Lots of people walked to work in the factories off Bermondsey Road or to the General Electric and General Motors plants in the Golden Mile off Eglinton.” Not everyone had a car, and if you did you only had one. “Most of the families in the neighbourhood had four kids or more living in a two-bedroom house. My dad’s childhood experiences weren’t all that different from mine, but there were a lot more kids then, a lot more dogs and fewer cars. My dad, Bruce, was born the same year they moved in. Their house on Merritt was the first they could afford to own. Frank was a veteran of the First World War who worked as a mechanic in the army. My grandparents, Frank and Margaret Hyckie, moved to the neighbourhood in 1956, 10 years after it was built. That’s when I began to get a sense of what privilege I grew up in and to understand the history of Topham Park, and my own family’s history within it. My life mostly existed within a kilometre radius of my house until I had to start taking the TTC to get to high school. Parents would collectively keep an eye on everyone as my friends and I played outside, ran in and out of each other’s houses, walked to school together and were generally oblivious to whatever was going on outside the neighbourhood. ![]() Topham Park is designed with the houses grouped around four large circles of grass. I thought all kids grew up in neighbourhoods like mine, in little detached houses that look like something a child would draw – a square with a triangle on top. (What you call it depends on who you ask.) It was a typical suburban neighbourhood in a benign E.T./Stranger Things kind of way, with lots of kids on bikes, softball games, above-ground pools and sleepovers. I grew up in Topham Park or Sunshine Valley. ![]() What is happening in this city right now – the erosion of Toronto Community Housing, the explosion of condo development, the eviction of artists and craftspeople from old industrial buildings to make way for more high-end tenants, and a dearth of affordable rental housing – has prompted me to look at my old neighbourhood not simply as a historic suburb under threat from development, but also as a case study for an alternative form of city planning that focuses on providing decent, affordable homes across Canada.
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