Our Annex Home On the day we took possession of our house in the Annex, August 3, 1967, the kitchen ceiling fell in. The house was in the Annex''s far western reaches, on Albany Avenue, a north-south street one block east of Bathurst. Our number, 199, placed us near the top of Albany in the long block between Wells and Dupont. The house was semi-detached, meaning that, to the occasional embarrassment of those of us who raised our voices, the none-too-thick north wall of 199 was also the south wall of 201. The lot our house stood on was narrow, just nineteen feet across, but the property ran a generous and surprising 173.5 feet to the back fence. Like most of the other houses on the block, ours had three storeys, a front porch, and no garage or other spot to park a car except at the curb. It was a brick house, and its plain but promising appearance announced that a business-minded contractor, not a fanciful architect, had designed the place.
The fallen-in ceiling was a disturbing welcome but not the catastrophe it might have been. That was because we had immediate plans to renovate. We arrived on Albany as "whitepainters," which was a term coined by the journalist Harry Bruce in an article he wrote for the April 18, 1964, issue of Maclean''s magazine. "''Whitepainters'' is my word for people who buy a mouldy downtown house and then spend several thousand dollars to clean out the cockroaches, replace the plumbing and generally exploit the building''s sweet possibilities." We converted the four poky little rooms on the first floor into one open space of living room, kitchen and dining room plus a cute acorn-shaped fireplace, and on the third floor, we knocked down walls to make a large master bedroom. We had ideas for the second floor, but by then, our allotted several thousand dollars had been spent. We were the first whitepainters on the block. That made us stand out, just as a number of other characteristics tended to differentiate us from the neighbours.
Density of population in our house was one. "Only your family going to live there?" an amazed Albany man said to my wife, Marjorie Harris. "It used to be four families." Most houses on the street were home to two and three generations of relatives and to boarders and roomers who came and went. Since both Marjorie and I were writers and of English ancestry, there was also the matter of our white-collar Anglo-Saxonism. It made us distinctive on a street that embraced blue-collar multiculturalism. Ted and Ruth, a Polish-Canadian couple, lived across the street. Ted, who had a lovely smile, was an assembler at de Havilland Aircraft, and Ruth worked at Simpson''s, making the crustless miniature sandwiches that the ladies ate with their tea in the Arcadian Court.
A handsome-faced banty little man named John had just moved in down the street, fresh from Portugal''s Madeira Islands with his wife and four young kids, sharing the house with his brother''s family. John found work in roofing. Other Portuguese immigrants lived further up the block, along with residents born in Italy and, like Ted and Ruth, in Poland. But of all the many nationalities on the street, Hungarian dominated by numbers. Among the many such households, two were on either side of us, Lazlo, a man who did heavy lifting for the city, at 201, and Steve, on workmen''s compensation with a permanently bad back, at 197. Steve, in his late forties, rotund, with a stentorian voice, was the block''s troubled, prickly presence. In his Hungarian hometown, Steve had suffered the death of a child and had emigrated alone to Canada where he worked as a bricklayer for eleven years until he saved enough money to bring his wife to the country -- there were no other children -- and to buy the house on Albany. Steve''s wife, who hadn''t a block identity beyond "Steve''s wife," spoke no English, and his own facility with the language remained minimal.
Having lost much in his past, Steve guarded his present turf with zealotry that approached paranoia. He fired his BB gun at local cats who crossed his yard, confiscated children''s toys that landed on his lawn, hacked off the clematis growing over a mutual fence, and provoked his neighbour on the south into a lawsuit. For two and a half decades, people on the block were united in conversations about the Steve Problem. Edward Coath Jr. at 211 was a curiosity for more instructive reasons. He was a tall, laconic pipe-smoker, nearing retirement from his job as a foreman at Rogers Majestic. Edward Coath had lived his entire life at 211 Albany, the house that his father, Edward Sr., had helped to build in 1903.
The elder Coath had been a plasterer who conducted his trade out of the house. He covered the ceilings of the first-floor rooms with samples of his work, ornate concoctions worthy of a ducal palace. Customers called on Coath the plasterer, studied the ceilings, and chose a design for their own homes. The Coath house, at the time we arrived on Albany in 1967, represented the block''s best connection to its earliest history. -- Badajoz is a small Spanish city close to the border with Portugal, its skyline identified by the ruins of a Moorish castle. On March 10, 1811, during the Peninsular Wars, Napoleon''s French seized Badajoz, aided by a large bribe they slipped to the Spanish commander. The Duke of Wellington retook the city a year later in a ferocious battle that cost the British 5,000 soldiers. One of the lucky survivors among the Brits was a colonel named Joseph Wells, thirty-nine years old and the son of a well-to-do London silk merchant.
After Badajoz, Wells returned to London, married Harriett King, and sailed with her for Canada where he had accepted a post as inspector of Upper Canada''s militia in the Town of York. Alas for Wells, he arrived to find that, while he was at sea, the inspector''s job had been dispensed with. He settled in York anyway and was hailed by the locals as the hero of Badajoz. In 1821, Wells bought Lot 25 in the Second Concession from the Bay, in the Home District of York, from a widow named McGill. Lot 25 was 200 acres in size; it covered much of what later became the west Annex since, in today''s terms, the land was bounded by Bloor Street on the south, Bathurst on the west, St. Clair to the north, and a line extending Brunswick Avenue on the east. Mrs. McGill''s late husband, John, a member of the Queen''s Rangers, had been the recipient of Lot 25 as a land grant from the crown to members of the military.
The grant was not of prime property for urban living, lying two inconvenient miles beyond York''s settled neighbourhoods, but Lot 25 and the adjacent lots were gathering favour among the local moneyed class as a location for summer homes. The main attraction derived from the high escarpment that ran across the centre of the lots; the escarpment had been created centuries earlier when a huge glacial lake that covered the area receded after millions of year to the level of about the present Lake Ontario. John McGill (not one of the moneyed class but thinking like one) built the first house on the escarpment, situated pleasingly above the present Davenport Road. "Davenport" happened to be the name that McGill gave to the house and property in honour of a York Garrison major of that name whom McGill admired. The name of the property remained after Joseph Wells purchased it, but almost everything else changed. Wells tore down McGill''s house and built a rambling three-storey home of his own, roomy enough to accommodate his eventual crowd of eight sons and two daughters. He also stepped up the already existing market gardening on the land, growing orchards of fruit and fields of vegetables. Wells kept himself busy in York politics and society, though not always to good purpose.
He was a particular flop as treasurer of the new school for boys, Upper Canada College, which his own sons attended. The colonel''s casual way with accounts and receipts generated a scandal among other UCC parents, who insisted that he stick to his rol.