A railway company's model town, built before it had any residents to speak of
Leaside
The Canadian Northern Railway laid out Leaside in 1913 as a fully planned industrial town with its own rail yards, years before enough houses existed to give it much of a population.
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Leaside was laid out in 1913 by the Canadian Northern Railway as a fully planned model town, combining a rail yard and industrial lands with a residential grid designed from scratch rather than growing organically around an existing settlement. The plan stalled almost immediately: the outbreak of the First World War the following year froze most development, and Leaside spent its first decade as a town that existed mostly on paper, with far more planned infrastructure than actual residents.
An industrial boom, then a residential suburb
The Leaside Bridge, completed in 1927, finally gave the community practical road access to the rest of Toronto, helping unlock the industrial growth the original plan had envisioned, with manufacturers including Canada Wire and Cable and wartime radar producer Research Enterprises Limited establishing plants there through the 1930s and 40s. Leaside developed into a solidly middle-class residential suburb in the postwar decades, its original railway-company street grid still recognizable beneath the houses that eventually filled it in.
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