Cabbagetown Toronto: Victorian Cottages and Historic Community

Cabbagetown is Toronto's most historically intact Victorian neighbourhood — a 144-block area of the city's eastern downtown that contains what is widely claimed to be the largest continuous area of preserved Victorian housing in North America. The neighbourhood's name, dating from the 19th century when impoverished Irish immigrant residents grew cabbages in their front yards, speaks to a history of working-class poverty that the neighbourhood's subsequent gentrification has not entirely obscured. The architectural heritage of Cabbagetown — row upon row of bay-and-gable brick cottages and semi-detached houses in the distinctive Ontario vernacular — has survived largely intact because the neighbourhood was too poor to attract the demolition and redevelopment that transformed comparable Victorian streetscapes across the city.

The Riverdale Farm, a working farm of heritage breeds operating on the grounds of the former Toronto Zoo in the Don Valley ravine at the neighbourhood's eastern edge, is one of the city's most charming institutions — a free public farm of cows, pigs, heritage chickens and sheep that has been providing urban Toronto with its closest encounter with agricultural life since 1978. The farm's seasonal programming, including farmers' market events and educational visits for school groups, sustains the neighbourhood's connection to the agricultural tradition that the cabbage-growing of the Irish immigrants originally represented. The surrounding Riverdale Park provides the neighbourhood with its primary green space and the viewpoint from the park's upper hill, overlooking the Don Valley and the downtown skyline, is one of the finest urban vistas in Toronto.

The neighbourhood's commercial activity centres on Parliament Street, Cabbagetown's main street, where independent restaurants, cafés and specialty shops serve a resident population of young professionals, artists and families who have chosen the neighbourhood for its architectural character and walkable scale. The annual Cabbagetown Festival, one of the city's oldest neighbourhood street festivals, draws visitors from across Toronto to explore the neighbourhood's heritage houses during its tour of homes component. The neighbourhood's proximity to Regent Park, the adjacent social housing neighbourhood currently undergoing a major mixed-income revitalization, creates an interesting adjacency of different Toronto housing histories that gives Cabbagetown's particular position in the city's social geography an additional layer of significance.