Riverdale: Victorian and Edwardian houses on plank subfloor
Riverdale floors squeak mainly because most of them are well over a century old. The area was annexed to Toronto in 1884, and its housing is primarily Victorian and Edwardian; some of the oldest houses were built in the 1800s as boarding rooms for working-class tenants. In the Blake-Jones pocket the homes run from the 1870s to the 1930s, and along Blake Street most are semi-detached. The era-typical floor is strip hardwood over plank subfloor nailed to sawn joists, laid long before plywood became standard. A century of renovation matters as much as age: a wall taken out, a kitchen moved or a house divided into flats changes how the floor carries load, so we look for those changes before deciding how to fix a squeak. The large redevelopment sites sit off the residential side streets: the former Lever Brothers soap works, in the southern industrial area from the 1890s until 2009, and Don Mount Court, rebuilt as a mix of social and market housing.
