December 23, 2006
Trees
I know less than I should about this sort of thing, but some of the enormous ancient maples in our part of Riverdale - the ones with a diameter over three feet - seem like they must have been planted before the Playter land sale in 1912, which triggered much of the development on and around the Danforth.
As far as I can tell from the city archives site, the answer seems to be that the builders worked around existing trees in many cases, unlike the common practice now. Here are some examples. Images link to larger versions on the archives site -
May 11, 1912 - New houses on Carlaw seen across Withrow Park - a large tree can be seen behind one of them. I think the streets on either side are Wroxeter and Strathcona.
February 24, 1913 - Logan at (I think) Grandview, seen from the middle of Withrow Park. These houses would all have been new. It's hard to see, but there's a fairly mature tree at extreme right in front of a house on Logan.
February 24, 1913 (again) - Looking northeast across Withrow Park toward Carlaw and McConnell. There are at least two mature trees visible near the corner of the park, but a third is harder to see - see below.
October 1, 1913 - Withrow Park under construction. This is the most revealing picture of the set. Again, we're looking across the park toward Carlaw and McConnell, from north of the modern west playground. At centre-left and centre-right, we have really large freshly planted trees, 25 or 30 feet tall, which I think are silver maples.
If you have the budget, this is one way of getting a mature tree cover in a hurry. I'd be interested to see if these two trees still exist. At right, we have a man and team of horses filling in a garden bed with topsoil.
This area actually floods all the time - I have the impression there's a natural spring there.
January 17, 1914 - In this shot, what looked like one tree south of Holy Name (centre) turns out to be two, fairly close together.
Posted by Patrick at December 23, 2006 05:54 PM