is where Lord Brock got his name, btw.) The plumber's supply shop at the corner was once the town City Hall and there are old goal cells in the basement.

The main employer at the time was a rope factory. Most of the streets at the time were little short things with lots of bends but there are two very long streets north-south streets near me that had no intersections that were used to twist the ropes. Even now the only cross-streets are the major thoroughfares the city built when they expanded out this way.

The factory owners, along with all the other wealthy people, lived south of the railroad tracks and down towards the lake. Big three-story houses with lots of windows and wide front yards and two staircases - one for servants. In the 50s the city built a highway along the lake and all the rich people moved out, a lot of those big houses were turned into apartments and boarding houses

The houses on my street were specifically built to home the factory workers and they are all row-houses on lots 15-feet wide or smaller. Most didn't have basements. They all had the same "summer kitchen" setup that I had to tear out. The insulation, where it existed, consisted of torn up newspaper.

My house is at the end of a row of three and was built in 1913. There are still sections on streets all over the area that were built at the same time, and also lots that were cleared and used to build more recently.

There are creek beds that were funneled into pipes and ravines that were filled in while they were building. There is a creek running under the next street over, you can hear the rushing water through the access covers every day of the year. Some of the houses we looked at when we were buying are settling into the old ravines, if you drop a marble it rolls the full length of the house and out the door. (Yes I did this once. The realtor tried to explain it away and I have no idea what he came up with because I could not stop laughing.)

There are history walks in the area all the time. I find this stuff fascinating.

Comments

[cornerofmadness]

I love history stuff like this

[elusis]

Our neighborhood was originally "beach houses." We have many covered creeks like you have - fortunately not one under our house, but our next door neighbors (who sit lower than us to begin with) have flooded many times in their basement.

When the previous owner of our house cut through the wall dividing the living room from the family room off the kitchen (!) his sawzall went through drywall and hit cedar shake shingles. Apparently my Craftsman front porch was turned into my living room which is why I have a crap, ugly concrete porch with cheap metal railings and not a beautiful Craftsman porch with pillars. Since the fireplace is in that same living room I don't know how they heated the house except maybe they didn't bother and only came out here when it was warm? But that's not all that often.

There may have been a "summer kitchen" situation out back and our current kitchen/family room might have been a sitting room with fireplace. Who knows.

The basement was clearly dug out post-construction at some point as it isn't to code in terms of height and has great huge concrete block "shelves" at either end of it which are just the foundation.

Our insulation isn't newspaper... we hope... but then again who knows, as it was built in 1911....

[zero_pixel_count]

It is fascinating! "Summer kitchen" is a new concept for me - the similar-era, similar-purpose terraces here are about the same width but the lots are much shorter - one we used to live in was probably about 70 feet, front wall to back fence, and that was a long garden for the type. Typically they just had an outhouse and a coal bunker at the back. (The ones which didn't even have that were mostly demolished in slum clearances.)

[warriorsavant]

My old house had horse hair insulation, which was basically useless.

Sometimes when you renovate, you find interesting old stuff behind the walls, left by the construction workers. Once found a 100? year old pack of cigarettes, with 18 in a box, that the company had no record of ever making.

[the_siobhan]

Most of what we found in our walls was wasps. Not recommended.

[flemmings]

Ha! So that's why those long n-s streets exist! I always thought it was bonkers not to have cross-streets.

[the_siobhan]

I stumbled across a plaque in the 'hood explaining the rope factory connection.

The city also has a bunch of maps and you can see what years different neighbourhoods were built and how the topography changed over the years.

[chasing_silver]

Man, I MISS Brockton! I loved that neighbourhood so much.