Cabbagetown House Styles: How to Tell Bay-and-Gable from Second Empire

The first thing to know about Cabbagetown’s houses is that “Victorian” is not a style. It is a period. The builders who put up most of these streets in the 1870s and 1880s worked from pattern books and borrowed whatever looked good: pointed arches from medieval churches, round arches from Romanesque abbeys, the mansard roof from Napoleon III’s Paris. A walking guide produced by the Cabbagetown Preservation Association calls it architectural dress-up, which is exactly right.

The spotter above narrows a house down in four questions or fewer. What follows is the longer version, style by style, with the addresses where each one can be seen. All of them are private homes, so look from the sidewalk, and take a few steps back: most of these fronts only make sense when the whole gable is in view.

Start with the roof, then the windows

There is an order to looking at a Cabbagetown front that saves time. The roof comes first, because one style is decided by the roof alone. Then the tops of the windows, because two more styles are decided by the shape of an arch. Only after that does it make sense to look at size and decoration, where the most common houses sort themselves out.

It helps to know one construction secret before starting. According to the City’s heritage plan for Cabbagetown South, many houses that look like brick are in fact pine balloon-frame buildings with a brick front that carries no load at all. The brick is the costume; the frame is the house. It explains why so many side walls are stucco or siding, and why the front of a house can be restored to look entirely Victorian while the back is something else.

Bay-and-gable, the Cabbagetown house

If one type of house defines the neighbourhood, it is this one. The bay-and-gable house is narrow, with a strong vertical line: a bay window projects from the front and climbs to a steep, pointed gable, and the edges of the gable are trimmed with carved wooden bargeboard. The brick is usually red, with decoration in yellow or buff brick, and the houses usually stand in pairs or long attached rows.

The City’s plan describes the effect well: unbroken rows emphasizing verticality, the alternate play of light and shadow, and steep peaked gables. Decorative woodwork in the gables, stained glass and, where they survive, wooden porches complete the picture. Many porches were added in the twentieth century, so a porch is not proof of age.

Where to look: almost everywhere. The lower part of Metcalfe Street is the most photographed row. Winchester Street east of Sackville, on the north side, has another long run.

Workers’ cottages

The smallest houses in the neighbourhood are also among the oldest in spirit. The workers’ cottage is a design that grew up in the middle of the nineteenth century, when newly industrial England needed to house the working poor quickly and cheaply. It is simple, symmetrical and compact: a central door, a window on each side, and a steep peaked gable above the door. Heritage planners describe them as small centre-hall plan buildings.

Where to look: mostly in the north of Cabbagetown. The Wellesley Cottages, north of Wellesley Street just west of Sackville, have a laneway named after them. Amelia Street has a long row.

Second Empire

This one is decided by the roof. The mansard roof has a double slope on each side, the lower part much steeper, and it is really an extra storey with dormer windows set into it. The sides slope inward and were originally clad in slate. The style takes its name from France under Napoleon III, and anyone who has been to Paris will recognize the roofline.

Where to look: several on Carlton Street, including 288, 309–311 and 314 Carlton, and a large-scale group at 373–377 Sackville Street. Smaller versions can be found on Alpha Avenue and on Geneva Avenue, the street named for a Swiss city. The row at 119–133 Spruce Street, built by Thomas Brice in 1887, is a small-scale Second Empire group listed in the Cabbagetown South plan.

Gothic Revival

On a house, Gothic Revival usually comes down to one feature: the pointed arch over the windows. Very few Cabbagetown houses are in this style. The heritage plan does note a large number of small “Gothic vernacular” Victorian houses in the south of the district, many with patterned polychrome brickwork, which is a looser use of the same borrowings.

Where to look: 255 Carlton Street and several houses on Rose Avenue. For the full effect, visit the chapels: the one at the Toronto Necropolis on Winchester Street and the one at St. James Cemetery on Parliament Street are both striking examples, and both are on the heritage walk.

Romanesque Revival

Round arches instead of pointed ones mark the Romanesque Revival: semicircular heads over windows and doors, and a heavy, solid look, often in red brick or red sandstone from the Credit Valley.

Where to look: a group at 93–99 Winchester Street. Two larger buildings show the style at scale: the former church at Winchester and Metcalfe that is now home to Toronto Dance Theatre, and the former Ontario Medical College for Women at 289 Sumach Street, which dates from 1890 and is now residential.

Georgian Revival

One of the earlier styles in the neighbourhood, and the plainest. Georgian houses have a flat, symmetrical front with evenly spaced windows and almost no ornament. After a street of bay-and-gable houses they can look almost severe.

Where to look: only a handful exist. 35 Spruce Street, the Charles MacKay House of 1860–61, is described in the City’s plan as “a bit of late-flowering Georgian”. There are others at 85 Winchester Street and 185 Carlton Street.

Queen Anne

At the other extreme is Queen Anne, the most elaborate and eccentric of the Victorian styles. It is deliberately asymmetrical, busy with gables and bays, and often decorated with terracotta. Put one beside a Georgian house and the difference is the whole history of Victorian taste in two facades.

Where to look: 297 Carlton Street and 314 Wellesley Street East, and one that faces Riverdale Park.

Arts and Crafts and the 1920s streets

Not everything here is Victorian. The houses of the 1920s, inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, are wider and more horizontal, with wide dormers and heavy porches carried on solid round columns. The heritage plan lists the differences from their Victorian neighbours: less ornament, newer materials and sanitary fittings, platform framing instead of balloon framing, solid brick walls, low ceilings and room for a car.

Where to look: Gifford Street and Nasmith Avenue, laid out after the Toronto General Hospital was demolished in 1922, are almost entirely made of them. There are some larger examples on the north side of Winchester Street between Metcalfe and Sackville. South of Spruce Street, a number of these 1920s houses have narrow driveways, unusual for Cabbagetown, sized for the cars of their day rather than today’s. The history page tells the story of the hospital.

Roofs, windows and brick: the details that repay a closer look

Once the style is settled, the small things start to show. Roofs were originally slate or wooden shingle, according to the Cabbagetown South heritage plan. Some slate survives, but asphalt shingle is now the usual covering, so a slate roof is worth noticing when you find one.

Windows vary more than people expect. Their heads can be flat, segmental (a shallow curve) or fully semicircular, and many houses still have original glazing. Many fine stained-glass windows survive, and some original front doors remain alongside them.

Brickwork is where the builders showed off. Red and buff brick are often mixed, or red brick is combined with shaped decorative brick, stone voussoirs over the openings or a stone base course at the bottom of the wall. Some houses are entirely in buff brick, and a good number are rendered in stucco, over both brick and frame. Look at the corners and above the windows: patterns that seem random from across the street usually turn out to be carefully repeated.

The front yards finish the picture. They are small, often laid out as a patch of lawn and a planting bed around a walkway to the porch, and many are defined by ornamental metal or wooden fencing or by hedges. The heritage plans treat these fences and yards as part of the district’s character along with the houses themselves.

Reading a whole row

The most rewarding exercise is not identifying one house but reading a row. Many Cabbagetown rows were built as sets of identical houses, so the differences you see now are almost all later changes: a porch added in the twentieth century, a window enlarged, trim replaced or restored. Stand opposite a row of bay-and-gable houses on Metcalfe Street and compare the gables one by one. Where a row still matches, it shows what the builder intended; where it does not, the story of the last hundred years is written on the fronts.

A few details worth learning

Some words come up again and again in heritage plans, and they make a walk more rewarding:

• Transom: the glazed panel above a door; a semicircular one with radiating bars is a fanlight.
• Voussoirs: the wedge-shaped stones or bricks that make up an arch over a window, often in a contrasting colour.
• Dormer: a small roofed projection that holds a window in a sloping roof.
• Polychrome brick: patterns made with bricks of different colours, red and buff being the local favourite.

Once these are familiar, the rows along Sackville and Sumach stop looking identical. For the rules owners follow when they repair them, see living in Cabbagetown.