Old school suburbia: A profile of one of Canada's first and finest suburbs

[flar]

HAMILTON NEIGHBOURHOODS:
Corktown • Durand • Central • Dundas • Locke St. South • Burlington • Stinson • Westdale • St. Clair • Keith • Landsdale
The Delta • Gibson • Jamesville • Concession Street • Durand North • Durand South • Old Dundas Houses • Hess Village • Barton Street
Ancaster • North Kirkendall • South Kirkendall • McMaster University • Downtown • The Bayfront • The North End • Kenilworth
Mountain Brow • Textile District • Strathcona • North Stipley • Flamborough • Beasley • Chedoke • Stoney Creek • The Beach Strip

HAMILTON FEATURES:
C I T Y _ L I G H T S • Stone Hamilton • Twilight of the Industrial Age • Twilight of the Industrial Age II
Stone in Dundas and Ancaster • Goodbye, Hamilton (from 43 floors up) • Dirty Brick • Day for Night
This broken down old city still manages to wake up every morning... • Everywhere, Ontario • < R - E - T - R - O >
HAMILTON | Scenes from the cutting room floor • S U B U R B I A ! • Everywhere, Ontario • Hamilton Rowhouses
< H E A V Y <> I N D U S T R Y > • Old Man Winter vs. Hamilton




Westdale
Begun in the 1920's, the Hamilton neighbourhood of Westdale was one of the first master planned communities in Canada.
It was intended to be a self sufficient community, and remains so today, with banks, grocery store, schools, library,
theatre and shopping all located at the centre of the neighbourhood in the quaint shopping district of Westdale Village.
The unique street layout ensures a walkable, aesthetically pleasing community, and public transit service is
excellent. In keeping with urban trends of the era, home ownership was governed by covenants which ensured the
neighbourhood's character was distinctly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Although Westdale remains
predominantly upper-middle class, today it is considerably more diversified, including a large Jewish community and
many university students. The continued vibrancy of Westdale Village and success of the residential community is
a testament to its standing as one of the best planned suburbs of its era.

The tour begins in Westdale Village and then moves on to look at some of Westdale's wonderful English inspired
residential architecture.

The street layout:

The magnificent Westdale Collegiate

[guynvb]

Wow, that's a suburb? No kidding. And the houses are to die for.

[costanza]

the snooty fox?

sidewalk patios?

buildings to the lot line?

thats no suburb.. where are the wide boulevards and endless sprawl we all love so much?

[Wpg_Guy]

Beautiful urban neighbourhood!

[Calgarian]

That's what a suburb should look like, not the rows of beige houses with the ugly garage doors Calgary is known for.

[OhioGuy]

Now that is a beautiful area. It looks incredibly inviting! Thank you *very* much for taking the time to photograph the area and post them online.

[niwell]

Nice stuff! If only suburbs today could be built like this...

[Gordo]

Beautiful place!

[UrbanSophist]

If only they all looked like this...

Beautiful pics.

[SteelTown]

HA! I was looking real hard but nope I couldn't find myself in your pictures for Westdale. I'm at Westdale most of the time during my lunch break. I work at McMaster.

I love Westdale. You did another wonderful job flar. Keep up the good work!

[miketoronto]

Very nice, I love Westdale. But its not really a suburb. Its part of inner city Hamilton now

[flar]

Westdale is not part of the inner city. It is geographically isolated from Hamilton by a large ravine for which the long McKittrick bridge had to be built to connect Westdale to Hamilton (the Chedoke Expressway now runs through that ravine). Westdale was built on farmland that was outside Hamilton at the time and the site was chosen for its isolation from the city. Although it doesn't look like today's suburbs, and Hamilton has grown around it, it is a suburb.


Here's an excerpt from an interesting article on Westdale:

"Westdale, the Hamilton community selected as a Canadian measure of twentieth-century urban trends, sheltered more than 1,700 households when completed. As a private enterprise, commercialism governed Westdale's construction, but like the best-planned North American suburbs of the era--the exclusive Country Club District of Kansas City or Vancouver's Shaughnessy Heights--it balanced aesthetic and environmental concerns with financial ones. This made it different from the many commuter suburbs, but its history still progressed in step with national urban circumstances...The owners and tenants of the suburb sorted themselves out spatially in ways that conformed with attitudes and economic conditions that were continental in scope." (p. 411)

John C. Weaver. 1978. "From Land Assembly to Social Maturity: The Suburban Life of Westdale (Hamilton), Ontario, 1911-1951" Social History 11, 411-40.

[crisp444]

It is very nice, but this is not a huge exception to the rule of older North American suburbs - there are plenty of towns in suburban New Jersey, for example, that look similar. A pedestrian-friendly shopping district downtown doesn't necessarily make a neighborhood "urban" and ban it from being a suburb. That aside, this looks like a very nice place.

[raisethehammer]

Westdale WAS a suburb. That's the point. It was a 'master planned community'.
Sadly, the Meadowlands of Ancaster are also called a 'master planned community'.
Seems to me that planners are either nothing more than monkey's these days or they all forgot how to plan.
It's not even appropriate to call Westdale 'suburbia' considering the crap we get in the burbs today.
If city leaders cared, we could easily have new communities built like this today. Unless our city council's are all secretly working for oil and car companies I don't see why they don't start demanding proper design and planning again.
And not surprisingly, Westdale commands some of the highest home prices in all of Hamilton.
It's not in the 'inner city' per se like Barton and Sherman would be considered 'inner city', but it is a part of the urban lower city core now.
It's on the busiest transit corridor from Mac to Eastgate and mere minutes from downtown - a 5 minute bike ride from my downtown home.
These days it's more 'urban, inner city' than it is 'suburbia'.

Regardless, it's a fabulous community and one that should shame current 'planners' into hiding or back to school...or better yet, right out of a job.

[Swinefeld]

Stupendous. I love the mix of architecture, especially the Arts and Crafts homes.

[miketoronto]

I don't get why we don't plan like this anymore either. Just by home values, you can see areas like this are still popular.

Are there any other parts the lower city that have nice stable neighbourhoods like this(besides the area just west of downtown)? Anything on the east side that is still desirable?

[flar]

There is an area with homes similar in style to these just east of Gage Park in the east end. Most any neighbourhood south of Main in the lower city is solid (and desirable).

[MolsonExport]

The town of Mount Royal (Quebec) was a planned master community that predates Westdale.

Town of Mount Royal is a town located on the northwest side of Mount Royal, north of downtown Montreal, on the Island of Montreal in southwestern Quebec, Canada. pop. 18,933 (Statistics Canada, 2006).

The community is commonly referred to as the Town of Mount Royal (in French, Ville Mont-Royal), or by the abbreviation TMR (VMR in French).

The town was founded in 1912. It was created at the initiative of the Canadian Northern Railway. The town was designed by Frederic Todd, a planner who was heavily influenced by the likes of Ebenezer Howard and incorporated many aspects of the City Beautiful movement into his design. [1] The plan was to build a new town (or "model city" as it was called) at the foot of the mountain. The company bought 4,800 acres (19 km²) of farmland, and then built a rail tunnel under Mount Royal connecting their land to downtown Montreal. The profits from the venture helped finance the development of Canadian Northern's transcontinental railroad, which eventually became a significant constituent of the Canadian National Railway system. The town was designed by Canadian Northern's chief engineer, Henry Wicksteed, based loosely on Washington, DC.

[Red UM Rebel]

lovely pictures. Looks like a fantastic place to live

[flar]

delete double post