[URBAN NOTE] "The space age Parkway Plaza, Toronto’s first heritage supermarket"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing's Chris Bateman describes the story of a 1950s supermarket in Ontario became a heritage building.

It was only a shopping mall, but when the Parkway Plaza opened at Ellesmere Road and Victoria Park Avenue in 1958, it signalled the arrival of space age in the Toronto’s eastern suburbs.

Just five years earlier the site was in the middle of Maryvale, a swathe farms and fields on the borderlands of the Toronto urban area named for the nearby country estate of Senator Frank O’Connor.

A short distance south, over the Canadian Pacific tracks near Lawrence Avenue, the first suburban culs-de-sac and commercial developments were rising from the cornfields.

Modernity arrived quickly in Maryvale. Highway 401 opened just to the north in 1956, and housing subdivisions sprouted from the agricultural landscape with astonishing speed.

To service these new homes, the Cadillac Development Corporation purchased the lots at the southeast corner of Ellesmere and Victoria Park for a shopping centre and hired Bregman and Hamann architects to draw up the blueprints.