What Roncesvalles Avenue used to look like

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Approaching Toronto from the southwest about a century ago, Roncesvalles Avenue would have been the first well developed north/south strip that one encountered. Despite the expansion and intensification that's taken place in the years that have intervened, the street has somehow managed to retain the feeling of a main drag, like the kind that you find in small towns all across North America.

Bearing in mind that the city of Toronto came to be through a series of annexations of surrounding villages â in this particular case, Brockton and Parkdale â drag-like qualities of this type make perfect sense. Some of our streets really were the primary strips of smaller towns that were eventually subsumed by the big city.

Roncesvalles probably also owes some of this remaining vibe to the fact that it was once a major transportation hub and the entrance point to the city's most popular summer destination, Sunnyside Amusement Park. This was, at a certain point in time, the beginning and end of this side of the city, where people departed for suburbs like New Toronto and Port Credit on the old commuter streetcars or came to get away from the hustle and bustle of downtown.

Moving northward, photos from the 1910s show that the area around the Revue Cinema near Howard Park was much the same as it is today: lined with small businesses and eateries that serviced the residential community that surrounds the street. Many of these buildings still exist, though the Revue is one of the few businesses that has managed survive the long haul (temporary closure aside).

Other landmarks worth noting from the photos below are the long lost Sunnyside GTR station, the old bus terminal (now a McDonald's) at the foot of the street, the Edgewater Hotel (now a plastered-over Day's Inn), the High Park Library (which has aged very well) and the gates to High Park Avenue, which offer a formal introduction to a street that once had a decidedly suburban feel, as Rick McGinnis eloquently points out in a previous post about the area. And don't forget the streetcars. Thanks partially to the presence of the Roncesvalles car house at the bottom of the street, these vehicles are a fixture in the images below.

Although the Polish presence on the street isn't as obvious as it used to be, there's still plenty evidence of the community today, be it through the annual festival or the handful of businesses that still line the street. Alas, this particular aspect of Roncesvalles' history is not as well documented photographically (at least in terms of publicly available images), and so exists as a bit of hole in the collection below.

PHOTOS