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If these walls could talk ... A silly notion to be sure, but I went to listen anyway.

Sitting with vacant, boarded-up stares like death-row prisoners and wearing demolition permits like badges of shame, more than a dozen large, fine houses and one small apartment building across from High Park have outlived their usefulness. Concentrated in a big U-shape made by Bloor Street West, Oakmount Road and Pacific Avenue, they're a kind of ghost town within the big city.

I didn't go to cry, or to determine which sturdy brick porch pillar would be best to chain myself to when the bulldozers come, since their demolition is a fait accompli. No, I went to walk among these husks because, being a hopeless romantic, I thought their peeling, leaking walls might have something to tell me — to tell all of us — about the future of our city.

In my fertile imagination, when I put my ear to the wall of No. 6 Oakmount, a big house in the middle of the block, it breaks the ice by telling me about some of the little things that have happened over the decades: the day the little boy next door fell off his bicycle and broke his leg, and how his father propped him up against the cool brick wall and kept him calm until the ambulance arrived. Over there, on a porch swing that used to sit underneath rusting wind chimes, a romance that lasted more than 50 years was first ignited. And after silly old No. 37 Pacific leaked rain all over Christmas dinner one year, it was scalped and got a nice new asphalt hat.

The ice sufficiently broken, I start by telling my new friends about the kind of year Toronto architecture had in 2006. I recount the story of the Canadian Trend House program. Did they know the very first of 11 exhibition homes sponsored by a British Columbia lumber consortium was built at 48 Rathburn Rd. in Etobicoke's Thorncrest Village in 1952? With only one owner, it remained virtually unchanged — a veritable textbook of what Canada was thinking about housing in those early postwar years — until it was knocked down in May despite the best efforts of a handful of heritage-minded people.

I recount the tale of Issy Sharp's Inn on the Park at Eglinton Avenue and Leslie Street. While technically a collection of bedrooms rather than an actual house, it shocks them to hear of its unceremonious end. Up the street, I continue, the heart of a neighbourhood, the Don Mills Centre, has just been ripped out, causing uproar in the community. The former Riverdale hospital lives with the sword of Damocles dangling over its head, as does the former Bata Shoe headquarters at Eglinton and the Don Valley Parkway. Walnut Hall, John Tully's 1850s Georgian townhouse complex on Shuter Street east of Jarvis — a “recognized federal heritage building,” according to a City of Toronto report — is dying slowly of neglect and might soon meet the wrecker's ball.

“Will the wrecking ball hurt?” they ask in my fantasy, really thinking of their own fate.

“Not if you close your eyes and think about the nice things that may be built in their place,” I offer. “It also helps to remember that cities change and grow — areas that were once grey and industrial can become verdant communities and, sometimes, verdant communities of single-family houses sometimes need to be something else, like higher-density ones.”

Of course, that leads to a wider discussion of constructing new buildings or saving old ones, and the little-used option of “adaptive reuse,” whereby a developer restores old houses by giving them a different purpose. Even better, I point out, old houses sometimes get restored and, new again, have children living in them who fall off bicycles, and teenagers who ignite romances on front porches. Developers might build the higher-density stuff in behind the restored homes, like Jack Diamond and Barton Myers did back in 1976 with their award-winning Sherbourne Lanes. Similarly, Beaverbrook's Printing Factory Lofts in Leslieville will preserve the 1913 factory on Carlaw Avenue by placing a new tower smack dab in the courtyard. So it can be done.

We conclude that it's too easy to blame developers looking to make money, since that's their right. It's more some developers' lack of vision. With a little sensitivity to our architectural heritage and more money invested at the beginning, they'd benefit financially in the long run, and generate some good urban karma in the process.

It's unfortunate things weren't different here, across the street from High Park, but their slumped brick shoulders tell me these houses know their time has come. Better to remember a life well-lived, shelter that was given when needed, and hope that we all can take a valuable lesson from their departure.

As I walk to my car, I decide to return in a few years to see what has risen from their ashes. And to all of you, dear readers, who have weathered this difficult year for heritage in Toronto, I suggest you do the same.

Dave LeBlanc hosts The Architourist on CFRB Wednesdays during Toronto at Noon and Sunday mornings. Send inquiries to dave.leblanc@globeandmail.com.