Among Toronto neigh­bour­hoods, Dover­court Park is some­thing of an unsung hero. Not sketchy enough to attract ris­ing chefs with cult fol­low­ings, nor trendy enough to send real estate val­ues through the roof, it’s long been an area where peo­ple find com­mu­nity, twen­tysome­things can rent a decent apart­ment and first-time buy­ers can buy an old semi to ren­o­vate and make their own.

There is even a real Dover­court Park at the cen­tre of it all. North of Bloor, south of Dupont and loosely between Duf­ferin and Oss­ing­ton – depend­ing on who’s sketch­ing the bound­aries – on real estate maps it’s also known as Dovercourt-Wallace Emer­son. The name Dover­court comes from the name of the home of the Deni­son estate, located west of Dun­das and Ossington.

In pre­vi­ous years, the neigh­bour­hood devel­oped a solid, lunch-bucket rep­u­ta­tion as indus­trial plants built up close to the Cana­dian Pacific Rail­way line just north of Dupont and Ital­ian and Por­tuguese work­ers moved in on the side streets to the south.

Dover­court Park Neighbourhood

In today’s hot real estate mar­ket, eye-popping ask­ing prices above $900,000 are start­ing to appear on the big fully-renovated houses. More typ­i­cal are the semi-detached houses, with some row houses and a few con­dos added to the mix. In the recent past, a lot of the hous­ing stock has changed hands in the more afford­able $350,000 to $500,000 range – which makes the area a draw for first-time buy­ers. Church-to–loft con­ver­sions are pop­u­lar with buy­ers and builders con­tinue to buy up every old pile of bricks they can get their hands on (watch for a bunch of new church con­ver­sions in the next year or two).

Orig­i­nally, the Vil­lage of Dover­court was founded in the 1870s. Its first res­i­dents were poor immi­grants from Eng­land, liv­ing in dozens of one and two bed­room tar and paper shacks which ini­tially resulted in the vil­lage being called a shan­ty­town. The vil­lage was annexed by the old City of Toronto in 1912 result­ing in city ser­vices being extended to the neigh­bour­hood help­ing stim­u­late its growth and devel­op­ment by 1923.

The neigh­bour­hood con­tains a mix of land-uses. The main thor­ough­fare of Bloor Street con­sists almost exclu­sively of mixed-use res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial build­ings. The Bloor­court Vil­lage BIA posts its street­lamp ban­ners on Bloor between Duf­ferin and Montrose.

Bloor Glad­stone Library

The build­ings along Bloor Street are typ­i­cally two or three sto­ries tall, with retail com­mer­cial on the main floor, and offices or rental hous­ing above. These struc­tures are the old­est in the neigh­bour­hood and are often in poor repair. At Dover­court Road, a large, high-rise apart­ment com­plex houses lower-middle-income ten­ants on the south­west corner.

Busi­nesses cen­tered around the inter­sec­tion of Dover­court Road and Hal­lam Street have formed their own BIA, the ‘Dover­court Vil­lage’. The bound­aries stretch from Dupont south to Shan­ley and east-west from Salem to Oss­ing­ton Avenue.

The res­i­den­tial area north of Bloor Street is pri­mar­ily single-family dwellings. Many of the larger houses have been con­verted into apart­ments, hous­ing up to eight sep­a­rate units. Side-streets increase in zoned den­sity as they approach Bloor. Low and medium-rise apart­ments occupy the major­ity of these zones.

The Bloor-Gladstone Library (dat­ing from 1912) is sit­u­ated at Bloor and Glad­stone Avenue, one block east of Duf­ferin Avenue. From 2006 to 2009 the library was closed for ren­o­va­tion. It reopened to the pub­lic – and many acco­lades – in July 2009.

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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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