Yonge and St. Clair Homes & Real Estate Toronto

It takes a time-machine imagination to picture the earliest beginnings of this section of mid-town Toronto. In the early 1800’s, St. Clair Avenue was no more than a line drawn in a surveyor’s notebook and labeled Third Concession. The area teemed with deer, and today’s major cross-town thoroughfare was no more than a narrow trail disappearing west through dense virgin forest.

The first settlers cleared land and established market gardens — joined in the mid-1830’s by water-powered grist mills and sawmills, a feed store, and a distillery that sold whiskey at 8¢ a bottle to the inns up and down Yonge Street.

Fast-forward to 1890... and now the electric streetcars of the Metropolitan Railway are climbing Yonge Street hill. Side streets are being developed, sidewalks installed, and the large country estates scattered throughout the area are being joined by smaller family-sized houses. The Third Concession Line is now St. Clair Avenue and, with the arrival of new residents, shops, schools and churches soon follow.

For the next 60 years, the neighbourhood developed as a tranquil, primarily residential neighbourhood, but this changed in 1954 with the arrival of the Yonge Street subway. Now big business moved north, bringing construction of the first office towers, including the Imperial Oil and Mutual Life buildings.

And now, today, the pendulum is swinging back, as those grand office buildings are reborn as high-end condos. For example, the Mutual Life building reopened recently as One12 St. Clair, a luxury condo address with two $3.5-million penthouses. Others will follow.

Away from St. Clair Avenue itself, Yonge & St. Clair homes range from the dignified brick houses on Chaplin and Oriole Parkway at the more ambitious end of the price scale... to older townhouses on Alcorn and Walker Avenues and two-storey brick homes on Hillsdale Avenue West and Lawton Boulevard in the lower (but not inexpensive) end.

Overall, this narrow strip of Toronto’s mid-town has been on the rise for the past decade and shows no sign of slowing down. Yonge & St. Clair homes and real estate occupy one of the city’s most well-rounded neighbourhoods and form one of the city's most desirable communities in which to live, work and entertain.

For current listings of Yonge & St. Clair homes and real estate, please check the column to the right of this page. Listings are updated daily, so we recommend bookmarking this page and checking back frequently.