Marlborough Avenue is a wonderful urban hodgepodge. Connecting Yonge Street and Avenue Road just south of Summerhill, it's a pretty little walk offering a little bit of everything: a heritage commercial building, Victorian workers' housing, the racket of the occasional freight train, a former gravel yard that's now home to a racquet club, and an award-winning architect's home. It's even the subject of a published tale of the David-versus-Goliath variety.
Care to join me? We'll start at Avenue Road and Dupont Street, near the Hare Krishna temple. See the variety store just to the north? The hardscrabble part of Marlborough is hiding behind it, cheek by jowl with the railroad tracks. Here, Canadian Pacific has peremptorily pinched the street's western end -- called Marlborough Place -- to a mere 14 feet, allowing only garages that belong to homes on MacPherson Avenue to stake a claim.
As we leave Avenue Road's constant swooshing of automobiles echoing through the underpass, it's like donning a pair of earmuffs. Marlborough, uniquely positioned about a dozen feet above Avenue Road and a dozen feet below the railway, is so insulated from noise it's like the quiet after a freshly fallen snow -- except, of course, when a train goes by.
Walking past the brambly barrier walls, flat-faced railway-worker row houses from the 1880s appear right at the sidewalk's edge, as if they've cast away their front yards to keep a better eye on the tracks.
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After passing a few typical bay-n-gables, Marlborough reasserts itself and bends away from the tracks, gaining the confidence to call itself an avenue. The north side opens up to allow parking for the hulking cinderblock mass of the York Racquets Club, which displaced the dusty Canada Building Materials yard in 1970. (Because of its proximity to the railroad, Marlborough had been zoned industrial until then and permitted such uses.)
The racquet club had relocated from its former site east of Yonge near North Toronto Station (which has been occupied by the LCBO since 1940) in preparation for a megacomplex to be built by the CPR's real estate arm, Marathon Realty.
The project -- "Summerhill square" -- would have seen the demolition of Darling and Pearson's gorgeous 1916 beaux arts station to allow the building of a 36-storey high-rise and assorted medium-rise towers over a two-storey shopping complex, with two movie theatres and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Thankfully, it never left the drawing board of WZMH Architects.
Had it been built, the increased traffic flow would have been handled by a giant ramp on tiny Marlborough. To prevent southbound cars from tying up traffic while waiting to turn left, drivers would have turned right on Marlborough, and climbed the expressway-style ramp. It would have curved around and ran along the railroad tracks, depositing cars at the complex on the east side of Yonge.
While no houses would've been demolished for this monstrosity since there weren't any on the northwest side of the street, it would have been positioned well back from Yonge on Marlborough -- 250 feet to be exact -- directly in front of numbers 17, 19 and 21. Fearing for the safety of the street's children, for property values, aesthetics and even noise and light pollution, residents banded together to defend their street against this Goliath.
Luckily, York University history professor and author Jack Granatstein was a resident and avid participant in their year-long and ultimately victorious struggle, which he painstakingly documented in a slim, 130-page volume called Marlborough Marathon: One street against a developer (A. M. Hakkert Ltd. and James Lewis & Samuel, publishers, 1971). It's required reading for anyone who thinks they can't make a difference.
Something to ponder as we look for number 83A, one of Marlborough's newest additions: Where a single-car garage once stood is architect Drew Mandel's award-winning modern townhouse. Because it doesn't insult surrounding Victorians by wearing their clothes on its small frame and opts instead for a clean, unfussy façade, it looks much wider than its 13 feet.
Finally, as we approach Yonge and the end of our tour, we see a mews-like housing development on the north side (where the ramp would have been) and, on the southwest corner, architect William Sparling's gorgeous 1930 Pierce-Arrow auto dealership, now an office supply store. Most of us remember this building as the CBC's studio four, where legendary comic duo Wayne and Shuster taped their specials.
While there's so much that's insensitive about the oversized, corrugated and very red signage, good bones and exquisite carvings by sculptor Merle Foster are still visible (she did some work on Casa Loma, too).
If you take a closer look, you'll see what appears to be an impish ballerina, parent and child griffins, and proof of the building's original purpose: a stylized crouching figure cradling a winged wheel in his right hand and a tiny, circa 1930 automobile in his left. These three-quarter-century-old carvings alone make for a worthy grand finale.
Spring's here: Got your walking shoes on?
Dave LeBlanc hosts The Architourist on CFRB Sunday mornings. Inquiries can be sent to dave.leblanc@globeandmail.ca.
