On the surface, Wychwood Park seems like the backdrop for a fairy tale.
The private enclave of 60 homes near Davenport Road and Bathurst Street has it all: a leafy, village-like setting; a cast of larger-than-life characters, including Marshall McLuhan; and a once-upon-a-time founding parable in which artists carved out a place of their own in the city.
"It's like a kind of 18th-century, pastoral English village," says Douglas Goold, who moved to Wychwood Park with his wife, Libby Znaimer, in 1992. With its storied past, the neighbourhood attracts - and retains, often for generations - families determined to preserve the Wychwood way of life.
By all accounts, Albert Fulton was the head of just such a family.
The 70-year-old retired mathematics teacher was the archetypical Wychwood guardian. He preserved the community's past with his meticulous archives and protected its present by serving as captain of the Neighbourhood Watch squad.
That is why Mr. Fulton's tragic death and the surreal events that preceded it have shone new light on the neighbourhood - particularly on the gulf that separates the old keepers of Wychwood's traditions from the community's newer residents.
"The demographic is changing as new people move in and old people die or leave," said Mr. Goold, president of the Canadian International Council, a non-partisan think tank. "There probably is some tension as a result of that. The world changes and people change with it."
Mr. Fulton's body was discovered in Lake Ontario on Thursday, nearly a month after he was arrested and charged with mischief, criminal harassment and disguising himself to commit a crime. (Police haven't publicly identified the body, but a police source confirmed to The Globe and Mail it is Mr. Fulton.)
Toronto Police charged Mr. Fulton after a security camera captured a figure in a balaclava repeatedly slashing the tires of an SUV parked in front of the home of Matthew Swarney and Laura Shuttleworth, parents of five and relative newcomers who broke Wychwood's unofficial rule against on-street parking, which is "really more of an informal suggestion," trustee Jennifer Lofft told The Globe. Mr. Fulton's wife of 46 years, Emily, told a news conference last Friday that her husband's arrest and the publicity that followed worsened his pre-existing depression.
The usually jovial and friendly man was rushed to hospital after he was charged, then disappeared a few days later in his 2001 red Daewoo Lanos.
The car was found a week later in a parking lot near the Toronto Harbour.
The tragedy has shaken many in Wychwood Park, turning the already insular community further inward.
Many residents have declined to speak to the media, saying they don't want to make matters worse for the community and for the Fulton family.
Those who will speak are quick to profess their love for Wychwood Park. But they also admit the neighbourhood is evolving.
"Certainly the rise in property values has seen a shift in the community," says Joe Mihevc (Ward 21, St. Paul's), the city councillor who has represented the area for 16 years.
"Whereas it used to be more arts- and culture-oriented, now it is more diverse. They [the arts-and-culture types]would represent the older part of the community and the newer part would be a variety of people from entrepreneurs to lawyers and so on."
Others say this shift is being exaggerated.
Gwen Rapoport, widow of public intellectual Anatol Rapoport, has lived in the park for nearly 40 years. She speaks with pride about the history of her neighbourhood and believes that the demographic changes haven't affected the park's identity.
"I've always had the feeling that there's a very civil relationship and people care for each other as neighbours and feel very citizenly toward the park," she said. "We do not ignore the people in the park, there's probably - more or less - intimacy between neighbours."
Despite Wychwood's evolution, the park's old self-governance system remains in place.
Three unelected trustees run the park, overseeing repairs to the area's private roads, ensuring that the roads are plowed in the winter and keeping up the tennis courts and pond. When one trustee leaves, a replacement steps up or is chosen by the current trustees.
At least three recent issues have upped the tension in the multimillion-dollar neighbourhood.
Many from the community have written letters denouncing a developer's plans to tear down a home in the southeast corner of the park and build a set of townhouses, Mr. Goold said.
The renovation and conversion of the former Toronto Transit Commission Wychwood car barns into an artists' colony slated to open this fall has also divided the community.
And the 18-month tire-slashing incident, which had already set the community on edge, has prompted another conflict: Ms. Shuttleworth and Mr. Swarney, whose tires were slashed, allegedly blamed their next-door neighbours for the vandalism at first. The neighbours, Mitchell and Maya Worsoff, filed a $1.5-million defamation lawsuit against Ms. Shuttleworth and Mr. Swarney in June.
It's all a far cry from what English landscape painter Marmaduke Matthews envisioned when he arrived in the area in 1873. He went on to found the self-governing artists' colony, named after the Wychwood Forest near his childhood home, Oxfordshire. By the early 20th century, architect Eden Smith, best known for designing homes in the arts and crafts style, built more Wychwood homes. The community continued to grow until 60 or so homes lined the small round crescent surrounding a duckweed-covered pond.
Mr. McLuhan, the celebrated University of Toronto intellectual who coined the axiom "the medium is the message," moved to Wychwood in 1968. He lived and worked in a home overlooking Taddle Creek pond until his death in 1980.
His house was sold May 27 for $2.2 million.
Mr. Fulton was passionate about preserving stories of the community's better-known residents, but he seemed equally dedicated to archiving the minutiae of daily life in Wychwood.
He was famous for typing "News from the Archives" flyers, photocopying them on green paper and hand-delivering them door to door.
The newsletters are full of residents' reminiscences of shared backyards, borrowed milk and eggs, and neighbourhood get-togethers.
Mr. Fulton carefully recorded each death and included tributes from neighbours of the deceased.
The fading generation met at tea parties and skating parties or over tennis, and walked their dogs in the quiet enclave, greeting friends as they navigated the green streets.
A crossword puzzle devoted to the neighbourhood encouraged locals to sniff out information about each other, the better to solve the clues; the answers were revealed at a puzzle party.
In a document titled, "Information for New Residents of the Park," provided by Mr. Goold, newcomers are requested not to park cars on the road of the park, because it is "more attractive and safer for children."
They are also encouraged to go through the park's trustees when they have a complaint, rather than contacting city officials themselves, and to run proposed landscaping changes by the same trustees.
Finally, they are asked to make sure their garbage cans are kept at the curbside for the minimum time possible, so as not to "mar" the park's streets.
John Lambert, who now lives on Avenue Road, was attracted to the small-English-`village feel of Wychwood Park when he bought his 7,000-square-foot home there in 1997, but he was soon fed up with the nitpicky rules that came with a community tied to a heritage conservation plan, but facilitated by a group of people set in their ways, he said.
"We always joked, people were born there, then their parents died, then they lived in their parents' house and then they died. That's very stereotypical about a lot of people in the park," he said.
"Change is something that is not in their vernacular."