Another Laneway House

 

This large home is actually a laneway house built in the back garden of a large house on Palmerston Blvd. When first built it looked out on garages but now it has a view of the development on the Honest Ed's site. A totally different environment!  I love the look of the house.

A Balcony Garden

 

The flowers on that balcony above the door of this small apartment building on Palmerston Blvd look so lovely. It must be a great place to sit out. And on the left of the pic you can see one of the round street lamps that are found along this street.

A Quiet Morning

I was out a bit earlier than normal when the streets were still quiet and took a wander down Palmerston Blvd. The church building in the background has been lovingly converted into condos but still looks wonderful.

A Walkup

In the older parts of the city you can often find small walkup apartment buildings like this one which are nestled in the middle of blocks of single family homes. They have gone out of favour in the newer parts of the city but there is a move afoot to encourage more of them in hopes of providing more rental units that are not in large towers. This beauty is found on Palmerston Blvd just north of College St in Little Italy.

Grand Columns

I thought I would show you one of the homes found along Palmerston Boulevard. Each of the large houses along the street is different although several of them have large columns like this one does. And here you get a closer view of one of the cast-iron lamps that run along this street.

Along The Boulevard

This is the view along the sidewalk of Palmerston Boulevard just north of College St. It is a beautiful street with stately houses which were built in the early 1900s and lovely large trees but the most distinctive thing about this area is the the cast-iron lamps. You can see the round globes as you look along the street. An attempt was made to replace them with aluminum copies but that was rejected by the residents and the lamps are now protected. It will set you back several million $$ to buy a house along here.

Colourful Streets

This pic was taken a week ago and gives you a good idea of how colourful some of our streets are becoming. At the same time there are others where none of the trees have changed yet! That just makes the beauty last longer.

Blue Palmerston

I thought that I would show you another of the wonderful homes along Palmerston Blvd since I have shown you so many shots of the laneway buildings that are behind some of them. I love the blue accents and the detail work on this one! I think that this one has been converted back to a single family home and in the wild real estate market in Toronto it would probably go for well over $2 million. I'd love to lounge around on that porch on a summer day!

Grand Palmerston

This is probably the grandest of the homes along Palmerston Blvd and as is typical of the large houses along this street the facade has changed little since construction in the early 1910s. First an area of upper middle class families, as the years passed and families were smaller most of the houses were divided into apartments as this one has been. This is now being reversed and many of the homes are reverting to single family dwellings. If you look up the left side of the pic you can see one of the laneway buildings that I have shown before - the side towards the house is quite tidy and nice but as we have seen the side towards the lanes are usually left fairly unadorned to say the least!

The Photographer

I went for a walk to shoot some pics of the houses along Palmerston Blvd which have some of the laneway buildings behind them - the ones I showed you a few weeks ago. As I wandered along I spotted this photographer who was really into shooting the same houses. It turns out he is an artist working on a project of taking shots of classic porches and he is planning a show of them in the future. He already has over 700 images to choose from!

In the pic you can also see the single pole-top lamps which line Palmerston Blvd. Originally installed in the 1910s, they were refurbished and renewed in 2005 and this remains one of the few streets in Toronto with this type of lamp.