Victorian rowhouses to glass towers

Toronto Architecture

A style found almost nowhere else — the Victorian bay-and-gable rowhouse — sitting a short walk from one of the tallest, densest condo skylines in North America.

Victorian bay-and-gable houses in Cabbagetown, Toronto
Bay-and-gable houses, Cabbagetown — David (bootbearwdc), CC BY 2.0

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Toronto's built environment runs on two very different clocks at once: a 19th-century residential style found almost nowhere outside the city, and one of the fastest, tallest condo booms in North America layered right on top of it.

The bay-and-gable house

Walk through Cabbagetown, Riverdale, Parkdale or the Annex and the dominant house style is the bay-and-gable: a narrow Victorian rowhouse with a projecting bay window topped by a steep, pointed gable roof, usually in red brick. It emerged in Toronto specifically in the late 19th century as a way to maximize light and interior space on narrow urban lots, and while similar bay windows exist elsewhere, the sheer concentration of this exact style is considered distinctly Torontonian — architectural historians treat it as close to a local vernacular style in its own right.

Rows of Victorian bay-and-gable houses in Cabbagetown, Toronto
Cabbagetown houses — David (bootbearwdc), CC BY 2.0

Cabbagetown: the largest Victorian district in North America

The Cabbagetown neighbourhood, just east of downtown, is frequently cited as the largest continuous area of preserved Victorian housing anywhere in North America — a legacy of 19th-century working-class Irish immigrant settlement (the name reportedly comes from residents growing cabbages on their front lawns) followed by a wave of restoration and gentrification starting in the 1970s.

The modern skyline

Since the early 2000s, Toronto has run one of the largest condo construction booms of any city on the continent, driven by high housing demand and a downtown that's been actively encouraged to build up rather than out. The result is a skyline dominated by the CN Tower (see our landmarks guide) surrounded by an ever-denser cluster of glass residential towers — a contrast that puts 130-year-old bay-and-gable rowhouses a few blocks from buildings that didn't exist a decade ago.

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