On the east side of Toronto is a north-south street called Craven Road. It runs from Queen Street in the south to Danforth Avenue in the north. It's an odd street in that there are only homes on one side of it -- the east side. The west side is fenced off. No garages. No laneway suites. Just one long fence separating Craven Road from the backyards belonging to the homes on neighboring Ashdale Avenue. Given that Craven Road is a real city street with things like services and a name, you might be wondering, as I did, why this condition exits. Surely the people on Ashdale Avenue would be better off if they took proper advantage of their "through lots."

What gives?

Turns out there is a reason for this and it dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. Before 1923, Craven Road was actually called Erie Terrace. It began its life as a smaller laneway outside of the city and was initially home to a "shacktown." The street was a kind of linear slum, housing new immigrants and providing a place for people to cheaply throw up whatever they could afford to build.

For a variety of reasons, Erie Terrace eventually became a problem and the City decided that it would be best to widen the street from its varying 18 foot width to the then standard 33 feet. The widening work was authorized in 1911. But as is always the case, there were a few problems. Who would pay for it? The City would pay for a bit of it, but the expectation was that the residents along Erie Terrace would also chip in. And since Erie Terrace was technically a one-sided street, they were in effect being asked to pay double what was typical at the time. Usually the burden would get split across both sides of the street.

There was also a socioeconomic question. The residents on Ashdale Avenue were thought to be wealthier than those on Erie Terrace and so they supposedly wanted the squalor out of their backyards. The City also had concerns that residents along Ashdale would use this double frontage to do wild and crazy things, such as build garages, sheds, and backyard cottages. Clearly there would be no room for such oddities after the widening.

I'm not sure which problem proved to be the thorniest, but ultimately a solution was found. Erie Terrace would be widened, but the City would retain a small sliver of land on the west side of it and erect a wooden fence in perpetuity. This would keep both groups separate and ensure that the folks on Ashdale -- who had contributed some of their land, but not any money -- didn't get use of the road. And it has remained this way for over a century.

If you ask me, it seems silly to keep this fence up. This is an ideal street to infill with laneway suites and other missing middle-type housing. But I'm sure I'm not the first person to stumble upon this east end anachronism. For a more detailed history lesson on the Craven Road fence, click here.

Later this month the new 9.7 km North-South metro line in Amsterdam will start service. Like most large scale infrastructure projects, its opening has been delayed many times. 8 times according to this source. But this post is not about that. It’s about a byproduct of the line’s construction. 

The excavations required for the line meant that two sections of the Amstel River – namely the Damrak and Rokin sites – had to be drained. This took place from 2003 to 2012 and gave archaeologists unprecedented access to the bottom of a river in the middle of a historic city center.

Amsterdam started as a small trading port along the banks of the Amstel River some 800 years ago. So not surprisingly, they found a few things. Over 17,000 objects were found and all of them have been catalogued online according to time period, use, material, and location found.

For the full catalogue of objects, click here. Screenshot of the catalogue shown above. And to learn more about the entire project, start here. There’s a lot of good stuff in there for city nerds.

At the time of writing this post, it’s still 2015 – at least here in Toronto. But by the time you (subscribers) get this post in your inbox, it will be 2016. So happy new year! I am thrilled about getting this year started and I hope you feel the same way.

To kick things off, I thought I would share a great interactive post from Guardian Cities called, A history of cities in 50 buildings. It’s a look at our urban history through 50 important and pivotal buildings. Buildings such as Southdale Center, which was the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall, and Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, which was a building that really set the stage for the modern skyscraper that we know today.

Not all of these buildings have left a positive legacy on our cities. I am sure that some of you would argue that the creation of the suburban shopping mall, with its corresponding “sea of parking”, was not a step forward for cities, but a step backwards. The architect behind Southdale Center, Victor Gruen, has even gone on record saying that he refuses “to pay alimony for those bastard developments.” He hated the shopping mall.

But like them or not, these buildings are part of our urban history, and I think it’s not only interesting but important to understand their impacts. If you want to see which important buildings were missed, at least according to Guardian readers, click here. I have to say that I was happy to see both Montréal and Toronto represented in the original list, as well as a few other buildings that I’ve written about here.

On that note, happy new year to you all, again, and many thanks for reading Architect This City. If you have any suggestions for content you would like to see on this blog in 2016, please leave it in the comment section below. This may be my personal blog, but my goal is to make it valuable for all of you. Hopefully I achieve that sometimes.