[Docere]

From Creeping Conformity, a book about suburubanization in Canada:

Suburbanization began before 1900. In the larger cities, quite extensive suburbs had grown up during the prosperous decades from the 1840s onward. In Montreal in the 1850s, for example, impressive terraces were built on newly subdivided lots north of Dorchester Street, between Mountain and University streets, while above Sherbrooke Street estates were laid out on the lower slopes of Mount Royal. Similarly, during the economic boom of the 1880s another fine suburb began to grow up in Toronto north of Bloor Street and west of Avenue Road, an area that became known as the Annex after it was brought into the city in 1884. But the wave of suburban growth that gained momentum after 1900 was different, above all in scale. The depression of the 1890s was the deepest of the nineteenth century, in some respects equalling that of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Some cities lost population for a short time in the 1890s, and few new houses were built. In areas like the Annex, which had been subdivided but incompletely developed the 1880s, the discontinuity was blurred: piecemeal development in the 1900s filled the gaps. Much more striking was the creation of extensive new districts during the speculative boom in suburban subdivision that reached a fever between 1909 and 1912.

Subdivisions that were laid out between 1900 and 1914 produced suburbs on a wholly new scale around almost every Canadian city. Two developments combined to create this new phenomenon: the electric streetcar and unprecedented economic growth.