Paving the Way to Life in the Park: W.G. MacKendrick and the dawn of the Suburbs
Excerpted from a longer text by Teresa Casas

When the newly prosperous Will MacKendrick moved his wife and five children into north Rosedale's Roxborough Drive in 1910, he typified the contemporary search for an environment near enough to the city yet providing some distance. He chose to build an "English cottage" style of house and garden, situating it in the slope of a ravine with a vista of woods and a creek below. The architecture reflects a fashion for a return to a simpler life. A reaction against the Victorian taste for adornment, dark wood, clutter and drapery, these new interiors stressed light, clean surfaces and natural, local materials with views and windows onto the natural world.

MacKendrick recognized in the 1890s that opportunity lay with the Warren Scharff Company and its newly patented road surface called bituminous cement. After working his way up the ranks on numerous road-building projects in the United States, he returned to Toronto as the head of the new Canadian branch of the company. There, he worked quickly to use his growing social influence to procure contracts for paving the best residential streets.

As a progressive city builder, MacKendrick balanced the proliferation of cement roads so that the city spread ever-outward, erasing the former countryside with the cultivation of nature within the city in the form of gardens and parks. He was able to accomplish this most ably between 1910 and 1913 as president of the Toronto Horticultural Society. The organization's mission was civic and social improvement through plantings and competitions in the poorer neighbourhoods of the city, and disseminating botanical information to the more educated classes through the Society's yearbook and newsletter.

Many illustrious Rosedale neighbours of MacKendrick belonged to the Society. As ardent gardeners they took great interest in the landscape design of their country estate grounds and their city gardens. Among these was J.H. Ryrie, owner of Birks' Jewellers, whose celebrated Arts and Crafts villa, Edgemere, was located several lots east of Mackendrick's Oakville property called Chestnut Point.

From 1909 to 1922, when he took up residence in Gairloch Gardens, MacKendrick accumulated 400 acres of farm property. His plan was to retire to a home that offered continuity with Edwardian pre-war Toronto – the Oakville home was an almost exact replica of the one in Rosedale. While the neighbouring lakefront homes were designed to accommodate large weekend parties, Chestnut Point was a comparatively modest-sized building. Although based on the desire to live close to the water, it was never intended as a hobby farm or a place of entertainment. The property was a canny investment based on MacKendrick's awareness that when scenic areas, roads, luxury real estate and landscaped gardens are brought together, the surrounding lands escalate in value.

The construction of homes for newly married MacKendrick children along the Chestnut Point private laneway in the 1930s anticipated the appearance of suburban subdivisions by a decade in what were first farm fields, then estates, and last residential developments. This echoed the pattern of the conversion of private estate parks to landscaped subdivisions that had occurred two decades before in Toronto. In June 1946, MacKendrick sold an adjoining field to a developer. A decade later, the private wooded lane-way leading to the Cox lakeshore estate, Ennisclare, became the spine of another subdivision.

The three resident groups that arrived in sequence – the farmers, the estate owners and the suburbanites – were now living side by side, marking a century of investment in the Oakville district by those in pursuit of a life just beyond the city.