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# Rosedale and Summerhill: A Walk from Toronto's First Garden Suburb to Its Newest Rental Address
- URL: https://www.apartmentculture.ca/rosedale-and-summerhill-a-walk-from-torontos-first-garden-suburb-to-its-newest-rental-address/
- Published: 2026-09-25T00:18:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-25T00:18:15.000Z
- Author: Augustin Cassian

### **Neighbourhood Walk — Rosedale and Summerhill**

*Rosedale was laid out on a sheriff's estate and has been owned, house by house, for 170 years. At its northwest corner, beside a railway station that became a liquor store, 127 families will now rent. A walk down the ravine and back up to Yonge Street.*

**The short version.** Rosedale is a residential neighbourhood immediately northeast of Bloor and Yonge, the intersection at the centre of Toronto's subway system. It was subdivided from the estate of Sheriff William Botsford Jarvis beginning in the 1850s and is protected by two heritage conservation districts, South and North Rosedale. Summerhill is its commercial edge: a short stretch of Yonge Street around Summerhill subway station on Line 1, anchored by the 1916 North Toronto railway station, now the Summerhill LCBO. The newest building on that edge is The James, a 127-home purpose-built rental building by Tricon Living.

## How Rosedale got its winding streets

Get off the subway at Rosedale station, walk east along Crescent Road, and within two blocks the street grid simply stops behaving. Roads bend for no reason a driver can see. Sidewalks thin out. The houses sit back behind hedges, and the city's traffic noise drops away faster than it has any right to this close to Bloor Street.

The reason is older than the houses. In 1824 William Botsford Jarvis, later sheriff of the Home District, bought an estate on the plateau above the ravines north of the town of York. His wife, Mary, named it Rosedale for the wild roses on the hillsides, and the neighbourhood's own lore holds that its winding streets follow the paths she walked and rode. Whether or not that is literally true, the ravines certainly are: deep, wooded, and hard to bridge, they kept this land separate from the city growing up around it and decided where any road could go.

The estate was subdivided in 1854 as one of Canada's first garden suburbs, and the Jarvis family sold the homestead ten years later. The house itself stood near what is now Cluny Drive and Rosedale Road until 1905\. What replaced it was not a village but a pattern: large lots, curving streets, architect-designed houses in every revival style the late Victorian and Edwardian eras could produce, and a homeowners' culture that has organised to protect it for most of a century. The South Rosedale Ratepayers' Association, formed in 1931, is the oldest such group in the city, and it led the push to make South Rosedale a heritage conservation district.

For a reader from elsewhere: think of Rosedale as Toronto's equivalent of a very old, very settled inner suburb, a few minutes from downtown by subway, where almost everything is a single-family house and almost nothing has been rented in living memory. Hold that last point. It is what makes the end of this walk interesting.

## Craigleigh Gardens, Chorley Park and the Rosedale ravines

Follow Crescent Road to South Drive and turn toward Craigleigh Gardens. The park was the grounds of the Osler family estate, and its stone gates, built in 1903, were designed by Frank Darling and John Pearson. Remember the names. They will turn up again at the other end of this walk.

Craigleigh is three and a half hectares of mature trees on the lip of the ravine, with an off-leash area that the neighbourhood's dogs treat as a club. On an autumn weekday it is quiet in a way that downtown Toronto parks rarely are. From its eastern edge, paths drop into the ravine system that wraps around Rosedale: the Park Drive Ravine, which separates South Rosedale from North Rosedale, and beyond it the trails that connect down into the Don Valley.

That ravine is also why North Rosedale exists as a separate place. It was cut off from the south until a bridge was built across Park Drive in 1909; development followed over the next two decades. Before the houses, the northern plateau held St. Andrew's College, a golf club and the lacrosse grounds where, in 1909, the first Grey Cup was played. Nearer to Craigleigh, Chorley Park now occupies the site of Ontario's fourth Government House, a vast French château-style residence for the lieutenant-governor, built between 1911 and 1915 and demolished in 1961\. The house is gone. The lawn and the view east over the valley remain, and on a clear October afternoon, when the ravine canopy has turned, they are worth the detour.

## What Rosedale's heritage districts protect, and what they don't

Wind back west along the residential streets toward Yonge. This is the stretch where the heritage district does its most visible work. Additions are tucked behind. Hedges are trimmed to a height someone has clearly discussed. The streetscape reads as continuous because a century of neighbours have agreed, sometimes loudly, that it should.

It is worth being clear about what that agreement protects. Rosedale's heritage designation preserves some of the finest residential architecture in the country, and the ravine landscape is a genuine public inheritance; the trails belong to everyone. But the designation also fixes a particular way of living in place. Big houses on big lots, owner-occupied, handed down or sold on. In a city short of homes, Rosedale has added very few. That is not a scandal, and it is not unusual for old, protected neighbourhoods anywhere. It is simply the context the new building at the end of this walk is arriving into.

## The Summerhill LCBO: a 1916 railway station that became a liquor store

Come out onto Yonge Street and turn north toward the clock tower. You will see it well before you reach it: a campanile modelled on St. Mark's in Venice, about 43 metres high, rising over the railway bridge that still carries freight trains across Yonge.

This is the North Toronto station, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1916 to Darling and Pearson's design. The CPR, tired of stalled negotiations over a new Union Station downtown, moved several passenger routes to its line through the north of the city and built itself a grand terminal to receive them: Beaux-Arts, limestone from Manitoba, a waiting room with an 11.6-metre ceiling, marble walls and bronze fixtures, clock faces lit through the night. It was a bet on midtown that did not pay. The new Union Station opened in the late 1920s, and regularly scheduled passenger service at North Toronto ended in 1930.

In 1940 the building reopened as a liquor store, which means it has now sold wine and spirits for more than five times as long as it ever sold train tickets. For decades the interior was hidden behind false ceilings and wood panelling. When Woodcliffe Landmark Properties restored it in the early 2000s, with GBCA Architects handling the heritage work, the marble, the ticket wickets and the skylights were all found intact underneath. It reopened in 2003 and is now the Summerhill LCBO, one of the largest in the province. Go inside even if you are not buying anything. The waiting room is still the waiting room.

Around it, Summerhill's stretch of Yonge is one of the city's best small shopping streets for food: a butcher, a fishmonger, greengrocers and bakeries within a few hundred metres, the sort of street that quietly organises a neighbourhood's week. It is a village high street in everything but name, and it serves Rosedale the way a market town serves the estates around it.

## The James: Rosedale's new purpose-built rental

The James is the building this walk has been approaching, and it is worth looking at carefully rather than taking on its own description.

Start with the podium, because that is what people on Yonge Street will actually live with. The lower floors are brick, laid by hand, with a stepped, layered detail around the corners that catches shadow in low autumn light. It is a considered answer to the material of the old station across the street without imitating it, and it is the building's most generous gesture to the street. Above, the tower changes register to white precast and glass. COBE, known for waterfront and public-space projects in Copenhagen, is here designing a residential tower in North America, and the most interesting parts of the scheme are less the tower than what happens at its feet: a small public square with a fountain shaped like a grapefruit, a retail mews and a pedestrian route through Scrivener Square that makes this corner more walkable than it was. Whether that square becomes a real gathering place or stays a handsome forecourt is the question to come back and judge in a year.

The homes are large by any Toronto standard. The one-bedrooms start around 850 square feet, the three-bedrooms run past 2,000, and the service programme includes doormen, valet, a concierge and indoor and outdoor pools. The rents are larger still. At nearly $7,000 a month for the smallest suite, this is rental housing at the very top of the market, and it should be described that way. It does nothing for Toronto's affordability problem, and it does not claim to.

What it does test is an idea: that renting can be a deliberate choice rather than a stage on the way to ownership. The James is betting that some of the people who could buy a house in Rosedale would rather not maintain one. If that bet holds, the neighbourhood that has been owned, house by house, since the 1850s gets a new kind of resident at its edge: people who live here without owning a piece of it. The Jarvises sold their estate to speculative builders; the CPR built a palace for trains that stopped coming. This corner has changed hands and purposes before. A rental tower across from a liquor store in a railway station is simply the latest version.

## How to walk Rosedale and Summerhill yourself

The loop runs roughly three kilometres and takes about an hour and a half at an easy pace, longer if you go down into the ravine.

Start at Rosedale station on Line 1\. Walk east on Crescent Road and follow the residential streets to South Drive and Craigleigh Gardens. Continue toward Chorley Park for the view over the valley, or take the ravine paths if you want a longer walk. Loop back west toward Yonge Street, then walk north along Yonge to the Summerhill LCBO, Scrivener Square and The James. Finish at Summerhill station, one stop north of Rosedale.

Go in October, when the ravine canopy turns and the light comes in low along Yonge. Weekday afternoons are quietest in the parks; Saturday mornings are best on the shopping street.

## Frequently asked questions

**What is The James in Toronto?** The James is a 127-home purpose-built rental building at 10 Price Street in Rosedale, developed by Tricon Living. It was designed by COBE with Graziani + Corazza Architects, with interiors by Hariri Pontarini Architects.

**Is The James a condo or a rental?** It is purpose-built rental: the building has a single owner and professional management and was designed to remain rental housing.

**What is the Summerhill LCBO building?** It is the former Canadian Pacific Railway North Toronto station, built in 1916 and designed by Darling and Pearson. Passenger service ended in 1930, it became a liquor store in 1940, and it was restored and reopened in 2003.

**Where is Rosedale in Toronto?** Rosedale sits immediately northeast of Bloor and Yonge, bounded largely by ravines. It is served by Rosedale and Summerhill stations on Line 1, and it is divided into South and North Rosedale by the Park Drive Ravine.

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*Apartment Culture covers Toronto rental living through architecture, design and neighbourhood. This is an independent editorial feature; no party named in this story paid for or reviewed it.*