Cabbagetown was named for poverty, nearly demolished in the 1940s, and saved by a generation of activists and early renovators in the 1970s. That sequence explains most of what you see when you walk the streets today.
The name came from Irish immigrants who arrived in the late 1840s, fleeing the famine. They settled in the area then known as Don Vale, east of Parliament Street along the Don River, and were among the poorest arrivals in the city. The story that stuck was that they grew cabbages in their front yards rather than ornamental gardens. The name was intended as a taunt. Over the following 150 years it became something residents chose to keep.
The original Cabbagetown covered a larger area than what the name describes today. It extended south through what is now Regent Park. That southern section is gone, replaced by housing projects in the late 1940s. What survived is the northern section, which retained its Victorian street grid and most of its housing stock.
The area built up quickly in the second half of the 19th century. Irish workers employed in the industries along the lakeshore, in Corktown and the Distillery area, moved east and north into Don Vale. They built and rented small brick semis and row houses. By the late 1800s, the neighbourhood was dense, working-class, and predominantly renter-occupied. About half of all residents rented rather than owned.
The housing stock that survives today dates largely from the 1880s and 1890s, with the last significant building period running up to the First World War. After that, construction slowed and the neighbourhood began its decline. Multiple families crowded into houses built for one. Maintenance was deferred. By the mid-20th century, the area was widely described as one of Toronto's worst slums.
The postwar period was nearly fatal for the neighbourhood. The prevailing planning philosophy held that the solution to slum housing was to demolish it and replace it with modern social housing. In the late 1940s, the southern section of Cabbagetown was razed and replaced with Regent Park, at the time the largest public housing project in Canada.
The northern section was next. Plans for further clearance were drawn up and came close to execution. What stopped them was a combination of changing political winds and organised community resistance. Karl Jaffary, elected to Toronto city council in 1969, was one of the key figures. John Sewell led efforts to preserve Trefann Court, which covered part of the original southern boundary. The demolitions stopped.
Having been saved from demolition, the remaining Victorian streets attracted a new kind of resident: professionals and young couples who saw the architecture as worth restoring. The gay community, active in central Toronto real estate from the early 1970s, was among the first groups to move in and begin renovation work. Low prices, intact streetscapes, and proximity to downtown made Cabbagetown an early case of what later became a familiar Toronto story.
A four-storey height restriction bylaw was passed in the 1970s, a direct response to the towers going up in adjacent St. James Town. It's one of the main reasons the neighbourhood's scale has been preserved. The Cabbagetown Preservation Association was founded in 1989 and continues to monitor heritage compliance today.
The Cabbagetown Preservation Association calls the neighbourhood the largest continuous area of preserved Victorian residential architecture in North America. The City of Toronto has designated much of it a Heritage Conservation District, giving legal protection against demolition and inappropriate alteration.
The streetscapes on Winchester, Carlton, Metcalfe, Sumach, and the surrounding blocks represent what was built for ordinary working people in the late 19th century, maintained and restored rather than replaced. That's the history you're buying access to when you buy in Cabbagetown. It's physical and ongoing.
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