Jim Rankin – Toronto Star

The trees of Wych­wood Park stand naked, the leaves bagged and gone. On Tad­dle Creek Pond, a sign warns of deep water and quick­sand in warmer months, but come win­ter – a real one, mind you – out will come the sturdy steel and twine hockey nets that rest on the bank.

Kids, as they do any time of the year, roam freely, and in what­ever house they wind up in at noon on a Sat­ur­day, it is under­stood lunch will be served.

No pro hockey to watch? No prob­lem. Reruns of the ’72 Canada-Russia series are play­ing in one home. Please do drop over.

Bucolic post­cards from a unique pri­vate enclave tucked in the heart of urban Toronto. Indeed, all would seem fine in Wych­wood Park, at least to an outsider.

But as usual, in a place where you do know all of your neigh­bours – and there are 60 house­holds – who kick in pri­vate money to care for a pri­vate road and com­mon land – there are the usual and occa­sional crises that, over the 121-year his­tory of the park, tend to come to a full boil before some­thing has to give.

Today, the trust deed that binds the place, drawn up long ago, is show­ing its age. It comes with no teeth to make folks pay up. It may not, in fact, even be ten­able, depend­ing who you ask. Trustees have had to go to court to force one res­i­dent who stead­fastly, out of prin­ci­ple, refuses to pay for some­thing he says brings him no ben­e­fit. A her­itage doc­u­ment that sets out what one can and can­not do is also weak. There are sus­pi­cions over how a pri­vate levy is cal­cu­lated and over who pays what.

In a place where every­one knows their neigh­bours’ busi­ness, yet these days com­mu­ni­cates less eye to eye and more by cold email, how do you enforce neigh­bourli­ness? As the line from Jack Nicholson’s char­ac­ter in Mars Attacks! goes, why can’t we all just get along?

Neigh­bourli­ness.

That’s what this story is about, set in a stun­ningly beau­ti­ful pocket of for­est and homes near Bathurst St. and Dav­en­port Rd., which began as an artists’ enclave and is now home to CEOs, lawyers and archi­tects – newer fam­i­lies with more money, more cars, more wants and less time to deal with the inher­ent weird­ness of Wych­wood Park life.

“It’s pretty big, eh, this house?” chuck­les Marc Gia­comelli, as he and Tikaani, his friendly Alaskan Mala­mute, pause at the nearly com­pleted home that strad­dles a dou­ble lot at 106 Wych­wood Park.

“I guess it will even­tu­ally fit in, when it’s green and there’s trees and stuff,” says Gia­comelli, 62, one of three park trustees.

For now, 106 – a grey-brick design inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright – looks entirely out of place. Mon­ster home comes to mind, although, at 4,500 square feet, it is not the largest in the park. How­ever, in pro­por­tion to the lot frontage, and how it sits on the land, it is unde­ni­ably an oddball.

While it may not be a sym­bol of a sea change here – there are other exam­ples of odd homes here – the story of 106 cer­tainly illus­trates the pat­tern of recur­ring flash­point issues that dot the colour­ful his­tory of the park.

In a place where a pri­vate trust deed, a provin­cial Her­itage Con­ser­va­tion Dis­trict des­ig­na­tion and a city her­itage bylaw set out rules, how did a home that screams sub­ur­bia come to be built here in the first place?

The answer, as usual, was a shot­gun com­pro­mise, of sorts. More on this later.

Just inside mod­est open gates, at the point where Wych­wood and Tyrell Aves. meet and Wych­wood Park begins, there is a plaque that deliv­ers a brief his­tory of the place.

In 1874, painter Mar­maduke Matthews built the first house here with the inten­tion of start­ing an artist colony, and named it after a for­est in Eng­land. In 1891, he and another early res­i­dent cre­ated a plan for the area in the form of a four-page trust deed that set out the pri­vate enclave’s rules.

Included in the doc­u­ment is a method of cal­cu­lat­ing an annual pri­vate levy, based on lot size and exclu­sive of build­ings, to be spent on main­tain­ing the road and com­mon land. New homes were to be built in the spirit of the Eng­lish Arts and Crafts move­ment and blend in with the land­scape of the park.

The city takes care of garbage and other ser­vices, but res­i­dents are respon­si­ble to this day for main­tain­ing a mean­der­ing cir­cu­lar road, two gates, one of which fronts on Dav­en­port and is only opened for heavy trucks doing work, a ravine area, ten­nis court and Tad­dle Creek Pond.

The pond, it should be noted, was arti­fi­cially cre­ated by damming Tad­dle Creek, which bub­bles up from a spring within the park. Surely, not for the sole rea­son of giv­ing res­i­dent artists – and there were a few – some­thing to paint, but that is how one story goes.

In 1907, the trust deed was replaced by a cor­po­ra­tion. In 1915, an early con­tro­versy over who would pay what and how the levy was cal­cu­lated led to a new rule that proved unen­force­able. That led to the rein­state­ment of the trust deed that binds to this day, legal or not.

In 1958 came a ratepay­ers asso­ci­a­tion to act as a buffer between park trustees and the com­mu­nity. There were legal opin­ions sought over the trust deed and the power of the trustees. There were peri­odic dis­putes over land and new devel­op­ment, includ­ing one in the ’80s over a developer’s plan to wedge six houses on a large lot. As usual a com­pro­mise resulted, and three new homes were built instead.

In 1985, the area became a Her­itage Con­ser­va­tion Dis­trict, which ush­ered in new rules about what could and could not be built. But to this day, the plan remains weak, to wit, the freshly built mon­stros­ity that sits at No. 106.

Through the ’90s, the sorry state of the pond was a recur­ring cri­sis du jour. It was so shal­low it ran the risk of becom­ing a swamp. Res­i­dents even­tu­ally ponied up $90,000 to have it dredged.

In the early 2000s, the Wych­wood TTC Barns and what to do with them became another divi­sive issue.

But noth­ing com­pares to the mys­te­ri­ous rash of tire slash­ings that cul­mi­nated in the 2008 sui­cide of Albert Ful­ton, one of two unof­fi­cial park archivists, and nasty rumours and a defama­tion suit over who might be responsible.

It made the news. The pri­vate affairs of the pri­vate enclave became very public.

Neigh­bours were talk­ing. About neigh­bours. To reporters.

Good neigh­bours who are neigh­bourly sim­ply shall not do this, but if they must, please be civil.

Quick aside: Fol­low­ing a lovely 1994 Globe and Mail piece on the park by John Bent­ley Mays, in which one named res­i­dent remarked upon the total unsuit­abil­ity for the area of another unnamed resident’s house – “ter­ri­ble … too Bayview” – the deeply offended unnamed res­i­dent dropped a bomb of a let­ter on the named resident.

“Imme­di­ately I came to real­ize that to indi­vid­u­als with your views, (and I can only assume there are more of you out there), the real­ity of liv­ing in Wych­wood Park for my wife and I dif­fers dras­ti­cally from the images por­trayed by Mr. Mays, with your help,” reads part of a let­ter cir­cu­lated widely in the park at the time.

“For we will never be able to live there in peace and con­tent­ment,” it con­tin­ues, “with­out being aware that beneath the sur­face of an idyl­lic park-like set­ting lurk the neg­a­tive, sense­less and hurt­ful atti­tudes of nar­row minded and mis­er­able peo­ple like yourself.”

Both res­i­dents later moved away.

Albert Ful­ton, as it turned out, was also appar­ently under the illu­sion that all should be idyl­lic in the park. He was upset with cars being parked on the road and gen­er­ally fond of the old ways. With wealth­ier peo­ple mov­ing in, along came domes­tic helpers, more cars and reg­u­lar home upgrad­ing and renos. There was sim­ply no place to park but on the road.

Ful­ton took it out on the tires.

After being charged crim­i­nally and outed in the media, Ful­ton, also the park’s Neig­bour­hood Watch cap­tain, went miss­ing. His body was recov­ered from Toronto Harbour.

That sad chap­ter speaks to what is inevitable in the park, and not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing.

Change.

Over the years, homes did stay within fam­i­lies, but the park has grad­u­ally lost its old-name stock. It attracts eccentrics, pro­fes­sion­als and aca­d­e­mics. Mar­shall McLuhan lived here, and only recently did his fam­ily sell off the home at No. 3.

Today, the houses of Wych­wood Park are home to some rec­og­niz­able names. Bon­nie Brooks, pres­i­dent of Hudson’s Bay Com­pany. Joe Oliver, fed­eral min­is­ter of nat­ural resources. Jour­nal­ist Libby Znaimer. Gary Clew­ley and Crown attor­ney Jen­nifer Lofft, a for­mer trustee.

Lofft, 51, only the sec­ond female trustee in park his­tory, resigned last year, along with a fel­low trustee.

In a let­ter to the park, Lofft and Mar­vin Green lamented that the annual levy was under attack and there was no way to enforce pay­ment, let alone coax out dough for spe­cial levies for major projects.

Things were degrad­ing and in need of fix­ing. And a small minor­ity was stand­ing in the way of get­ting things done.

One improve­ment project would be the road. Such is the state of the asphalt road, Lofft and Green noted in their res­ig­na­tion let­ter, that a cab dri­ver remarked that it reminded him of his home country.

“When asked where he was from, he said Afghanistan,” reads the letter.

“With over $110m of real estate in Wych­wood Park we can only imag­ine what effect the degra­da­tion is hav­ing on the resale value of each and every home.”

The com­mu­nity, the out­go­ing trustees wrote, is being “held hostage to a super-minority who may for one rea­son or another be dis­sat­is­fied with what most thought was a sound com­mu­nity deci­sion. This minor­ity is now car­ry­ing the day, which is unjust.

“Fur­ther­more there is a very long his­tory of acri­mony and dys­func­tion in Wych­wood Park that inevitably results from the prob­lems noted above. The his­tory of bick­er­ing and resul­tant degra­da­tion of our envi­ron­ment is a pre­dictable out­come of this no longer work­able gov­er­nance model …

“Until there is a new gov­er­nance model, we are doomed to re-live the fail­ures of old.”

What’s going on? There are dif­fer­ing wants and needs and pri­or­i­ties, and a power imbal­ance rooted in who pays what.

Marc Gia­comelli, per­haps best known by SCTV Net­work afi­ciona­dos as a cre­ative direc­tor and asso­ciate pro­ducer in the Bob and Doug days, was named as a replace­ment trustee.

Res­i­dents now have busier lives. There are younger fam­i­lies. More money. And it is becom­ing more and more dif­fi­cult to be neigh­bourly, says Gia­comelli, who along with wife Sarah (she’s in real estate and grew up in Wych­wood) live in a lovely home built by artist George Reid.

When long­time park care­taker Peter Cad­dick, who resigned a year ago, died in late Novem­ber, only 11 houses of the 60 in the park were rep­re­sented at the funeral, accord­ing to one per­son present.

The ser­vice was less than a 10-minute walk from the park.

“There are more, newer peo­ple mov­ing in, with more money, espe­cially young cou­ples who I guess are kind of in between ‘charm­ing, idyl­lic, his­tor­i­cal Wych­wood Park’ and ‘can’t the road be fixed and what about my prop­erty val­ues’ kind of atti­tude,” says Gia­comelli, who has served as trea­surer and is in his sec­ond stint as a trustee.

“I guess because it’s unique and it’s lovely and it’s got trees and a pond, it’s dif­fer­ent … but I don’t think it’s dif­fer­ent in the neigh­bour dynamic, other than it’s more personal.

“It’s like a vil­lage, a weird lit­tle vil­lage, so the agree­ments and dis­agree­ments get empha­sized. The ben­e­fits and the neg­a­tives are empha­sized because every­body knows everybody.”

Per­haps the only Wych­wood owner that still has fam­ily ties to an orig­i­nal owner is Ger­ald Owen, a Globe and Mail edi­to­r­ial writer who, along with his wife, inher­ited his father’s home on Alcina Ave. It backs onto Wych­wood Park and is part of the area sub­ject to provin­cial and munic­i­pal her­itage rules.

Owen, 59, also hap­pens to be at war with the Wych­wood Park trustees over the trust deed.

While he believes in the her­itage aspects of the neigh­bour­hood and the phi­los­o­phy behind it, he believes the trust deed has no merit. Five years ago he stopped pay­ing annual levies, for which he argues he receives no ben­e­fit, since his home fronts onto a city-owned street. (A num­ber of Alcina homes are part of the park.)

The trustees took him to small-claims court, where Owen lost. On appeal to divi­sional court, the rul­ing was upheld.

Unchal­lenged in either court, how­ever, was whether the trust deed is bind­ing on future home­own­ers. Or even legal. The trust deed is not reg­is­tered on the title of his home and Owen believes it is a feu­dal­is­tic arrange­ment – one he didn’t agree to.

Owen remains stead­fast and refuses to pay the reg­u­lar levy. In a sub­se­quent small-claims case brought for­ward by the trustees, Owen will have a chance to make new argu­ments on what turns out to be an old issue.

Owen con­tends that his fam­ily, in pay­ing the levy over the years, has been sub­si­diz­ing ben­e­fits received by others.

In 1952, a legal opin­ion cast doubt on whether the trust had any legal hold on a strip of com­mon frontage on Alcina Ave. and warned trustees not to make any claims of own­er­ship on that land. In other words, do not rock the boat.

The trustees, argues Owen, have been wing­ing it for more than a century.

“We have every rea­son to believe that a suc­ces­sion of trustees have been afraid of what some of the ben­e­fi­cia­ries would say to the court in that event – some would sim­ply want out,” Owen said in an email to the Star.

At the heart of it all are the fees, sus­pi­cions over who pays what, who wants what, and who benefits.

Over the years, oth­ers have not paid or with­held pay­ment until the last moment because of var­i­ous dis­agree­ments with the trust over spend­ing and projects. Records indi­cate past law­suits where the trust went after residents.

In rare cases of finan­cial prob­lems, pay­ments were delayed or stag­gered and, if left unpaid, were recouped by plac­ing liens on prop­er­ties, the amounts owed real­ized when the prop­erty was sold.

Owen’s reg­u­lar annual levy now stands at more than $3,000, which is high for the park. Only eight other prop­er­ties pay more than $3,000.

While the trust will not dis­close who pays how much in levies, for pri­vacy rea­sons – which is odd, given that one can look up city tax infor­ma­tion – the aver­age levy for the com­ing fis­cal year is $2,027. The high­est levy is $8,423; the low­est, $729.

With grow­ing park costs, levies jumped by 25% from the pre­vi­ous year.

This is on top of city prop­erty taxes.

At the end of each year, the home­own­ers of Wych­wood Park vote with their cheque­books. By the end of this past fis­cal year, three res­i­dents, includ­ing Owen, had not paid.

Owen, it should be noted, is not part of the “super-minority” that led to the res­ig­na­tion of the trustees. But he does have sup­port­ers who won­der about the trust deed. A neigh­bour on Alcina offered a let­ter of sup­port for the court bat­tle, say­ing that the pri­vate tax is “unfairly and inap­pro­pri­ately levied.”

Owen says that when he first started ask­ing ques­tions at a gen­eral meet­ing in 2007, he was treated “rather disdainfully.”

“The whole thing needs to have a com­plete over­haul,” Owen said in an inter­view. “But we essen­tially just want out. The deed is ille­gal and trusts aren’t really allowed to go on indef­i­nitely, unless they’re actual char­i­ta­ble trusts. It just doesn’t make sense for us to be part of this.”

Oth­ers agree that the trust deed needs improve­ment. Options include scrap­ping it in lieu of a con­do­minium–like arrange­ment, or, just turn­ing over every­thing to the city, with her­itage rules in place to pro­tect the area. And there are res­i­dents who are lean­ing that way.

The only way to deal with changes to the trust deed is to open it up in court, which is costly. The results could be unpredictable.

Tsur Moses pads through the nearly fin­ished inte­rior of 106 Wych­wood Park in rub­ber boots. His iPhone chirps con­stantly. A cou­ple of work­ers do brick­work on the main entrance.

The soft-spoken, 39-year-old Israeli-born engi­neer and devel­oper and a busi­ness part­ner bought the land in 2007 for $1.5 mil­lion, and in doing so sent a col­lec­tive shud­der through the park.

That the old ’50s bun­ga­low that sat on one side of the lot would come down was almost a given. For starters, no one much liked the bun­ga­low, although the gar­den, includ­ing a lovely rose gar­den, on the empty lot beside it, was pleas­ing to the eye.

“It was a given, as soon as Tsur Moses bought that prop­erty, that some­thing big was going to hap­pen because our very own her­itage doc­u­ment iden­ti­fied the lot as one for poten­tial devel­op­ment,” says for­mer trustee Lofft.

Ini­tially, Moses wanted to put two large houses on the dou­ble lot. The city and the Wych­wood Park Her­itage Advi­sory Com­mit­tee stopped him cold. A revised plan for two smaller homes looked promis­ing but not to the res­i­dents of Wych­wood Park, who gal­va­nized over this issue.

“It was an amaz­ing thing in some ways because a lot of the res­i­dents really came together and pitched in and there’s actu­ally an extra­or­di­nary amount of exper­tise here,” says Lofft. “There are lawyers and plan­ners and archi­tects and artists.”

Archi­tect Paul Oberst, who drew up one of the homes, remem­bers show­ing off the draw­ings at a com­mu­nity open house at the Wych­wood Barns.

“The coun­cil­lor (Joe Mihevc) liked it, the staff liked it, peo­ple came to the open house and just said, ‘It’ll never hap­pen.’ And it didn’t.

“We got com­pletely slaugh­tered. The neigh­bour­hood is very tight. They sort of go to the wall.”

For what it’s worth, Oberst says he fell in love with Wych­wood Park at first sight. “This would be years and years ago, it was just like, ‘Holy crap, I can’t believe there is this right in the mid­dle of the city,’ and, ‘Oh, what a lovely place to live.’ And (now) it’s like, ‘You couldn’t make me go there. It’s just too weird.’ “

Their two-house plan thwarted, Moses and his busi­ness part­ner went to the Ontario Munic­i­pal Board, where, after years of back and forth on the prop­erty, ham­mered out a set­tle­ment with the Wych­wood Park her­itage com­mit­tee. There would be one house and a plan that would not result in the total demo­li­tion of the exist­ing house.

The park was adamant that a demo­li­tion prece­dent not be set.

So, although you’d never know it to look at it, encased in double-thick foun­da­tion walls are rem­nants of the orig­i­nal bungalow.

This par­tic­u­lar com­pro­mise will hence be known as the “house at 106.”

The fight, while always civil, took its toll on every­one involved.

As for the house, peo­ple “hate it,” in the words of one resident.

“As much hard work that was done, it looks like a mon­ster house,” says Gia­comelli. “When you stand and look at it, it looks like one of those fake French chateaus that you can see in For­est Hill or the Bri­dle Path.”

Even the devel­oper thinks it doesn’t fit the lot. It’s “too huge” and the two smaller houses, Moses thinks, would have blended in better.

Five years after he embarked on the project, Moses will soon walk away with­out mak­ing any money, he says. He sold his share of the prop­erty to his part­ner, who may or may not live in the house before sell­ing. It could poten­tially be ready for list­ing in a month.

Greet­ing a reporter for a tour of the house, Moses begins with a sales pitch: “What can I tell you about lovely Wych­wood Park? Wych­wood Park, it’s the oasis in down­town or mid­dle down­town Toronto. It’s a place, if you are a young CEO, you want to raise your chil­dren in a coun­try­side feel­ing and be ten min­utes from your office.

“And the secret of this place is that a lot of peo­ple don’t know it exists.”

And then this piece of advice for fel­low developers:

“I rec­om­mend to every­body not to do it. It’s not worth the time. It’s too hard. The neigh­bours are very picky, and I under­stand them, because they really love the neigh­bour­hood and they really care. They want to pro­tect it like a mother pro­tects a child. But they over­pro­tect it.

“For a builder, it’s very hard to get it approved. And they want to be involved in all the details.”

Moses calls this house – boast­ing a home the­atre room, library, wal­nut floors and soar­ing ceil­ings – his baby and pre­dicts it might go for $5.5 mil­lion, which would be a record for Wych­wood Park.

It appears to be well built, with fab­u­lous views of the park and ten­nis court.

“Who­ever buys it is lucky,” he says. “He’ll have a fin­ished house and he won’t have to deal with the neigh­bours. Because some­body already did it for you.”

To recap: In this beau­ti­ful weird neigh­bour­hood, there’s been a legal bun fight over a dusty 121-year-old doc­u­ment, a devel­oper man­aged to build a house no one wanted built, divi­sive issues con­tinue to crop up, there are sus­pi­cions over money, and occa­sional unneigh­bourly conduct.

And peo­ple who con­tinue to love liv­ing here for a host of reasons.

“It is with­out a doubt the best place in the city to live,” says Lofft, who loves being “sur­rounded by beauty and inter­est­ing discourse.

“The eclec­tic mix of peo­ple who live here don’t fit per­fectly into any one cat­e­gory. It’s not the place for those seek­ing instant social sta­tus or recog­ni­tion; it is the quiet secret of mid­town, and it’s more of a village.”

She and her hus­band Gary Clew­ley, who bought into the park in 2000, have had the plea­sure of watch­ing their five chil­dren – aged12 to 20, includ­ing 14-year-old triplet daugh­ters – grow up there.

“It still is an amaz­ing place to bring up kids,” says Gia­comelli, who raised three kids here. “The pos­i­tives are your neigh­bours know your busi­ness. The neigh­bours know your kids. The kids can run around, go in the pond, skate on the pond, look for rabbits.

“So, the neg­a­tives of a vil­lage turn into a positive.”

In the wake of last year’s trustee res­ig­na­tions and obvi­ous neigh­bour­hood issues, there’s now a new approach to get­ting along, and it turns out to be a very old approach.

Go slow. Walk around and talk to peo­ple, just like the trustees of olden days, who were typ­i­cally older and had a lot of time on their hands.

“They would walk around on a week­end or on an evening and talk to peo­ple and ask what’s going on,” says Gia­comelli. “Tree fallen down? Is your street light out? Do you really want to put that colour of roof on your house?

“It was face-to-face and it was like elders in a village.

“It sounds like some kind of weird idyl­lic thing.”

In other words, you do want to be a good neigh­bour, don’t you?

Weird any­where else, per­haps, but not in Wych­wood Park.

“It’s a great pos­i­tive exper­i­ment in urban liv­ing,” says Gia­comelli. “You won­der why there aren’t more neigh­bour­hoods actu­ally like this.”

For plea­sure and sport, the res­i­dents of Wych­wood Park will now hope for a frozen Tad­dle Creek Pond and watch the new trees at 106 Wych­wood grow – and, now that the mon­stros­ity is built, spec­u­late on just how much she might go for.

Not that good neigh­bours ever talk about such things.

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Con­tact the Jef­frey Team for more infor­ma­tion – 416−388−1960

Lau­rin & Natalie Jef­frey are Toronto Real­tors with Cen­tury 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these arti­cles, they just repro­duce them here for peo­ple
who are inter­ested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
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