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The DMV area in general I think has development patterns and urban characteristics not unlike Toronto, skyscrapers and gridded suburbs being the obvious major differences. Both are centralized post-war metros with sizable pre-war cores (CBD and neighborhood), post-war rapid transit systems, hard city proper boundaries that incorporate a good amount of the hybrid form, and sprawly suburbs not really oriented around commuter railroads. DC suburbs are a mess, very reminiscent of Atlanta with the random street layouts and forested topography. |
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South Pasadena is a traditional streetcar suburb based on the definition I've been using. Even though it's served by light rail, the rail line runs along a mostly exclusive ROW and not in the middle of a corridor sharing a surface with automobile traffic. Then there's Claremont, also originally built around the PE, but it's served by traditional commuter rail because it's a stop along a line that extends beyond LA County (Claremont will eventually have light rail as well). Everything from Ventura to Santa Monica to Beverly Hills to Pasadena to San Bernardino to Riverside to Long Beach to Anaheim to Huntington Beach to San Clemente started out as suburbs that over time became satellite cities, large suburbs, "technically suburbs but not really," suburban-form areas that were absorbed by LA city, and suburbs that remained such in both form and function. LA's complicated. LIRR and even the NYC Subway started out as trolleys/streetcars, so it's all semantics. South Pasadena is a streetcar suburb that's more like an older East Coast bedroom community than an older neighborhood in Toronto city proper one square block removed from Old Toronto. |
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Other Toronto streetcar suburbs are: West Hill Cliffside Birch Cliff Riverdale (see video) The Beaches North Toronto Parkdale New Toronto Mimico Long Branch Montreal streetcar suburbs Lachine St Laurent Cartierville Sault-au-Récollet Westmount Outremont Notre-Dame-de-Grâce Ottawa Streetcar Suburbs Hintonburg Westboro Glebe Old Ottawa South Old Ottawa East Rockcliffe Park Vancouver Streetcar Suburbs Kitsilano Mount Pleasant Fairview Grandview-Woodland Dunbar-Southlands Kerrisdale |
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As I said, suburbs are ultimately an extension and product of the city. Suburbanites are still living in apartments and townhouses and crowding the buses. Some might call it "dystopia" but that affects Toronto too. Look these "inner ring" neighbourhoods highlighted by the OP, what would happen to them if the adjacent neighbourhoods were completely car-dependent? How many parking lots would be needed? That is not what I would call utopia. Btw, the Not Just Bikes guy makes a lot of sensationalist and misleading claims about Toronto and its suburbs. He once made a video presenting suburban transit in the GTA as nothing more than a bunch of parking lots and a few rush hour only GO Trains to and from downtown, which is obviously bullshit, even if you exclude Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough. I wouldn't take anything he says too seriously. |
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One thing I'm still not sure I agree with is that streetcar suburbs thoroughly pre-date the automobile era, which begins as early as the turn of the century. LA neighborhoods like Highland Park and Angelino Heights all feature wider-than-desirable streets and front-facing driveways. I also didn't realize that mews/mid-block alleys were for originally for horse-drawn carriages, rather than the much-tinier automobiles back in the day. So that must mean the homes with driveways were originally front yards. |
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Railroad suburbs were decades older, dating to the mid 19th century. While they typically didn't have heavy industry, they were otherwise built on the model of a miniature city, with a downtown commercial area by the railroad station. In addition, they were constructed prior to the idea that social classes should be residentially segregated, meaning even in quite wealthy ones there was always a poorer side of town for "the help" to live in (along with people like shopkeepers, etc.) The main method you engaged with community was on foot, you just commuted into the city via rail. In contrast, a streetcar suburb (which began being a thing in the last decade of the 19th century) was explicitly set up with segregation of classes and uses in mind. Developers would plot out the whole neighborhood at once, and favored very long linear blocks (which weren't best from a pedestrian perspective) because it meant more salable lots. Not only were all industrial uses segregated out, but often commercial districts were very small and widely spaced as well, because the original setup of the streetcar was they would stop on every corner quite frequently, allowing travel to a more distant commercial node for shopping. Mixes of housing typologies became rarer (more SFH-dominant) and generally speaking mixing of income levels was not part of the original design (though if they went more upscale/downscale, the housing size/quality could change over time. |
The purpose of long narrow blocks of streetcar suburbs were to make it easier to walk to the streetcar stop, minimizing barriers and walking distances for pedestrians. They were still built for pedestrians. This is in contrast to car-oriented suburbs which are not designed to offer pedestrians straight path to the bus stop.
The car-oriented suburb has a strict hierarchy of roads from freeways, major arterials, minor arterials, major collectors, minor collectors, local roads or side streets. In a streetcar suburb, there is only the main street and the side streets. The streetcar suburb also has a much higher density of intersections compared to the car-oriented suburb. It is not "fundamentally suburban" by today's standards. It's not the 19th century anymore. To idealize a "miniature city" is not urban anymore, it might even be anti-urban. Urban areas are millions of people now. The streetcar suburb, designed for the big city, is the most urban now. You want to build a transit-oriented neighbourhood, you focus on the corridors, not the train station. An isolated neighbourhood with a train station is not going to work anymore. |
Don Mills, which began development in 1953, was blueprint for what came later in the GTA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Mills |
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Southern Etobicoke is a mix of interwar and postwar suburbs.
Three lakefront communities - Mimico, New Toronto and Long Branch - were incorporated as municipalities in the early 20th century (and amalgamated into the borough of Etobicoke in 1967): https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6125...7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6175...7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6014...7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5988...7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5953...7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5949...7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5965...7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5956...7i16384!8i8192 |
Softee did another tour of Bathurst St./Lawrence Manor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9NVn4BLb8E My guess is most would put Forest Hill, Vaughan Road and Mount Dennis-Weston under "urban" and Etobicoke lakeshore and Lawrence Manor as "suburban." Not sure if there's any other Toronto neighborhoods worth profiling. I'll do Vancouver next. |
Do Torontonians generally like the more unkempt aesthetic of the city (i.e. power lines, less manicured softscapes)? Or is there this idea that in order to fully "seize the mantle" away from Montreal, polishing up the cityscape is a must?
Toronto's quirks and shabbiness are what make it interesting. It provides a nice and much-needed juxtaposition against all the look-alike residential towers going up. I also don't get why Montreal's urbanism is viewed so much more favorably than Toronto's. Montreal's pre-war residential architecture looks very utilitarian, though the form is more "fine-grained." Toronto's stock, while not wall-to-wall, is more charming IMO. The streets are also narrower, so it appears. |
There's no dispute that Toronto is Canada's largest city. It's nearly twice the size of Montreal, richer, more diverse. So I don't think anyone cares about "upping" Montreal.
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Remember when AOC said that defunding the police would be like a suburb?
The implication is that suburbia is generally prosperous, which has a lot of truth to it in the US, even though suburbs come in all sorts of forms. That analogy to Canadians, "suburb" means "average" or "the masses", monotonous etc. Suburbs are for the masses or maybe "new money", not the elites. People in West Vancouver, say, will go to great pains to say their community is "not suburban" (because it has "character", it's not mass tract suburbia etc.) I even recall some posters here insist that Port Credit isn't "suburban" because it's "old" and has character. (There are of course some wealthy suburbs, like Oakville and West Vancouver, but they're considered exceptional). |
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When people talk about streetcar suburbs, they don't mean that they're currently suburbs. They just mean areas that originated in that way from that era. |
Yes streetcar suburbs were suburbs a century ago or more, and they developed between (roughly) 1890 and 1930. Most streetcar suburbs today are functionally urban.
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