Monster jam: Jan Wong on the tear-down real estate trend in Lawrence Park
In my neighbourhood, century-old houses are being knocked down to make room for super-sized faux chateaux. Something is lost, and something gained
When I was house-hunting in Toronto in 1994, my real estate agent routinely pointed out the highlights of each prospective property. At one house, she said helpfully, “There’s a Chinese family next door.” I grimaced. I’d just wrapped up six years working as a foreign correspondent in Beijing. Quite frankly, I’d had my fill of squeezing up against a billion or so neighbours who looked just like me.
What I yearned for, after living in a soulless concrete apartment inside a bleak walled compound, was a bit of green. Lawrence Park, with its wide lawns and winding streets, was the polar opposite of Beijing. I snapped up a 1938 four-bedroom Cape Cod–style house with eight towering oaks and a 95-foot frontage (which was affordable only because it faced Lawrence Avenue and needed lots of work). From my front door, I could see the Don River ravine, and from my kitchen window, I could glimpse a gigantic willow a block away at Cheltenham Park.
I was keen on meeting my neighbours, a statistically improbable percentage of whom were blond. When I went for walks, almost no one made eye contact, except the Filipino housekeepers. Had I made a mistake? There was one friendly neighbour, who, a year or two after I moved in, invited my family to swim in her pool whenever she wasn’t using it. I took her up on her generous offer but, somewhat puzzled, asked why she had singled me out. “I extended the same invitation to all the neighbours, but you’re the only one who ever came. You must not be from Toronto,” she said, smiling, adding that she was from B.C. She was right. I’m originally from Montreal.
Why was Lawrence Park so unfriendly? I suspect it has something to do with the way the neighbourhood was designed. It was laid out roughly a century ago by an English-born loan-company executive named Wilfrid Dinnick. Inspired by the way developers in England had begun creating suburbs for middle-class families, notably Letchworth and Hampstead, Dinnick saw potential in Lawrence Park’s rolling hills. He bought up the land and planned a 400-acre development, hiring a team of landscape architects to create gardens, croquet lawns and terraces. Dinnick sold lots in the area and imposed strict regulations about the style of houses that could be built. He gave them garages, rather than stables, because the automobile age had arrived. And he insisted his development be strictly residential, without a single shop, church or school. In 1909, Dinnick’s first homes went on sale, and the area he called “a garden suburb” was born.
I did eventually meet a few neighbours—in a quintessential Toronto moment. We had been allotted the same time slot to dispute our property taxes. Now when we have the occasional dinner together, table talk inevitably turns to our rising property taxes. The other big subject: the neighbourhood’s million-dollar tear-downs.
Like so many uptown neighbourhoods, ours has attracted developers. Lawrence Park has some of the biggest lots south of Steeles. In the rush to have more—more bathrooms, more closets, more square footage—Dinnick’s vision of a halcyon garden community is vanishing. It seems that every time an older house is sold, a construction fence goes up. Soon there’s a gaping hole that extends to the property line. I feel disoriented, guilty and sad all at once because I can’t even remember what was there before.
I’m not sentimental about the past. I like new. But I am against super-sized homes and ever-expanding footprints. From what I’ve seen on my neighbourhood strolls—OK, from peeking into windows of homes under construction—the marble-and-granite-filled rebuilds of Lawrence Park have all the warmth of municipal parking garages. To optimize prime ground-floor space for those huge kitchens and family rooms, developers have sunk the garage, which raises a house by 13 steps. Twelve-foot-high ceilings add to the loom factor.
Staring up at these faux chateaux, I yearn for the architects of the past who valued function (and style) over size. Mies van der Rohe kept his elegant, airy, two-bedroom units along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive under 1,000 square feet. On a trip to Paris a couple of years ago, I visited Villa La Roche, the curving white residence designed by Le Corbusier. The rooms were surprisingly small, but the layout and large windows imparted a sense of fluidity and spaciousness. At Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home and architectural school in Arizona, his small bedroom did double duty as a study. Its low ceilings forced the eye out to the desert landscape.
My house is more than spacious enough at 2,800 square feet. If money were no object, I doubt I would go big. Here’s what I would do instead: I’d tear it down to build a Lumenhaus, a modestly sized prefab home designed by a team from Virginia Tech that recently won the 2010 Solar Decathlon Europe competition in Madrid. Inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Lumenhaus has sliding exterior walls and a modular design that allows it to expand and shrink with a family’s needs.
I wonder what giant, sprawling new homes are doing to the family unit itself. What are the repercussions when a one-child family occupies a four-bedroom home, when a child’s bedroom is her castle and that ensuite bath the new moat? When kids have a choice between a family room, a media room and a basement rec room, aren’t they often playing in solitary confinement?
I put all those questions to Carl Honoré, the U.K.-based Canadian author of Under Pressure: Putting the Child Back in Childhood, and he said, “Too much space dilutes the bonds of family life. A big house allows us to pick family life like a buffet, to choose the smooth and escape the rough. Family life is messy, tangled and sometimes annoying, but that is real life. There is a glorious joy in resolving problems.”
In mammoth houses, we live differently. We work out alone on a rowing machine. We watch a video while someone else in the family is in another room watching something else. My family isn’t immune, either. Here’s a confession: I e-mail my husband even when we’re both at home.
A study published in 2006 in the American Sociological Review suggests that the spread-out way we live now reduces the number of friends we have. Two decades ago, the average American adult had three people in whom to confide. Today that figure is two. In fact, one in four adult Americans has no close confidants at all. Researchers speculate that living in the suburbs, working longer hours and tuning out with electronic toys have all contributed to these depressing stats.
Today, I no longer have a view of the Don River ravine. A luxury condo rose to the northeast, and then the private school across the street added a three-storey addition. My partial view of Cheltenham Park is gone after someone bought the charming Tudor cottage behind me and tripled its size. Am I bitter? Not completely, because there is a bright side to all this upheaval: as Dinnick’s original English cottages come tumbling down, so too are the invisible barricades to this once WASPy enclave. I did end up with lovely Chinese neighbours, who moved in a couple of years later. And just the other day, a white stucco sidesplit behind me was fenced off for demolition. The bad news is that a new monster home is going up. The good news is that a black couple is moving in.
![](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://torontolife.com/city/the-tear-down-real-estate-trend-when-century-old-houses-are-replaced-by-super-sized-faux-chateaux/&title=Monster jam: Jan Wong on the tear-down real estate trend in Lawrence Park&picture=https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/01_wong1110.jpg&description=In my neighbourhood, century-old houses are being knocked down to make room for super-sized faux chateaux. Something is lost, and something gained Jan Wong
[caption id="attachment_45423" align="alignright" width="320" caption="(Illustration: Emiliano Ponzi)"][/caption]
When I was house-hunting in Toronto in 1994, my real estate agent routinely pointed out the highlights of each prospective property. At one house, she said helpfully, “There’s a Chinese family next door.” I grimaced. I’d just wrapped up six years working as a foreign correspondent in Beijing. Quite frankly, I’d had my fill of squeezing up against a billion or so neighbours who looked just like me.
What I yearned for, after living in a soulless concrete apartment inside a bleak walled compound, was a bit of green. Lawrence Park, with its wide lawns and winding streets, was the polar opposite of Beijing. I snapped up a 1938 four-bedroom Cape Cod–style house with eight towering oaks and a 95-foot frontage (which was affordable only because it faced Lawrence Avenue and needed lots of work). From my front door, I could see the Don River ravine, and from my kitchen window, I could glimpse a gigantic willow a block away at Cheltenham Park.
I was keen on meeting my neighbours, a statistically improbable percentage of whom were blond. When I went for walks, almost no one made eye contact, except the Filipino housekeepers. Had I made a mistake? There was one friendly neighbour, who, a year or two after I moved in, invited my family to swim in her pool whenever she wasn’t using it. I took her up on her generous offer but, somewhat puzzled, asked why she had singled me out. “I extended the same invitation to all the neighbours, but you’re the only one who ever came. You must not be from Toronto,” she said, smiling, adding that she was from B.C. She was right. I’m originally from Montreal.
Why was Lawrence Park so unfriendly? I suspect it has something to do with the way the neighbourhood was designed. It was laid out roughly a century ago by an English-born loan-company executive named Wilfrid Dinnick. Inspired by the way developers in England had begun creating suburbs for middle-class families, notably Letchworth and Hampstead, Dinnick saw potential in Lawrence Park’s rolling hills. He bought up the land and planned a 400-acre development, hiring a team of landscape architects to create gardens, croquet lawns and terraces. Dinnick sold lots in the area and imposed strict regulations about the style of houses that could be built. He gave them garages, rather than stables, because the automobile age had arrived. And he insisted his development be strictly residential, without a single shop, church or school. In 1909, Dinnick’s first homes went on sale, and the area he called “a garden suburb” was born.
I did eventually meet a few neighbours—in a quintessential Toronto moment. We had been allotted the same time slot to dispute our property taxes. Now when we have the occasional dinner together, table talk inevitably turns to our rising property taxes. The other big subject: the neighbourhood’s million-dollar tear-downs.
Like so many uptown neighbourhoods, ours has attracted developers. Lawrence Park has some of the biggest lots south of Steeles. In the rush to have more—more bathrooms, more closets, more square footage—Dinnick’s vision of a halcyon garden community is vanishing. It seems that every time an older house is sold, a construction fence goes up. Soon there’s a gaping hole that extends to the property line. I feel disoriented, guilty and sad all at once because I can’t even remember what was there before.
I’m not sentimental about the past. I like new. But I am against super-sized homes and ever-expanding footprints. From what I’ve seen on my neighbourhood strolls—OK, from peeking into windows of homes under construction—the marble-and-granite-filled rebuilds of Lawrence Park have all the warmth of municipal parking garages. To optimize prime ground-floor space for those huge kitchens and family rooms, developers have sunk the garage, which raises a house by 13 steps. Twelve-foot-high ceilings add to the loom factor.
Staring up at these faux chateaux, I yearn for the architects of the past who valued function (and style) over size. Mies van der Rohe kept his elegant, airy, two-bedroom units along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive under 1,000 square feet. On a trip to Paris a couple of years ago, I visited Villa La Roche, the curving white residence designed by Le Corbusier. The rooms were surprisingly small, but the layout and large windows imparted a sense of fluidity and spaciousness. At Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home and architectural school in Arizona, his small bedroom did double duty as a study. Its low ceilings forced the eye out to the desert landscape.
My house is more than spacious enough at 2,800 square feet. If money were no object, I doubt I would go big. Here’s what I would do instead: I’d tear it down to build a Lumenhaus, a modestly sized prefab home designed by a team from Virginia Tech that recently won the 2010 Solar Decathlon Europe competition in Madrid. Inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Lumenhaus has sliding exterior walls and a modular design that allows it to expand and shrink with a family’s needs.
I wonder what giant, sprawling new homes are doing to the family unit itself. What are the repercussions when a one-child family occupies a four-bedroom home, when a child’s bedroom is her castle and that ensuite bath the new moat? When kids have a choice between a family room, a media room and a basement rec room, aren’t they often playing in solitary confinement?
I put all those questions to Carl Honoré, the U.K.-based Canadian author of Under Pressure: Putting the Child Back in Childhood, and he said, “Too much space dilutes the bonds of family life. A big house allows us to pick family life like a buffet, to choose the smooth and escape the rough. Family life is messy, tangled and sometimes annoying, but that is real life. There is a glorious joy in resolving problems.”
In mammoth houses, we live differently. We work out alone on a rowing machine. We watch a video while someone else in the family is in another room watching something else. My family isn’t immune, either. Here’s a confession: I e-mail my husband even when we’re both at home.
A study published in 2006 in the American Sociological Review suggests that the spread-out way we live now reduces the number of friends we have. Two decades ago, the average American adult had three people in whom to confide. Today that figure is two. In fact, one in four adult Americans has no close confidants at all. Researchers speculate that living in the suburbs, working longer hours and tuning out with electronic toys have all contributed to these depressing stats.
Today, I no longer have a view of the Don River ravine. A luxury condo rose to the northeast, and then the private school across the street added a three-storey addition. My partial view of Cheltenham Park is gone after someone bought the charming Tudor cottage behind me and tripled its size. Am I bitter? Not completely, because there is a bright side to all this upheaval: as Dinnick’s original English cottages come tumbling down, so too are the invisible barricades to this once WASPy enclave. I did end up with lovely Chinese neighbours, who moved in a couple of years later. And just the other day, a white stucco sidesplit behind me was fenced off for demolition. The bad news is that a new monster home is going up. The good news is that a black couple is moving in.){kind=link}
I think this is the most annoying thing I have ever read. If I actually started writing about all the things that bother me about it, my day would disappear. And I don’t want that to happen so I’ll restrain myself.
It is revolting. They are ruining this beautiful neighborhood. I walked around this area recently and was horrified by the monster mansions. They should have protected the area with stringent planning laws. Oh dear Toronto you continue to blight your urban landscape tut tut.
Yes, it’s an annoying article, that’s for sure.
What bugs me about Lawrence Park are the people who are NOT RAISING THEIR CHILDREN! While mommy and daddy are at their big bank jobs downtown, brain dead automatons called Fillipino nannies are with the kids. They are all over Lawrence Park.
It is a soulless, boring neighbourhood full of pretentious dullards who have to “have it all”.
I wouldn’t consider this article “annoying” at all, in fact I’m glad to finally see this published. I grew up in the neighbourhood, went to TFS and then Glendon, so I have seen the changes from day to day throughout my entire life. My two childhood homes turned from modest to monstrosities. It’s a shame that people continue to believe that bigger is better, while leaving the environment to take the weight of externalities.
This is definitely an annoying article.But then Jan is an annoying journalist.
Jan gets to live in Lawrence Park (barely – seeing as she is at the corner of Lawrence near Bayview) but makes it very clear how she isn’t one of “them” as she faces Lawrence and the house needs work. Elitist yet humble.
Jan is tired of other Asians. Until she gets tired of the local white folk ignoring her. Now she’s all for Asians and Blacks making LP more interesting.
Jan doesn’t like the faux chateaux. Too big compared to her tidy 2800 sq. feet. Well I live in one and it’s 3000 sq. feet. It has wonderful flow little wasted space. It is much more green than my last 1900 sq. ft house circa 1952 that leaked like a sieve. And it is most assuredly warmer than a municipal garage. Art, rugs, furniture and people warm up a house. Mies van der Rohe is fabulous but I would hardly call his work “warm”
What family with one child is buying a four bedroom home? And even if there are some that do, big deal, one spare bedroom becomes a guest room ann the other a study. 4-bedrooms can be an important factor when re-selling a house. Especially to a family with more then one child.
Jan thinks Montrealers are superior. Well I’m from Montreal and people from there don’t generally use other people’s pools when they are not home, even if invited to do so.
Jan Wong is a one-of-a kind writer. As Anne Collins, publisher at Random House once said: “(His) mistake was to treat Ms. Wong as though she was a human being for a moment. No one should make that mistake”.
hey “annoyed”
I think everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
If you can write a better article and stop being so hateful then do it.
I think your just bitter that Jan made some dollars writing this article whereas YOU just wasted 10 minutes writing a response that makes you look like a bitter middle aged old hag.
p.s. I don’t blame Montrealers, I wouldn’t invite you to swim in my pool either. For the simple fact you may eat my children.
WRITE ON JAN, WRITE ON!
If this reflects the attitude of the habitants of Lawrence Park; “brain dead automatons called Fillipino nannies;” it would not be my choice of a place to live. Monster homes have taken over many neighborhoods and while the term “monster” was coined to reflect the size it appears that the term can also reflect the inhabitants.
It’s what SELLS.
I’m one of those people who built a huge home in Lawrence Park and while the house IS lovely, moving here has been eye-opening for me on 2 fronts. 1. there’s a class war-far underway here between the older, long time residents who resent the newcomers their privilege and cash (sure everyone is polite but they envy me (or what they imagine my life is); and 2. Law Park desperately needs a community hub, a village square, a place to buy eggs and milk, to bump into people. I love the house but I yearn for community – like Summerhill Ave and market are to Rosedale and Moore Park. I’d give my eye teeth for the city to re-zone a lot or two on Blythwood so a retail shop or two,or a coffee shop might be developed.
Hi Folks.
I’m from Toronto. I’ve only been ‘here’ in Michigan for some fifty-seven years.
And I know exactly what Jan says when the ambience and history of a neighborhood is bulldozed. And she is right… bulldozed into nonexistence.
It happens here, right and left in many locations. Big box energy wasting homes* (* wasting means, why does one need so much space?) blocking out the sunlight and open spaces around a house. And abutting another blockbuster of a house, that does just the same thing. Where do the other inhabitants, the wildlife of the blocks, live? Where is the native growth that would sustain them? A big block of a house is what they are. Self-indulgence, a la seventeenth century England, and France. Just to have a kitchen that is, well, as big as a house. And true, true, indeed: People get lost in their own homes and end up, under the same roof, fully apart from one another.
And that is a bad Rx for learning how to be an outside, hello, how are you, kind of neighbor. One isn’t learning how to communicate… inside their own home.
I would like to return to Toronto. But not to this kind of builder/buyer/ neighborhood destroyer mentality. With children who don’t know how to say hello, or smile. Or be courteous. But they can show you how adept they are with their cell phone, and all the games they can play on it.
While I’m here, how can I get back to Toronto and employment?
Anyone have lead they can share?
I’m good at accounts payables, property escrow accounting.
Been in retailing for eighteen years as well, before the accounts payable support jobs.
I am a full-fledged CANADIAN citizen. With a SIN card, too.
TX to TO.
LOOKING FOR MR (or MRS) ‘GOOD-BAR’.
Meaning… looking for contacts to make the move back to Toronto.
Single man. I would forward my resume to anyone with suggestions and leads.
Can forward me anything that will lead to contact with the right folks.
Jobs people and living places… Places down near the Boardwalk.
I’m posting my e.mail for sincere leads. [email protected].
AND, to the two nice guys of my age bracket, that I met in front of the old Michigan Central train station in Detroit, last Sunday, Nov. 7, a great big hello. If YOU guys have suggestions, I’ll gladly accept them.
I think it’s really depressing that Toronto continues to be overtaken by developers (and the clients that pay for their pathetic homes). There is no style, no taste, no attention paid to quality in what passes for new “architecture” in this city’s monster homes. Pre-fab homes are more interesting and pleasing. Torontonians have the opportunity to be forward-thinking with architecture but for some reason, everyone wants a faux chateau, whether it’s a 1500 square foot faux Victorian or a Versailles redux. Plebeian tastes make a plebeian city.
Hello to ‘new to LP’.
You are one hundred percent right. Lost in the building up and out, you’ve all shut out being neighbourly, and have lost the closeness. Of being able to walk to a coffee shop, sit outdoors even, and chat with your neighbours.
A place to buy groceries… not a mom and pop place, but a decent size grocer.
A park?! Voila! A park is a respite place, a place of sun, bars and swings and children, and dogs. Outside, in the sun, winter or summer. A place to chat, as well. So many have lost the sense of knowing how to be ‘outside’.
And the big box homes are doing just that.
Don’t make it a gated mentality community with ‘dues’.
TX, from a CANADIAN in Birmingham, Michigan, wondering how to go ‘home’.
Bravo to the caller who is protecting their children from being ‘eaten’.
And by the way, big box builders and buyers:
Are you installing solar roofing panels.
If not, why not?
Find them made in Canada, or made in USA… definitely not in China.
They’re attactively designed. They could be fabricated to look like roof dormers that wouldn’t appear to be solar panels at all.
And, too big box builders: Are you destroying native vegetation that sustains the wildlife that is part of your land and landscape. They, after all, are the original land occupiers. They are not Inuits or American Indians to be displaced in the name of ‘progress’.
Reply to ‘new to Lawrence Park’….don’t be expecting any empathy, a there-there or a tissue….we don’t need a visual, it’s obvious your nose is up in the air.
You’re kidding yourself; your neighbours don’t ‘envy your money’….they hate that you’re contributing to the decline of their neighbourhood.
Perhaps you could spend less time trying to impress them with your precious wealth and see things from their point of view? Try it, you may find you’ll spend less time looking down your nose at them.
I make a special point not to judge people because they’ve got more or less than me, but based on whether they’re kind, generous, tolerant and aware. Still I know full well that some people sadly, feel diminished by other people’s good fortune/dumb luck. Anyway, my purpose in commenting on Jan Wong’s article, was to float the idea that while the popular discourse is that large new homes ruin older neighbourhoods and undermine family life, it’s also possible that some people (not all!) expressing this view are actually bothered by something else, something more insidious. This is also why I believe it’s important that where there’s a real disparity in household income or other markers of identity (like ethnic heritage, and faith) that concerted efforts should be made to build a sense of community. Hence my plea for a tiny bit of retail – or yes thoughtfully designed green space – NOT that this is the only way of building “belonging” and understanding, but it helps.
More evilness from Ms. Wong! It is quite nice to see her misanthropic racialist approach to everyone, reducing WASPS, blondes, east asians, and “blacks” to nothing more than their skin or hair colour.
Jan Wong is despicable and so is what’s happening to Lawrence Park.
Who are some notable residents living in Lawrence Park? Would you say more of Toronto’s elite live in Lawrence Park, Forest Hill or Rosedale?
I live in a special corner of Lawrence Park. I know my neighbours by first name, including the senior citizens and the new baby. More than neighbours, we are an extended street family. We regularly borrow or lend items from eggs or milk to glue guns or frig space, help jump start a car or pick up mail, employ the teenagers to move snow, chat while walking dogs, give a neighbour child a ride to the dentist or a place to happily wait when they’ve lost their house key. My Lawrence Park doesn’t resemble Jan Wong’s Lawrence Park, yet she only lives a stones throw away. It’s too bad some people can’t get beyond the size of house, the hair colour, the presumed income, the age, or the ethnicity of their neighbours to see the real people that we live among. Community is about relationships with people. Why not try intentionally inviting the neighbours over for a glass of wine instead of relying on a happenstance meeting at a property tax dispute. Doing your part to build a happier, stronger community is not rocket science.
I also live in a part of Lawrence Park that reflects Jocelyn’s experience-in fact, I bet on every street, one could find the good and the bad. I have raised 5 kids in 3 bdrms.in LP. Love the home we’ve created and our neighbours (and,yes, people often ask me if I’m from out of town which I am not!). I welcome Jan’s discussion because it recognizes that there is room for community development as the community transitions structurally and demographically. A community that inspires connections is a healthy one. Like Jocelyn, I also can name family fun days, sports leagues, bridge, bike and dog walking groups that thrive here. So let’s keep our eye on the good and keep working to create a neighbourhood that should be a model not a monster.
These tasteless, souless monster McMansions are destroying the beauty and heritage of Ward 25!
Only in Toronto, where money is everything, would this kind of cheap quality, tacky mess be permitted. No respect for culture, no respect for heritage, no respect for quality, no respect for the future- only respect for $$$.
FYI @ new to Lawrence Park who wrote “1. there’s a class war-far underway here between the older, long time residents who resent the newcomers their privilege and cash (sure everyone is polite but they envy me (or what they imagine my life is)”- This is not a class war, it is a good-taste war. I too am a new homeowner in LP but I love my beautiful century-old home. So do my friends love theirs. People like you always assume everyone is envious of you and your ostentatious, obnoxious “taste”. News Flash: WE’RE NOT!