Tuesday Treasures

 Tom the backroads traveller hosts this weekly meme.

Travel Tuesday

Our World Tuesday

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My Corner of the World

Postcards

Toronto ON

Click here for a history of Toronto lane naming and a list of other lanes with neighbourhood descriptions. That post is a work in progress, and gets updated frequently.

Note Luttrell Loop Lane post has an additional photo added from our visit to the Halton County Radial Railway Museum this week.

When you cross Spadina at Queen St. Graffiti Alley becomes Lot Street Lane.

Further along on Queen St. West (around Portland??) 

Originally known as Lot Street, it was the baseline established by the Royal Engineers, when they laid out the town of York (now Toronto) in 1793.

It was renamed in the 1840s in honour of Queen Victoria.

Lot Street marked the southernmost perimeter of a series of 100- acre park lots, which extended north to what is now Bloor Street. By setting aside these tracts of land for the gentry, the surveyors signalled the expectation that Upper Canada would perpetuate the British class system. Among those granted Park lots were Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, lawyer and dry goods merchant D’Arcy Boulton Jr., business entrepreneur George Allen, and Doctor William Warren Baldwin, all of whom were prominent in the new community. Established in large part to provide for an influx of United Empire Loyalists fleeing the War of Independence south of the border, by the 1830s the prestige attached to the ownership of land had been overtaken by the desire to subdivide lots for speculative building due to urban expansion. 

UPDATE NOVEMBER 2021

I found this at the corner of Queen St. W and Bathurst.

Park Lot 18 Borden Street to Bathurst Street

Granted to the Edward Baker Littlehales, 17 September 1800, and patented on 10 August 1801.

Park Lot 17 was granted to Alexander Grant. It ran from Queen Street to Bloor and consisted of 100 acres. Park Lot 18 separated it from the line that became Bathurst Street and had been granted to Littlehales. George Taylor Denison purchased Park Lot 17 and the east half of Lot 18 in 1815. Denison built his house, south of the south bank of Russell Creek at what would become the south side of Dundas Street. There were also two outbuildings on the property, one to the west of the house and the other north of it but on the other side of the creek. The house itself was Loyalist Georgian in style, covered with roughcast stucco painted white. There were several large fireplaces. George Taylor Denison lived in the house until his death in 1853. His son, Robert Britain Denison (1821-1900) donated the site of and built St. Stephen in the Fields Church. In 1854, J. Stoughton Dennis surveyed the lower portion of the estate into town lots, which were offered for sale. In 1889, R.B. Denison sold the house and what remained of the property, and the house was demolished the next year.