American Geographical Society A Working-Class Suburb for Immigrants, Toronto 1909-1913 Author(s): Richard Harris Source: Geographical Review, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 318-332 Published by: American Geographical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/215635 . Accessed: 09/05/2014 16:39 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Geographical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.101 on Fri, 9 May 2014 16:39:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Transcript
American Geographical Society
A Working-Class Suburb for Immigrants, Toronto 1909-1913Author(s): Richard HarrisSource: Geographical Review, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 318-332Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/215635 .
Accessed: 09/05/2014 16:39
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.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
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American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toGeographical Review.
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A WORKING-CLASS SUBURB FOR IMMIGRANTS, TORONTO 1909-1913*
RICHARD HARRIS
ABSTRACT. During the first half of the twentieth century, working-class suburbs in North America were created by immigrant owner-builders. One example was North Earlscourt, a suburb of Toronto that was settled mainly by working-class immigrants from Britain, who helped one another in building their own houses through formal subcontracting and informal exchange. Houses were constructed in stages, as families saved from weekly incomes and secured limited credit from lumber companies and private lenders; public services were installed later. De- velopment of North Earlscourt raises questions about the process of suburban- ization and the experience of the immigrant working class in early-twentieth- century North American cities.
JN late fall 1913 Alice Randle rode to the end of the streetcar line in the northwestern suburbs of Toronto and, after alighting, walked north. Im- mediately, she later wrote, "the scene ahead began to change.... Before
me appeared a vast expanse of little hills and valleys and, here and there ... queer shapes of black arose, toy houses they looked like in the distance. It began to dawn upon me now. This must be shacktown, the camp of English immigrants" (Randle 1914, 96). Up close, she found the houses to be tidy, with "curtained windows [that] showed a thrifty woman's care." She admired the "romping, sturdy children, quite as immaculate ... as glee- ful, lung-expanding outdoor games permit." She had mixed feelings about the dwellings. Acknowledging that "each cottage seemed to have a person- ality all its own," she judged that to the cultured eye many of the shacks must seem "ludicrous in size and shape." Nevertheless, she applauded the evidence of hard work and pride that she saw.
Randle believed that she had found a place that would be unfamiliar to her educated, middle-class readers. Like Charles Booth in London or Jacob Riis in New York City, she was exploring home turf and returning with an account of the exotic (Keating 1976). Unlike those critics of the urban abyss, Randle offered an upbeat interpretation. In the suburbs she encountered healthfulness, thrift, and hope. With this viewpoint she was typical of many of her contemporaries. Reformers disliked the immigrant areas of central Toronto, which were inhabited by Jews and, to a lesser extent, Italians (Mail and Empire 6 July 1911), but they expressed few concerns about the shacktown
* Assessment records were made available with the assistance of James Ball and Douglas Desroches at the city of York. I am grateful for a Canada research fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and for initial funding from the Arts Research Board of McMaster University.
* DR. HARRIS is an associate professor of geography at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8P 3Z7.
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fringe of the city. Ethnicity played a role in this response: the downtown ghetto aroused concern because of the types of people who lived there. The geography of the situation also counted. Living only a short distance from city hall, the ghetto residents were visible, if not as a threat, at least as an affront to the sensibilities of the middle and upper classes of the city. In contrast, the workers' suburbs were far removed from the daily lives of the affluent (Harris 1984). Out of sight, out of mind was the principle.
The bias of educated contemporaries has persisted among scholars, who have created an image of North American suburbs of the early twentieth century as products of speculative builders and as residences of affluent, white, native-born groups (Jackson 1985; Stilgoe 1988). Restrictions imposed by builders and suburban authorities helped ensure that many of these places remained exclusive (Weiss 1987). Yet suburbs with characteristics like those northwest of Toronto were also being built: working-class and immigrant communities where speculative contractors might be less important than owner-builders (Kane and Bell 1985; Harris 1988). Although owner-building is usually viewed as a rural or third-world phenomenon, many North Amer- ican urban dwellers built their own houses, until at least World War II, both in Canada (Saywell 1975; Harris 1990) and in the United States (Bodnar, Simon, and Weber 1982; Zunz 1982; Doucet and Weaver 1985).
This article systematically traces the creation of one owner-built suburb in the shift from open subdivision to settlement, through financing and construction. The case study is North Earlscourt in suburban Toronto. This area, located well beyond the terminus of a streetcar line, subdivided in 1909, uneven in terrain and essentially owner-built, was probably the community visited by Randle in 1913. The primary sources for this study include busi- ness, church, property-assessment, and other municipal records, together with insurance atlases, photographs, oral histories, and contemporary ac- counts, to reconstruct what became an extended process of development in the area. In doing so, I attempt to elucidate the making of a characteristic North American landscape.
In the years before World War I, hundreds of thousands of immigrants came to Canada. Rural peasants from eastern Europe settled in the Canadian west; even larger numbers of urban workers from Britain contributed to the rapid growth of Canadian cities. British immigrants were especially likely to settle in Ontario, which was the intended destination of 50 percent of all British immigrants to the country between 1904 and 1929 (Reynolds 1935, 53). The economically booming city of Toronto, the largest urban center in the province, received and retained more of those immigrants than any other Canadian city. Toronto grew very rapidly, more than doubling in size between 1901 and 1913. The growth in population, coupled with a slow decentraliza- tion of industry along railroad lines, led to significant new construction. Until the first decade of the twentieth century, annexations enabled the city to retain control over most of the encroached areas (Harris and Luymes 1990).
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FIG. 1 -North Earlscourt in the Toronto metropolitan area.
The last important annexation occurred in 1910. As a result, although some land within the city limits lay undeveloped until the 1920s, especially in northern Toronto, most new construction after World War I was in the suburban townships (Fig. 1).
Canadian growth and development were sustained by both immigrants and capital imported from Britain. Much of the capital went to purchase land, especially in the suburbs of rapidly growing cities (Canada 1914). Toronto probably received more of that investment than any other center. The largest landowner and developer there was the Dovercourt Land, Build- ing, and Savings Company, run by Wilfrid Dinnick. The scale of the com- pany's operations can be inferred from an estimate made by Dinnick, ap- parently in 1914. In the handwritten draft for a speech, he noted that "there are in the neighborhood of five thousand persons ... who come into our office each month to make payments on land purchases" (Dinnick Papers 1914). If each of those persons owned one lot and even if only one lot in two had a dwelling on it, the Dovercourt Company held mortgages on land occupied by more than ten thousand people. An unknown but possibly larger number would have purchased lots from the company and settled their accounts before 1914. Dinnick liked to think of himself and the company as acting responsibly by discouraging mere speculation. But the economic core of the firm was the purchase of suburban farm tracts or woodlots, their subdivision into building parcels, and their sale at higher prices to a myriad
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of individuals. Sometimes the company imposed little or no restriction on the building process. The Parsons Estate, soon known to its residents as North Earlscourt, was an example.
SUBDIVIDING AND SETTLING NORTH EARLSCOURT
The Parsons Estate was located northwest of Toronto in York Township, immediately outside the city limits (Fig. 2). The lots were marketed by the Dovercourt Company in newspaper advertisements and in an illustrated prospectus. Intended for the thrifty workingman, the prospectus opened with the argument, "Rent is waste, mere waste," and asserted that "The Same Money You Pay for Rent, Would Pay for a Home" (Dovercourt 1911, 3-5). It then described and illustrated what other house-building pioneers had already erected in the area. It concluded with a map showing lots that had been sold, together with instructions as to how buyers might get to the estate (Fig. 3). Though marketed as a distinct entity, the subdivision arose in much the same way as did adjacent tracts such as the Nairn Estate to the south, Silverthorn to the west, and Fairbank to the north. The name Parsons Estate did not endure; instead the area became known as North Earlscourt. In its early years it was indistinguishable from its southern namesake, located inside the city limits, or from adjacent portions of York Township.
The types of people who settled North Earlscourt exemplified the new suburbanites of Toronto during the early twentieth century. Those who moved into the suburbs in the decade before World War I were overwhelm- ingly the families of blue-collar workers (Harris 1990). A large sample of householders drawn from the property-assessment records shows that in 1913 approximately 62 percent of all employed householders in the city of Toronto were blue-collar workers. The equivalent proportion in the suburbs was 80 percent, and in many suburban districts the proportion exceeded 90 percent. North Earlscourt was a typical area. Of the sixty-three employed householders in the area in 1913, no fewer than sixty, or 95 percent, were blue-collar workers; the area contained an especially high concentration of unskilled laborers and of men in construction trades (Table I). Settlement continued through the 1910s and into the 1920s. The number of occupied dwelling units in the area increased from 73 in 1913 to 228 in 1921 and to 274 in 1930. In the process the area became a little more mixed. By 1930 there was a small number of people in clerical and professional occupations, and the previous bias in favor of laborers and construction trades had been largely eliminated. This pattern persisted during the 1930s, when the Toronto sub- urbs were becoming more middle class in character. Throughout the pro- longed period of settlement, North Earlscourt remained a working-class area.
If the character of Toronto suburbs then did not correspond to the pre- vailing middle-class stereotype, neither did it support the notion of suburbs as places for the native born. Contemporaries agreed that the suburbs were immigrant reception areas, specifically for the British. In 1911 an editorial
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Source: Complete enumeration of assessed property in southern portion of North Earlscourt. a For comparison the 1913 percentages for the city of Toronto were 16, 12, 11, 36, 14, and 12; for
all suburbs 10, 9, 1, 37, 24, and 19. These figures are based on a 2 percent sample of property- assessment records.
writer observed that "British immigrants as a rule try to find homes in the outskirts of the city, and in outlying communities, as fast as they are able to become homeowners" (Mail and Empire 6 July 1911). This pattern continued into the 1920s. In contrast with the "colonies of foreign poor" in the central- city slums, British immigrants, according to one historian, were "more likely to 'squat' in the outskirts of the city" (Middleton 1923, 402). Because British immigrants outnumbered all others by a ratio of approximately three to one, shacktowns grew more rapidly than did the inner-city slums.
The desire of British immigrants to acquire property in the Toronto suburbs was in part a response to local conditions. Rents were rising very rapidly before World War I, and as early as 1905 a severe housing shortage had developed. Doubling-up was common. Even for the reluctant house- builder, making a home in the suburbs was an attractive option (Harris 1990). It is likely that the experience of urban tenancy of most British immigrants had helped to create a strong desire for a suburban, if not semirural, alter- native. By the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately 70 percent of the British immigrant population lived in cities, and, given the location of industry, the level of urbanization among workers was higher still. The availability of land in the Toronto suburbs offered attractive ownership possibilities that were denied to the working class in Britain.
The concentration of immigrants in the Earlscourt and Fairbank districts was such that they became known collectively as Little Britain. English visitors to Toronto, especially between 1911 and 1913, made a point of stop- ping by. In those years almost 400,000 persons emigrated from Britain to Canada, accounting for more than half the total emigration from there (Reyn- olds 1935, 26). One visitor to North Earlscourt was Arthur Copping, who traveled across Canada in 1911, a time when British interest in the North American dominion was reaching a peak. Recounting his experience for British readers, he lauded the opportunities available to people who were thrifty and hardworking. During his stay in Toronto he spent several days in Earlscourt, and his book included a favorable description of this "re- markable Toronto suburb that has sprung up during the past year or so, and is mainly populated by mechanics and laborers from London and other
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English cities" (Copping 1912, 145). His account could only have added to the stream of immigrants to the area.
The English and Scottish settlers in North Earlscourt did not meet with the same degree of ethnic hostility as did Italians and eastern European Jews. Even so, they experienced problems of adjustment. The Earlscourt Methodist Church, whose pastor was then Peter Bryce (1915), organized social events for recent immigrants. Writing about the earliest years of settlement in the area, Bryce recalled that "at that time most of our people came from the Old Country. We organized little groups so that they could meet friends and thus get rid of some of their loneliness. We had nights set apart for the following and many more groups: Tyneside, Scottish, Irish, Yorkshire, Lan- cashire, Welsh and London" (Earlscourt Methodist Churches 1950).
On occasion, more than loneliness was at stake. In the winter of 1907- 1908, Toronto and much of Canada experienced a short-lived but severe economic recession. Those who lived in the city fared adequately, because city officials arranged for supplies to be donated to the most needy. In the suburbs, however, township authorities were unable or unwilling to bear the burden. Making the situation worse, suburban residents did not like to ask for charity, in part, as asserted in The Globe (27 Jan. 1908), because "most of them are English, and feel that there is no sympathy for them here." Although some residents apparently took exception to the immigrants, there was goodwill toward the great majority of British newcomers, as was indi- cated by a successful fund-raising drive to provide necessities to the suburban needy. "Most emphatically," stated The Globe (31 Jan. 1908), "Canadians have no antipathy toward the English, Irish and Scotch folk who with too little knowledge of what a Canadian winter means have built their little homes out in the suburbs."
BUILDING PROCESS
The little homes of the suburban settlers were largely self-built, and collectively they surrounded the city. As early as 1907, a reporter for The Globe (9 Nov. 1907) wrote: "Shackland's dwellings extend around Toronto.... There is scarcely a terminating car line in the city but taps the[m]." In an attempt to estimate more precisely what proportion of suburban houses were owner-built, I have developed a methodology that utilizes property-assess- ment records. This methodology assumes that there is a self-built threshold, a market value below which speculative builders will not operate. New dwellings worth less than this value may be assumed to have been owner- built. Using this methodology, I have calculated that approximately 35 per- cent of all new dwellings in Toronto between 1901 and 1913 were owner- built (Harris 1991a). This proportion reached almost 100 percent in the suburban areas that lay beyond the city limits. The value of the self-built threshold was rising rapidly before World War I, because of the inflation of construction costs and wages. By 1913 it probably exceeded $1,000. In that
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TABLE II-ASSESSED VALUE ($) AND OWNER-OCCUPANCY (%), NORTH EARLSCOURT 1913-1930
1913a 1922a 1930a
LOCATION AV 00 AV 00 AV 00
North Earlscourt 135 100 297 97 395 77 All suburbs 401 76 533 83 916 59 City of Toronto 1,478 45 1,872 60 2,491 52
Source: See Table I. a AV = average assessed value of dwelling units in Canadian dollars; 00 = percentage of owner-
occupied dwelling units.
year, the average dwelling in the suburbs was worth $401, less than one- third the equivalent figure for the city, while the average assessed value of houses in North Earlscourt was an extraordinary $135 (Table II). Even in 1922, when prices had risen further, the average assessed value of dwellings had barely reached $300. The Dovercourt Company's advertising, aimed at owner-builders, had evidently reached the intended buyers.
Owner-built usually meant owner-occupied. Every one of the seventy- three homes built in the area by 1913 was owned by its occupant. For the early settlers, the immigrant dream of homeownership was instantly realized. This pattern remained true in subsequent decades: during the 1920s, although the number of houses had more than doubled, there were still few tenants in the area.
As a general rule, there was a division of labor, under which the building of the house was men's work and child care and housework were women's work. Many men had come alone from Britain to determine the opportunities in Toronto, and most soon bought land and erected some sort of dwelling. Joseph Thorne was an example. Born in Bermondsey, London, he came to Canada in 1905 at age thirty-six. Under the terms of his passage, he had to work a year on a farm north of Toronto, during which time he sent money home. As soon as his indenture ended in 1906, he moved to Toronto, where he worked as a laborer at odd jobs. At first he boarded in Little Britain, but in summer 1906 he purchased a double lot with a thirty-six-foot frontage there. He made a hole in the ground, covered it with tin, and called it home. He sent for his wife and five children; by the time they arrived in 1907, he had built a two-room shack with a dirt floor.
Under pressure, the gender division of labor might alter. Tales abound of women and children participating in house building; however, they were usually viewed only as helpers. After the house was erected, the wife again concentrated her energies on domestic tasks, which, in unserviced districts, were more than sufficiently onerous (Harris 1991b).
Because construction was essentially men's work and because most men were employed, evenings and weekends were very busy. Many accounts refer to hammering that went on until midnight. Both evenings and week- ends were short. North Earlscourt was not well served by public transpor- tation. In the early years the closest streetcar line, the one used by Randle,
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terminated next to the Canada Foundry, a half-hour's walk from North Earlscourt. Men who worked downtown might spend more than an hour getting to and from work, often traveling the whole route on foot. After a nine-to-ten-hour workday, little time or energy was left for evening labor. Many worked at least a half day on Saturday, and churchgoers found that little could be done on Sundays.
In that context, informal cooperation with neighbors and friends made much sense. Cooperation seems to have been common in the owner-built suburbs, especially among the men employed in the construction trades. A writer for The News (9 May 1907) described one example in some detail. He talked with a bricklayer who was building his own house "with the assistance of friends in his union.... Last Saturday he had a bee, eight bricklayers and three builders' laborers assisting." The reporter noted that "much the same is going on all over the district." The general plan, he suggested, was not to work in the evening but "to gather the materials together during the week, put them in handy positions, and then call a bee for Saturday afternoon, when more work is done in a few hours than one man could do in weeks of toil." Men in the construction trades were in the best position not only to build their own houses but also to receive the assistance of others with necessary skills. In contrast, unskilled workers might have been more likely to work on their own. Thorne was again an example; after his family joined him in the two-room shack, he built a larger brick house by himself, learning by trial and error.
Cooperation might involve the simple donation of labor. Richard Jones, born in 1918 and reared at 27 Woodcroft Crescent, remembered that "all the kids in the neighborhood" helped his father dig out the basement (Jones 1990). More common, however, was an informal exchange of labor. Frank Fisher, whose parents moved from South Earlscourt to 19 Holmesdale Cres- cent in May 1912, recalled much later that although most of the men in the area "could turn their hand to any kind of manual work, they often ex- changed labor" (Bailey 1980, 63). Such trading could include those who did not possess manual skills. Speaking of her family physician, a local resident remembered that "Dr. Lowery never submitted a bill, nor did we pay him. It was always a barter system" (Bailey 1980, 91). Barter of this sort might involve a careful, though necessarily imprecise, calculation of services ren- dered and received. A more exact, and to the modern mind more conven- tional, system of subcontracting was also used. Men in the construction trades who had established good reputations might be hired to do especially skilled or important work such as wiring (Bridle 1909, 130). In that manner, owner- builders drew on the resources of the construction industry, even when they were not themselves part of it.
Cooperation extended beyond the erection of houses to involve the mak- ing of community facilities. The Earlscourt Methodist Church was very active in the community and for many years was the center of community life. It
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promoted a food co-op, a day-care facility, and a Sunday school. It eventually had an attendance of more than thirteen hundred, which made it the largest of its kind in Canada (Earlscourt Methodist Churches 1955). This commitment to the community was reciprocated. The first church, Westmoreland Meth- odist at Boon and Ascot in South Earlscourt, was built with help donated by the congregation, and a community clubhouse in North Earlscourt was "built by members in their spare time, just as they built their own homes ... [T]his clubhouse stood on the distant borders of North Earlscourt. Here many stormy meetings were held and social functions brought the pioneers to- gether" (World 16 Dec. 1932). In a real sense, settlers in the area helped to create a neighborhood, not merely their individual homes.
Some things the settlers could provide for themselves only through the medium of the township. North Earlscourt was at the center of the most urbanized part of York Township, the greater portion of which was still rural. For many years the township government expressed rural interests, which were slow to respond to the needs of urban residents concentrated close to the southern edge. The first' tentative building regulations were not passed until 1918, and even in the 1920s their enforcement was seemingly lax. In its early years North Earlscourt had no public services, and after World War I the North Earlscourt and Fairbank Ratepayers Association lobbied for improvements. However, residents in the area had mixed feelings about increased taxes. With little industry, the township was never prosperous, and services were installed slowly in stages. Water pipes were installed along most streets in 1919-1920; sewers around 1925. Most of the roads were not given a permanent tarmac surface until 1926-1928. Woodcroft, a cul-de-sac that was cut through in the 1920s, was not linked to a sewer line until 1929. Coal ash from neighboring districts was dumped there in the 1920s. To this day, a proper roadbed has never been laid.
The building and servicing of North Earlscourt took many years. Lots were sold quickly, but many were purchased by speculators who had no intention of building or moving to the area. Evidence from a contemporary insurance atlas (1912) shows that most of the lots sold by 1911 remained undeveloped. Many were still undeveloped when the next survey of the area was undertaken in 1923. The development of the area, extending from at least 1910 to 1930, took an unusually long time; on the eve of the Great Depression, when construction virtually stopped, there were still vacant lots that were used as gar lens and as playgrounds for children.
More striking than the slow development of individual parcels was the continual alteration of existing houses. Houses were built and then extended, perhaps several times. Often the original dwelling might be pushed to the back of the lot, and a larger house built in its stead. Contemporaries saw these improvements as a sign of thrift and hope. Copping, for example, wrote that "the interesting process of transforming shacks into substantial ... houses was proceeding apace. Nay, the 'Shack Town' of a year before was already
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FIG. 4-Stages of owner-building in North Earlscourt circa 1911. Source: Copping 1912.
a town of villas, if of villas strangely mingled with nondescript wooden structures" (Copping 1912, 145-146). His brother, who accompanied him on the trip, painted a watercolor to illustrate the point (Fig. 4).
The process of improvement can be demonstrated more systematically with evidence from property-assessment records. Buildings and land were assessed separately, supposedly at their respective market values. On this basis, we can expect that the replacement or extension of a shack would have been reflected in an increased assessment and, with one qualification, that a higher building assessment would indicate the presence of improve- ment activity. The qualification is that, in the 1910s and 1920s but not in the 1930s, the intermittent appreciation of housing prices tended to raise slightly the assessed values of all houses. Many houses increased a little in value without being improved. In order to screen out such cases, properties were grouped at $250 intervals. Only those that changed value categories were classified as having risen in value. Those that remained in the same category were deemed not to have risen in value, even though, in most cases, their assessed values did increase. On the whole, this procedure probably under- estimates the extent of improvement. Even so,, it suggests that almost half of all the dwellings that existed in the southern portion of North Earlscourt in 1912 had been improved by 1922. The rate of improvement fell slightly to 38 percent in the 1920s and still further in the 1930s. Not surprisingly, the occupants of the modest houses, most of which were no better than shacks, were always the most likely to improve their property. The settlers
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of the area continued to invest "sweat equity" in their houses long after the original structures had been built.
THRIFT AND CREDIT
The people who settled in North Earlscourt were thrifty and resourceful, but they also relied on various forms of credit. Most brought little savings from Britain, and none earned enough to have saved much after arrival in Toronto. It is true that land, especially in the early years, was cheap. In 1911 the Dovercourt Company was selling land in the area at prices that ranged from $4 to $12 a front foot. The cheapest lots, costing about $100, were in a hollow, known locally as "the dip," where drainage was poor and spring flooding common. Lots on higher ground, some with a pleasing view, could cost $300. Even at that time, the sum was not a great deal of money; an unskilled worker at the Canada Foundry, the nearest important employer, could expect to earn almost double that amount in a year. Yet it was a good deal more money than most people had. Buyers thus usually received short- term credit from the Dovercourt Company: $10 down and monthly payments of $5 were not unusual terms in the Toronto suburbs before World War I (Dovercourt 1911; Mavor 1923, 1:374). Combined with a life of thrift, such an arrangement was affordable even to the family of an unskilled worker.
Although land was affordable, household budgets did not leave much over for building. Owner-builders in North Earlscourt managed to assemble the building materials that were needed through various means. Much seems to have been obtained secondhand. Frank Fisher recalled that, after his family moved to 19 Holmesdale, his father "gradually enlarged the place till it became a six-roomed house. They were remodeling the stockyards at that time and he, like many of the neighbors, bought the second hand lumber" (Bailey 1980, 62). Others actually fashioned their own materials, making bricks from local clay or using sand dug from basements for concrete blocks (Jones 1990). Still others obtained credit from local building suppliers.
Many owner-builders were simply patient and thrifty. Often, as the Dovercourt Company observed in its prospectus, people bought "a quantity at a time each week or month with the money they had left after providing for the small payments on their lots" (Dovercourt 1911, 8). Copping told of a West Ham (London) man who had bought a small lot for $2 down and $2 a month. At first the family made do with a two-room shack, but eventually they paid off the mortgage on the land. Copping rendered the man's story in dialect: "'Now it's time' I says 'to 'ave a nice 'ouse over our 'eads, same as others.... By livin' quiet, and puttin' away a bit every pay-day, I'd saved pretty nigh half enough money to buy the stuff, and me and two others got to work on it evening after evening, and very often an hour and a half in the morning. But the lath and plaster I didn't want nobody to 'elp me with. The rest of the money we're paying off same as we did for the land, only five dollars a month instead of two" (Copping 1912, 147-148). Homes were built slowly, as current income and savings allowed.
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Most of the mortgage credit came from private sources, as was the case among the Polish owner-builders in Pittsburgh about the same time (Bodnar, Simon, and Weber 1982, 165-167). For example, Fisher's father obtained an 8 percent mortgage from a minister in 1916 (Bailey 1980, 62). Fred Hatton (1990), a bricklayer's son who eventually moved to Hamilton, stated that his father lost his house in the 1930s when "the woman who held the mortgage wanted her money." Much of the credit that owner-builders obtained was as informal as the arrangements they struck with friends and neighbors to exchange labor. Thrifty living and mutual aid built North Earlscourt.
CONCLUSION
The emergence of North Earlscourt helped to remake the geography of Toronto. In 1900 the city conformed, loosely, to the Burgess model. Immi- grants and workers were concentrated at the center. By 1913 owner-building, notably by immigrants, in places like North Earlscourt had made the suburbs working-class. This geographical pattern was maintained and entrenched, as owner-building persisted into the 1920s, much of it in areas like North Earlscourt that had been subdivided but only partially developed before World War I. Owner-building by families and communities was confined largely to the suburbs. There, land was affordable because of its distance from the main centers of employment, which even in the 1920s lay down- town. There, too, owner-building was made possible by the absence and, later, the lax enforcement of construction regulations by the suburban mu- nicipalities. By moving to the suburbs, workers with little in savings could hope to make a home. In that sense the emerging geography of Toronto was not simply a reflection of the process described here; it was integral to the process.
North Earlscourt may or may not exemplify a common form of suburban development in North American cities in the early twentieth century. The area was far from unique, but additional research is needed before one can generalize about the extent of working-class suburbs. The account of North Earlscourt underscores the need for this research to understand the social patterns and economic processes behind urban expansion of the period. The study of North Earlscourt shows that suburbs held opportunities for im- migrant laborers and that a period of sojourn in the central immigrant ghetto could be shortened or avoided. In this respect, the history of this Toronto suburb complicates the portrayal of the ethnic and the social geography of the city.
In terms of what underlay suburban growth, North Earlscourt exemplifies a neglected process of owner-building and cooperative endeavor. Speculative builders, mass transit, and local governmental services, which together are generally supposed to have been the foundations of suburban growth in the period, had only a marginal, belated role. Evidently, in terms of process as well as pattern, the possibilities for development were greater than is gen- erally supposed. The story of North Earlscourt shows that even in a well-
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tilled subfield like urban social geography, reality is richer than the theories and interpretations developed to account for it.
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