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  #41  
Old Posted May 16, 2023, 5:07 PM
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Reminds me of an episode of Seinfeld when George asks the group if anyone wants to go with him to Queens to help his dad fix a screen door and Kramer responds with "Yeah, I love going to the country".
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  #42  
Old Posted May 16, 2023, 5:14 PM
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Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
I can't answer that for goat314, but there are parts of Queens that would fit most definitions of suburban. It's the biggest borough by land area, and it has the most drastic change in built form of any borough. Queens goes from this to this.
That suburban area is beautiful through. All those trees, rolling landscape and the narrow, winding streets. A more authentic sense of place than in most suburban areas.
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  #43  
Old Posted May 16, 2023, 10:23 PM
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All the streetview links in this thread demonstrate how varied Toronto's built environment is. Even within the same neighborhood, it looks like 10 different cities rolled into one. It's hard (for me, at least) to identify a Toronto style.
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  #44  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 1:08 AM
Docere Docere is offline
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Yeah, you can find Queens NY, Midwestern streetcar suburbs, Wilshire Boulevard and Silver Spring/Arlington in these pics.
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  #45  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 2:21 AM
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Originally Posted by Docere View Post
Yeah, you can find Queens NY, Midwestern streetcar suburbs, Wilshire Boulevard and Silver Spring/Arlington in these pics.
There's suburban-ish neighborhoods in all of the outer boroughs. Manhattan lacks them, except for like two half-blocks in Inwood if you squint really hard.
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  #46  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 3:01 AM
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I realized I mentioned but never did Streetview pics for the Lawrence Manor area (ETA: though MonkeyRonin covered part of it).

It was built up in the 1940s and 1950s and is home to Toronto's Orthodox Jewish community as well as the Lawrence Heights housing project. A lot of apartment buildings, a good amount of street life. Many of the original homes have been replaced with larger custom homes owned by the Orthodox Jewish community.

Softee did a walk along Bathurst St.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRkzlejQhKc


Streetview pics:


https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7125...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7100...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7153...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7156...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7182...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7191...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7181...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7186...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7292...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7289...7i16384!8i8192

Last edited by Docere; May 17, 2023 at 4:22 AM.
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  #47  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 3:32 AM
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Population density (per square mile) for Toronto areas covered:

Forest Hill 15,185
Oakwood-Vaughan 24,639
Humewood-Cedarvale (Vaughan Road-St. Clair area) 19,901
Weston-Mount Dennis 17,844
Lawrence Manor 13,181

Last edited by Docere; May 17, 2023 at 4:22 AM.
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  #48  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 4:01 AM
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Toronto proves that pedestrians/transit and cars/motorists can co-exist, which is why LA can't be completely ruled out of the urban equation.

There are some obvious key differences though. Toronto is a very centralized metro, its skyscrapers in the suburbs being more of a Canadian development quirk than a representation of multi-nodality. Its urban fabric, while not as fine-grained as Brownstone Brooklyn or Center City Philly, is much stronger and effectively served by a high-frequency, station-dense rapid transit system, streetcar network, and bus lines that don't carry a stigma surrounding ridership.

Post-war suburban Toronto is worse than LA though. Even as an Angeleno, I find places like Mississauga cringey and can't understand why neighborhood subdivisions have a sidewalk on one side of the street but not the other.
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  #49  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 4:22 AM
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For quintessential hybrid urban-suburban enclaves though, Chicago has two of my favorites: Oak Park and Evanston. I love the extra-wide parkways that encourage big trees providing ample shade and garage access tucked in the mid-block alleys.

I think much of inner-city Chicago is like that as well. That's not meant to be a knock. I love the tranquility and coziness of what looks like an urban forest.
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  #50  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 2:22 PM
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Canada generally does suburbia much worse than the U.S. Toronto suburbia (the postwar stuff, to the present) is pretty terrible. More sustainable, with more bus riders and density, but otherwise pretty dystopian.

But the flipside is that their postwar narrative didn't involve white/wealth flight and so Canadian suburbia is just cheaper urban overflow, not this new world formed in reaction to urbanity's perceived ills.
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  #51  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 2:51 PM
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
Canada generally does suburbia much worse than the U.S. Toronto suburbia (the postwar stuff, to the present) is pretty terrible. More sustainable, with more bus riders and density, but otherwise pretty dystopian.

But the flipside is that their postwar narrative didn't involve white/wealth flight and so Canadian suburbia is just cheaper urban overflow, not this new world formed in reaction to urbanity's perceived ills.



From the perspective of a UN report on sustainable urban growth or whatever, North York demolishes, say, Buckhead.

From the perspective of cruising through the place... not so much.
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  #52  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 2:54 PM
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
But the flipside is that their postwar narrative didn't involve white/wealth flight and so Canadian suburbia is just cheaper urban overflow, not this new world formed in reaction to urbanity's perceived ills.
Isn't that why Toronto has a green belt?
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  #53  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 5:16 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Docere View Post
Population density (per square mile) for Toronto areas covered:

Forest Hill 15,185
Oakwood-Vaughan 24,639
Humewood-Cedarvale (Vaughan Road-St. Clair area) 19,901
Weston-Mount Dennis 17,844
Lawrence Manor 13,181
Lawrence Manor (the Orthodox Jewish area) is the most suburban of the areas I've profiled so far. It's an immediate postwar area, and still feels transitional between pre-war and post-war suburbia.
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  #54  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 11:14 PM
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The problem with comparing just the suburbs of US and Canada is no hard boundary between urban and suburban, and the suburbs do not exist in isolation from the city. Suburban is a form of urban, and the suburbs are an extension of inner city. The suburbs are reflection and a product of the city, and vice versa. To treat them as completely separate is the main problem in the first place. Brampton Transit has much higher ridership than Pace Suburban Bus. Is it merely a coincidence that the TTC also has much higher ridership than the CTA?

Pace Suburban Bus: 17,530,700 boardings in 2022
Brampton Transit: 49,200,800 boardings in 2022

CTA: 243,538,700 boardings in 2022
TTC: 577,941,400 boardings in 2022
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  #55  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 11:29 PM
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Originally Posted by Doady View Post
The problem with comparing just the suburbs of US and Canada is no hard boundary between urban and suburban, and the suburbs do not exist in isolation from the city. Suburban is a form of urban, and the suburbs are an extension of inner city. The suburbs are reflection and a product of the city, and vice versa. To treat them as completely separate is the main problem in the first place. Brampton Transit has much higher ridership than Pace Suburban Bus. Is it merely a coincidence that the TTC also has much higher ridership than the CTA?

Pace Suburban Bus: 17,530,700 boardings in 2022
Brampton Transit: 49,200,800 boardings in 2022

CTA: 243,538,700 boardings in 2022
TTC: 577,941,400 boardings in 2022
You're right, but the mythology behind American suburbia pretends otherwise. It was a clean break from the cancerous core. No such sentiment in Canada.

Also, there are almost no Americans who would agree that bus ridership is a measure of a suburb's desirability.
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  #56  
Old Posted May 17, 2023, 11:54 PM
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Most suburbia, whether American or Canadian, doesn't follow a hybrid model as far as built environment is concerned. Or perhaps it's more that the definition of what makes an area suburban-urban differs greatly between the two countries.

In the American context, it's usually referring to outer-ring inner-city enclaves and inner-ring suburbs that are more or less an extension of the former, typically with a rail station (or at the very least an imprint of a historic ROW).

Canadian cities don't really have streetcar suburbs. Instead, they have more multi-family housing and greater transit share (i.e. bus) — things that are urban characteristics on paper.

Those differences aside, do Torontonians view Mississauga, Brampton, Richmond Hill, Vaughan, and Markham as "the suburbs"? Or is it more like LA where there's less of a cultural distinction between city proper and suburb? I ask because Toronto's municipal boundaries are quite sharply defined and not as arbitrary as even NYC and Chicago. The northern boundary, where there is some bleed in development patterns, is one straight line following one equally straight thoroughfare (Steeles Avenue).
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  #57  
Old Posted May 18, 2023, 12:37 AM
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Canadian cities don't really have streetcar suburbs.
Not sure what you mean. The Oakwood and Vaughan Road-St. Clair area is streetcar suburb type development (and there's even streetcars running on St. Clair Avenue!). Unless you mean incorporated suburbs with that typology and not the urban form.


Quote:
Those differences aside, do Torontonians view Mississauga, Brampton, Richmond Hill, Vaughan, and Markham as "the suburbs"? Or is it more like LA where there's less of a cultural distinction between city proper and suburb? .
Absolutely they do. Or they're referred to as "905ers" which essentially means the same thing. While it's true that the urban form on the outer edges of Toronto isn't all that different than neighboring parts of 905, all the urban parts are in the city of Toronto. There's no patchwork, where you have some independent municipalities that are more urban than much of the city proper, like in L.A.
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  #58  
Old Posted May 18, 2023, 12:37 AM
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What are US equivalents of Forest Hill or Westmount?
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  #59  
Old Posted May 18, 2023, 12:55 AM
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Originally Posted by Docere View Post
Not sure what you mean. The Oakwood and Vaughan Road-St. Clair area is streetcar suburb type development (and there's even streetcars running on St. Clair Avenue!). Unless you mean incorporated suburbs with that typology and not the urban form.
I'd consider that an urban neighborhood built during the early days of the automobile era that was eventually absorbed into the city proper. Even if not originally Toronto proper, it has more the urban form of an outer-ring inner-city enclave than a close-in suburb with a walkable downtown and commuter rail station. I'm thinking something more along the lines of a Weston, only outside city limits.
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  #60  
Old Posted May 18, 2023, 1:01 AM
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Originally Posted by Quixote View Post
I'd consider that an urban neighborhood built during the early days of the automobile era that was eventually absorbed into the city proper. Even if not originally Toronto proper, it has more the urban form of an outer-ring inner-city enclave than a close-in suburb with a walkable downtown and commuter rail station. I'm thinking something more along the lines of a Weston, only outside city limits.
I think you're referring to railroad suburbs, not streetcar suburbs. Canadian cities (not just Toronto, but Montreal too) just weren't that big a century ago, so you have no equivalent.

The closest you'll get for that type of feel in Toronto is Port Credit or Oakville, but even they're more postwar suburbia with a little historic village.
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