Today I learned something new about my neighbourhood

Today, while reading the monthly newsletter from our community association I learned a little history about our new neighbourhood. It used to be called the Midway Annex and its 99 years old. Pretty cool. It sounds weird but I like knowing that my neighbourhood had a name. It's easier than describing it as "further east than Riverdale, but not as far over, or south, as the Beach". Now if I start calling it the Midway Annex, its not like anyone is going to know what I mean. But hey - I can glow in my newfound knowledge.

Here's the excerpt from the newsletter.

The Midway Annex is just one year shy of its centennial as a part of the city. Midway was the name of an area between the City of Toronto (the eastern boundary was just east of Greenwood) and
the Town of East Toronto (the western boundary crossed Danforth about a half km east of Woodbine). In its entirety, Midway, which was annexed in 1909, almost ran down almost to
Queen.

It was a dusty rural road with small wooden bridges over swamps and creeks until pavement and streetcar tracks arrived in 1913. Its market gardens supplied fresh produce and dairy products to the
nearby city, but gave way to a 1920s building boom that followed the end of WWI and the opening of the Bloor viaduct. The name Midway was largely forgotten as this hybrid streetcar/automobile
suburb developed. Also largely forgotten is that for more than 40 years, people from north and south of Danforth walked to the Midway s Midway stri p -- for streetcars into the core, for employment and for nearly ever kind of shop and service imaginable. There were movie theatres,
bowling alleys, several supermarkets, scores of independent food stores, lots of bank branches and a wide range of clothing and shoe stores.

Things changed rapidly after the subway replaced streetcars in 1966. With transit stops suddenly much farther apart, with traffic speeding up in the absence of streetcars and with major retailers
shifting to larger-scale car-dependent business models, Danforth as a pedestrian-friendly destination went into decline.