A City of Homes Reused: Mirvish Village and the Conservation of Historic Use

In the 1960s, Ed and Anne Mirvish transformed a Toronto city street lined with late- Victorian homes into a commercial and cultural enclave. On Markham Street – later known as Mirvish Village – living rooms became cafés and front porches were shorn and shop windows installed in their place. Jane Jacobs celebrated this transformation as an expression of a living city in which users adapted buildings to suit changing needs.

The creation of a public realm on a former residential street was not unprecedented in Toronto. Known as the “City of Homes,” Toronto’s 19th- and 20th-century urban fabric was largely defined by a mix of commercial thoroughfares and residential streets lined with single-family dwellings. When commerce and innovation occurred outside planned confines, houses became host to new uses.

The adaptive reuse of domestic architecture in 1960s Toronto was part of an early wave of gentrification known as the White Painters Movement. These changes also gave rise to new relationships between place and use that have become widely valued, and the focus of conservation efforts in the proposed redevelopment of Mirvish Village. This paper explores Toronto as a “city of homes” where the conservation of social and cultural practices can be considered alongside the conservation of built form. In the absence of municipal and provincial conservation and planning mechanisms that conserve historic use, this paper also probes how the architectural qualities of a place that engendered these valued uses can be conserved while being mindful of the need for future and unforeseen adaptations.