It's already too late for Norden Crescent.
Driving along its gentle asphalt arc, Jonathan Mousley and I are amazed at the number of "monster homes" that seem to have eaten the smaller, architect-designed Don Mills types. Do they taste better on this street?
Probably not, since the view driving down many streets in this once architecturally focused neighbourhood is getting increasingly blurry with all the teardowns.
"Some people are completely clueless about what fits and what doesn't and they don't frankly care," says Mr. Mousley, 40, vice-president of the 1,300-member ratepayers association, Don Mills Residents Inc. (DMRI). "They just see their own home; they don't see it as part of a neighbourhood, as part of the community, and that's unfortunate."
Unfortunate may be a gross understatement.
It's too late for Kirkdale Crescent, too; just behind the fences that line Leslie Street, north of Lawrence, the monsters crowd together, forming a beast with many backs. Banbury Road was devoured years ago. DMRI president Terry West says another street, Hurlingham Crescent, is "75 per cent gone."
Do the math: In five or 10 more years, these examples won't be the exceptions, they'll be the rule, and urban planner Macklin Hancock's dream of a garden city will be so trampled upon by these architectural Bigfoots, it'll be all but unrecognizable.
So what's so recognizable or special about Don Mills?
That's a question residents of this modernist mecca must ask themselves, and soon. If the answer is nothing, then nothing needs to be done, since construction of lot-hungry, faux-historic McMansions is completely within the legal rights of developers and individuals. But, if it's determined there is something special, and that something is based on original architecture, aesthetics and community, then there's only one weapon that works against the monsters, Mr. Mousley says.
A lifelong resident of Don Mills until five years ago, Mr. Mousley, with help from others, has just unleashed the city's newest heritage conservation district (HCD) in Riverdale, where he now resides with his wife and two children.
In a nutshell, when an HCD is created, a set of agreed-upon guidelines is established, and they are then turned into by-laws. Champions of postwar modernist architecture will agree that Don Mills is no place for stuccoed Georgian boxes sporting ostentatious columns and pediments, so specific items such as these could, in essence, be outlawed for future development.
Don Mills-specific features, such as ground-hugging roofs, muted paint schemes and smaller footprints (relative to the large lots), would be enforced for additions to existing houses and the construction of new ones. And if, for example, a restriction involving exterior paint colours became a sticking point during preliminary discussions, it could be excluded, since the rules can be as lax or as tough as residents desire.
"An HCD doesn't say that you can't have change, what it does is it allows change to happen within certain guidelines," explains Mr. Mousley. "Of course," he adds, "if you have too many loopholes, then why bother doing it?"
But HCDs aren't just about aesthetics, Mr. West points out. "When these monster homes come in, they do change the character of the area, so I think it goes beyond architecture."
Not only has Mr. West been cataloguing DMRI member complaints about monster homes for the past decade, he knows of at least one couple who moved elsewhere in Don Mills when the monsters marched onto their street.
"In many cases, [monster homeowners]are putting fences around their properties," he explains. Since these people are also "fairly wealthy," he adds, they don't do their own landscaping.
"In the old community, people used to go out and cut their own lawns and chat with their neighbours, and the implementation of these monster homes in a great number, [this couple]felt, had destroyed the community spirit."
And speaking of community, that's exactly where an HCD must begin. While the DMRI is willing to assist any initiative (possibly even with funding), getting neighbours warmed to the idea must be done at the grassroots level.
"What it would really involve is someone taking the bull by the horns and being the lead person who goes around, maybe who walks their dog and talks to people outside," explains Mr. Mousley, who studied urban planning at the London School of Economics and now works for the Ontario government.
It could even start with just one street, since there is no minimum requirement (tiny Draper Street in the King/Spadina neighbourhood is an HCD). Any street in the northwest quadrant - where the very first homes were built on Jocelyn Crescent in 1953 - that retain their original look would do.
A good example is Overton Crescent and its tiny cul-de-sac appendage, Overton Place. As Mr. Mousley and I cruise along it and admire the large, tidy front yards, we note that even the inevitable additions and alterations done over the past half-century have been handled sensitively.
Paul Zanettos, 32, a media relations consultant for George Brown College who lives on Overton Place, agrees: "My neighbours have a genuine respect for the look of the neighbourhood." Good thing, since a big part of his decision to move to his current home three years ago had to do with the mid-century modern architecture.
"I'm not a big fan of homes in older neighbourhoods that resemble builder homes in the 905."
Should something happen on Overton or a similar street, other streets would likely follow once residents realized establishment of an HCD doesn't mean the death of property values, but rather the reverse. With HCDs comes predictability and stability - prospective buyers now know that their across-the-street view of a low roof capped by distant pines won't be obliterated - and this keeps property values high.
Ask Jeff Wills. After first opposing a proposed HCD in his own Bowmanville neighbourhood in 2004, he conducted the most extensive private survey ever done, speaking with representatives from every HCD in the country. In all but one case of a small town declaring its commercial district an HCD, the response was overwhelmingly positive, and it convinced him to post a sign on his front lawn dispelling common myths associated with HCDs. To attract neighbours to the sign, he painted the pillars on his 1890 home purple.
But even if it's possible to convince Don Mills residents that an HCD won't hit their wallets or rob them of their rights as homeowners, it may be a hard sell suggesting mid-century modern architecture is worthy of the same kind of protection afforded to places such as Cabbagetown.
Heritage architect Catherine Nasmith says, however, that "[Don Mills]is as important to Canadian planning and architecture as any Georgian development is to British planning. No one would think of defacing a Georgian row, yet we have little to prevent the destruction of Canada's modern heritage. This was the period of Canada's coming of age, just before the Centennial."
Mr. Mousley agrees: "It said a lot about how we were evolving as a county. What a departure from Leaside, which was built 20 years before.
"Terminal One, the Bata building, the Inn on the Park, those kinds of buildings, we didn't build a lot of them in Canada and it's a snapshot in time," he continues. "And once it's lost, it's lost, because we're not building things like this any more."
Postwar 'hoods get some love
St. Mary's in Kitchener is Canada's only neighbourhood built just after the Second World War to be designated a heritage conservation district. It's a grouping of small, unadorned homes constructed in the mid to late 1940s by the federal government to provide "low-cost rental housing at a time of considerable need." The HCD designation was approved in 2002.
There are invaluable diagrams illustrating the appropriate ways to put an addition on the rear of a home without detracting from its front in a 68-page PDF available at www.kitchener.ca/pdf/heritage_plan_st_marys.pdf
In the United States, the first post-Second World War neighbourhood to achieve historic-district status on the National Register of Historic Places is Denver's Arapahoe Acres, built between 1949 and 1957.
While the number of architects involved there was far fewer than in Don Mills, the neighbourhood of post-and-beam homes with an "earth-tone palette and horizontal forms" has more in common, architecturally, with the Ontario community than St. Mary's does.
The Arapahoe Acres website, www.arapahoeacres.org, has much that might be of interest in its "standards" section, since the conservation of modernist buildings is so vastly different than with historic styles.
As the site points out, homes can be "easily compromised by small alterations that might seem insignificant." For instance: "Cement block and plywood, widely utilized by modernist architects, are often targeted for refinishing or removal because they are regarded as 'common.'" The same holds true for details such as original doors, screen doors, gates, fences and street numbers.
All of these things would hold true in Don Mills, as would this last point: "By today's standard, the largest of homes in Arapahoe Acres appear small."
Terry West, president of Don Mills Residents Inc., says: "Regretfully, all that developers see is a small house sitting on a big lot that's close to downtown, and they see dollars."
Dave LeBlanc