A residential pocket that fought off its own university's expansion plans
Harbord Village
Squeezed between the University of Toronto and Kensington Market, Harbord Village organized in the 1970s to block university expansion plans that would have demolished much of its Victorian housing stock.
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Harbord Village developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a dense residential neighbourhood squeezed between the University of Toronto to the east and Kensington Market to the west, filling in with modest Victorian and Edwardian rowhouses built for a working- and middle-class population, including many Jewish immigrant families in the neighbourhood's early decades.
Organizing against the university
By the 1960s and 1970s, the expanding University of Toronto had ambitions to acquire and demolish significant portions of Harbord Village for institutional expansion, a threat that galvanized residents into forming the Harbord Village Residents' Association, one of Toronto's more effective neighbourhood preservation campaigns of the era. The association's sustained opposition helped block the university's larger expansion plans and secured heritage protections for much of the neighbourhood's housing stock, preserving Harbord Village's low-rise Victorian character even as the university and downtown development pressed in on it from multiple sides.
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