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White-picket dreams

Broadcast Date: Nov. 21, 1954

Bright suburban dwellings from Rockcliffe to Surrey are affordable and ideal compared to homes in the city. With a significant increase in housing prices since the war, trailer parks have turned up on the outskirts of cities and some families even squat in abandoned factories.

In 1954, the idyllic alternative lies 12 kilometres outside of Toronto in a new suburb called Don Mills.

The planned community is Canada's suburban model, boasting row upon row of saltbox houses with large children-friendly backyards.

As seen in this TV clip, CBC crosses the country documenting new suburban communities like Don Mills.

White-picket dreams

• The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines a suburb as a region lying immediately outside a town or city, especially one lying near its boundaries.
• Between 1947 and 1952, business magnate E.P. Taylor bought 2,063 acres of land that would later become Don Mills.
• Construction began on Don Mills' first house on May 8, 1953.
• The planned community is often referred to as Canada's first suburb.

• Rent for a two-bedroom suite in an early Don Mills complex (Brydencourt Apartments) was $96 a month. In 1953, the average Canadian brought home $971 a month before taxes.
• In his book Creeping Conformity, author Richard Harris points out that the Hamilton suburb of Westdale was actually built before Don Mills.
• Westdale was a developer-planned community of 1,700 houses.

• Harris also refers to a 1,500-home subdivision in Lethbridge, Alta., completed by 1951, and mentions the following 1950s-built suburbs: Pont Viau on the Isle Jésus north of Montreal, Thorncliffe Heights near Calgary, Richmond Park near Vancouver and Landsdowne Park on the west island of Montreal.
• Don Mills was the most sophisticated Canadian suburb in terms of scale and architecture.

• Critics have compared Don Mills to New York's Levittown (built in 1947) and neighbourhoods developed in the late-1940s in San Francisco by Joseph Eichler.
• Don Mills was also innovative for being Canada's first fully-integrated community. Residents could work, shop and live there.
• Although stereotyped for its rows of monotonous bungalows, most of the 8,121 dwellings erected in Don Mills were actually apartment buildings and town houses.

• A young Harvard student in his late twenties was responsible for the original plans. Macklin Hancock convinced E.P. Taylor he was the best person for developing Taylor's land.
• Hancock's plan stressed community living with neighbourhood focal points — a shopping centre, churches, schools, factories and banks.
• Hancock went on to blueprint Meadowvale and Erin Mills, Ont.

• As president of Project Planning, Macklin Hancock also developed the St. Lawrence Seaway's north shore in Quebec and Century City, a commercial and residential district in California.
• Hancock's suburban model was duplicated by communities throughout Canada until the 1970s. Since then, a new trend in making urban centres more liveable has begun.

• In 2004, Hancock received an honorary doctor of science degree from the University of Guelph. He had graduated from the university's agricultural college years prior in 1949.
• In 2004, the first house built in Don Mills still stood at 55 Jocelyn Crescent. It was a typical "saltbox house;" two-storeys with an asymmetrical roof, sloping low in the back.

White-picket dreams

Medium: Television

Program: CBC Newsmagazine

Broadcast Date: Nov. 21, 1954

Duration: 13:31

Last updated:
March 6, 2008