To stand on the corner of Don Mills Road and Lawrence Avenue, not far from the geographic centre of Toronto, is to go back to the future — back to a modern vision of the future now over 50 years old. The parkette here on the northeast corner is named after urban planner Macklin Hancock, a local hero.
When he was just 27 years old, he took leave from his graduate studies at Harvard to go to work for Toronto tycoon E.P. Taylor, designing Canada’s first planned suburb. Built between 1952 and 1965, Don Mills was, and is, a modern wonderland that garnered postwar headlines like “The suburb that is to become Canada’s most perfect city” and “Toronto’s bright satellite between the forks of the Don.”
E.P. Taylor, who lived a few kilometres east on Bayview at his estate “Windfields” — now home to the Canadian Film Centre — began purchasing working farms in 1947. Originally, Taylor’s plan was to build a new brewery — his holding company, Argus Corporation (later of Conrad Black fame), owned the O’Keefe Brewing Company — but finally a massive new community was planned.
Hancock’s plan, though brand new for Canada, was a modern take on the English Garden City model developed a half-century earlier, where residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural uses were balanced with greenbelts throughout.
Though relatively close to downtown, Don Mills is physically isolated, surrounded by ravines and railways. Turn onto any of the residential streets and you soon lose a sense of direction due to the twists and curves of the streets. Low-rise apartment buildings mix in with townhouses and single-family homes. Some of those homes have fantastic space-age designs with massive panes of glass and roofs that slope to the ground.
This place is mother to most Canadian suburbs that followed. As early as 1977, former mayor John Sewell wrote “it is difficult to overestimate the influence of Don Mills on urban development in Canada.” Walking around the neighbourhood, you begin to notice subtle but important differences with many of the suburbs that came after. In Don Mills, over 200 different home designs were built, far more than by contemporary suburban standards.
In Don Mills, the gentle roll of the Ontario countryside is still visible. Homes and apartment parking garages are built into hillsides. For Sewell, though, developments after Don Mills that followed similar principles were “the ghosts of Don Mills — but in a sad way.”
If you travel up to the fringe of GTA sprawl ghost-hunting, anywhere north of Major MacKenzie drive, you will find landscapes that look like images from clear-cut Brazilian rainforests, where the land is shaved down to an empty, muddy, uniform plain, waiting for streets and houses. In Don Mills, efforts were made to preserve and work around mature trees and in some spots the narrow tentacles of ravines reach up between homes to the street.
The problem with suburbs is that they are neither city nor country — but they try to do the impossible by being both. Don Mills might come as close as possible to attaining that. In the southeast quadrant, take a walk down to Moccasin Trail Park — it’s tucked underneath Don Mills by the DVP. There is an artificial pond here, constructed six years ago to contain storm water, but it’s already natural-looking and home to a rather extroverted beaver. Nearby, there is a long cement tunnel smelling of pot and teenagers that passes under the DVP into a clearing that leads to the Rainbow Tunnel that highway commuters can see from their cars while travelling north. Through this looking-glass passageway, a quiet and hidden near-wilderness exists, with paths along the Don that lead under what is likely Toronto’s most impressive railway bridge. Across the shallow river are the rusting ruins of the old Don Valley Ski Club.
From the beginning, Hancock’s design incorporated nature and people. Karl Frank, a landscape architect who worked with Hancock and has lived in Don Mills since 1970, notes many of the residential streets were originally narrower and that the natural watercourses had been preserved. “They wanted to avoid costly infrastructure,” recalls Frank. “They tried to use as much of the topography as possible for drainage.” However, 25 years ago the soft shoulders and ditches were replaced with curbs and gutters for aesthetic reasons, and the natural absorption of runoff was curtailed. “People just didn’t like the ditches.”
Though it was built when the car was king, many residents of Don Mills get along just fine without cars, like Jeanetta Vickers, who has lived here for 46 years. “It’s very handy here. I don’t drive, but I can walk everywhere,” she tells me. “There are a lot of seniors here who don’t need a car.” Vickers said she raised her children in Don Mills, and now they and her grandchildren live there — “once a Don Miller, always a Don Miller” — describing a life that those marketing campaigns north of Major Mackenzie try to conjure.
This utopian view of Don Mills is not shared by everyone. Author Lawrence Hill devoted a chapter in his book Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On being black and white in Canada to Don Mills. His parents moved from Washington, DC and settled in Don Mills in the early 1960s. “It was a challenging terrain to navigate,” he told me. “Nine out of 10 days, it was a normal [suburban] life, hanging out at the rink, playing on teams. Then on the 10th day somebody would spit in my face and call me a nigger. It happened enough to keep me off balance.”
For many ethnic minorities who were here during the WASP-dominated Toronto-the-Good era, this is a city-wide phenomenon. “I may have faced similar things in other places,” says Hill. “It’s strange that my parents were fleeing one of the most highly charged racial places in the US, and they took us to Don Mills. They were looking for an escape hatch. Well, they found it. Then we had to find a way out.”
What Hill has in common with Don Mills fans like Vickers and Frank is concern that the redevelopment of the Don Mills Shopping Centre will destroy the community. Originally a modernist gem, the outdoor plaza was converted into a covered mall in 1978 and became the de facto community centre. Don Mills lacks proper community gathering spots — even the bowling alley, movie theatres and curling club have closed — so the shopping mall became the town square.
Owners Cadillac Fairview plan to turn what was a lower-middle-class mall, now a construction zone, into an upmarket place called The Shops at Don Mills, hoping to attract consumers from outside the area. This gets to the heart of the problem with quasi-public spaces: what responsibility do owners of such places have to their surrounding community?
“It gave the community its identity,” says Simone Gabbay, founder of the Don Mills Friends, an organization formed out of concern over the redevelopment. “The new centre will not really be geared to the community.”
In an interview in Business Edge magazine this year, Cadillac Fairview’s president and CEO, Peter Sharpe, said Don Mills Mall will be redeveloped into “an outdoor-lifestyle centre that will transform the space and the community into a mixed-use, residential, retail and office space,” using language that, though describing what Don Mills has always been, has Don Millers on edge about the future of their community.