Planned mid-century suburbs, and an older pocket
North York’s floors are mostly mid-century, and unusually well documented. Don Mills is the clearest case: as late as 1950 the area held around twenty farms, E.P. Taylor had assembled two thousand acres by 1952, and it was designed and built out as a model community between 1952 and 1965. That is nailed plywood subfloor over dimensional joists throughout. Willowdale runs a little earlier, with single-family homes ranging from 1910 to 1950s construction, one and two storey pre-war houses plus modest one-and-a-half storey postwar ones. Lawrence Park is older again and slower: assembly began in 1907, but the neighbourhood was interrupted by two world wars and a depression and was only completed in the 1950s, with most homes built between 1910 and the late 1940s. The post-2000 development is concentrated in the Yonge Street towers, not the residential streets.