Beach Triangle Residents Association
Neighbourhood News and Information
The Beach Triangle Residents Association, Toronto, Ontario
Home History Articles
This page links to all of the popular Home History articles that have appeared in the BTRA Newsletters over the years, covering the fascinating history of various houses within the Beach Triangle.
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8 Rainsford Road
Eight Rainsford Road is a classic Beach Triangle home. As you walk past you note the original roofed verandah and white Doric columns, the stained glass window over the large living room window and another to the right of the front door, the brick richly aged by almost 100 years of weathering. Looking up and you see the original second storey windows and a third floor dormer (wait, no it is an attic window with pretensions). As you enter, there is a...
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29 Lockwood Road
June Stewart has lived at 29 Lockwood Road
all of her life. Her granddad and grandmother,
William and Christina Ross, came to Canada
from Scotland and settled in this house in
order to “get out of the town” and move to the
new development in The Beach.
[More]
39 Brookmount Road
Stephen Anderson of 39 Brookmount wrote to say that
when they renovated their house in the fall of 1991,
they replaced the original hardwood floor, finding that
newspapers had been spread between the sub-floor
and the original hardwood floor. These newspapers
couldn’t be salvaged, but were dated December 1921,
probably signifying...
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42 Lark Street
Erwin and Erica Maier, owners of 42 Lark Street for
12 years, called to let us know that they had
recently gutted the interior. They found, to their surprise
and pleasure, many Blessed Mary medallions,
all about the size of a penny or smaller - in the walls
of the living room, dining room...
[More]
82 Dixon Avenue
The Triangle boasts several grand old houses on the corners of its intersections but, in my opinion, the 'Queen' is 82 Dixon on the northwest corner of Dixon and Rainsford. Current owner, Kate Langford, asked for a look into the history of her home. 82 Dixon has several features...
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98 Rainsford Road
James Collins of 98 Rainsford Road dropped
off an interesting and somewhat incredible bit
of history on the home that he and Jean have
shared since 1954. In about 1975, James’s aunt, Cathy Lamond,
came from Scotland to visit. When she
returned, she was looking through the
October 6th, 1915, edition of the Perthshire
Advertiser, and was amazed to see a
wedding announcement...
[More]
106 Dixon Road
This story is not so much about a home in the Triangle as about someone who lived in a Triangle home, and about an obsession – mine! It begins with a previous Home History article that focused on Eight Rainsford Road, where I found that Annie May Taylor sold the home in 1911 to newlyweds Henry Turner Smith and Anne Selina (Taylor) Smith. I became convinced that there had to be some relationship between Annie May Taylor and Anne Selina Taylor.
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102 Rainsford Road
Lil Rowe also has a "Six Degrees of Separation"
experience. She went to Kew Beach School with
Gwen Kirk, who was one of five children who lived
with their parents at 102 Rainsford Road. One of
these children, Dorothy, grew up, married, and had
a family....
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116 Rainsford Road
Lil Rowe tells us that Mr. and Mrs. Archie Wilson
bought 116 Rainsford Road the year it was built, in
1913, and lived there until about 1968. Mr. Wilson
died in 1969. Mrs. Wilson went to live in a nursing
home, where she lived until....
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118 Rainsford Road
For the grand sum of $5,450 Lillian and Wesley
Rowe bought 118 Rainsford Road in 1948 from her
brother and his wife, George and Gladys Hanna,
although they couldn't move in until 1950. Wes died
in 1996, but Lil lives on there to the present day.
The house was built in 1913, a year in which...
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122 Rainsford Road
Our research inspired Lil Rowe to do some of her
own! Lil tells us that 122 Rainsford was also built in
1913, bought in October 1950 by Mr. and Mrs.
Bulger, and Audrey Bulger lived there until she
passed away in August 2005. The Bulgers had photos
of their property from about 1915, one from the
backyard that showed no houses on Kingston Road
in the block between Rainsford and Columbine....
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1864 Queen Street East
If not derelict, definitely unloved. This is how
one may view the curiously shaped, flat-roofed
building on the northeast corner of Rainsford
Road and Queen East in the Triangle. Now
threatened with demolition to make way for a
possible condo development, I decided to look
into the history of this home before it is too late.
[More]
The Hidden Twins... 1878 and 1880 Queen Street East
Two of the oldest houses on Queen Street in the Triangle, 1878 and 1880, are now almost totally hidden by urban growth. These houses show up clearly in the photo taken in about 1906 from the fire hall tower but now barely discernible. The c.1906 photo reveals only four buildings on the north side of Queen...
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Historic Triangle Photo Worth a Second Look
The photo printed in the Winter 2006 Triangle Topics was interesting to a lot of people, so we are re-printing it
here with more commentary. The photo portrays the corner of Queen and Woodbine circa 1905 (Woodbine
appears to bend at Queen because of a distortion resulting from putting two photos together). First, a resident called to say, “I was really thrilled to see the house I live in” – one of two houses on Queen...
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History of Triangle Homes
As we accumulate more histories on Triangle
homes, we see how much more there is to
learn. One of our pursuits is to determine the
time frames in which different parts of the
area were developed. For example, we have published a photo from
1912 of the original
Woodbine Racetrack on the
south side of Queen...
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The Triangle Neighbourhood in the Fifties
Lil Rowe also speaks of the neighbourhood in the
fifties - there was a butcher shop at the corner of
Rainsford and Queen (now Sauvignon) run by Mr.
Goodwin, and a bowling alley and pool hall on
Queen in the block between Rainsford and Brookmount.
The convenience store at the corner of
Rainsford Road and Kingston Road was then a grocery
run by Gordon Cane. A dry goods store was
next door....
[More]
