New triplexes line Pape Ave. in Toronto, circa 1960. Each building has three 2-bedroom apartments and all still exist today.Courtesy Gil Meslin
When Peg Graham decided to downsize from her detached single-family house, she went out and bought a 1959 triplex in Scarborough, near Kingston Road and Victoria Park Avenue. This may sound a bit counterintuitive, but Ms. Graham, who is retired but previously worked in real estate, understood why the math worked. Before buying the single-family home she had lived for several years in a duplex, renting out the second unit.
“I didn’t realize how the monetary element of it was so handy for whoever owns the building until I sold it,” she said recently. Confronted by the high cost of owning a single, Ms. Graham spent four years looking for a triplex. “I did all the math and I felt that was the best way of being able to cover my expenses and to give a nice unit to whoever it is that was looking [for one]. I searched and searched and then I found this big square box of a place with three existing units and three different [electrical] panels in it.”
The triplex she eventually bought, in 2016, is colloquially known as a “Toronto Special.” These modernist three-level walk-ups are characterized by low-pitched roofs, picture windows, light-filled units and brick façades adorned with grey and pink angel stone panels.
According to an open-source mapping project done by BDP Quadrangle associate architect Jan Schotte, there are hundreds of Toronto Specials around the city, predominantly in areas such as York, Scarborough and North York that were known mainly for postwar bungalow or split-level style tract housing. Many have spacious three-bedroom flats and parking at the back.
Despite their diffusion, they are strikingly similar and beg the question: did they come from a single set of designs?
As planners in Toronto and cities across Canada move to up-zone neighbourhoods once reserved almost entirely for detached homes, federal policy-makers have revived an old idea – the use of so-called “pattern books,” which are essentially catalogues of designs, to hasten the development process.
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation published these catalogues between the late 1940s and the 1960s, allowing buyers to select from a range of floor plans that could be built inexpensively from kits. Housing minister Sean Fraser has pledged to update this approach, arguing that those preapproved templates helped confront the postwar housing crisis. “We intend to take these lessons from our history books and bring them into the 21st century.”
Toronto Multiplex housing. Homes in York district of Toronto in the triangle between Oakwood Avenue, Vaughan Road and Eglinton Avenue.John Lorinc/The Globe and Mail
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Yet renewed interest in small-scale multifamily housing, such as Ms. Graham’s triplex, raises the question of whether planning departments and federal housing officials should be looking to assemble catalogues of pret-a-porter triplexes or fourplexes, which could be used by small-scale builders and investors looking to transform a single-family dwelling into a multiplex.
While there doesn’t appear to be a CMHC pattern book for dwellings like the Toronto Special – Mr. Schotte isn’t the only aficionado who has searched in vain for such a publication – there are plenty of examples of strikingly standardized multiplexes that are woven into the residential vernacular in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, among other cities.
In the older parts of the city, there are plenty of examples of pre-war walk-up apartments, as well as fourplexes situated on deep, double-frontage lots – all forms that would be difficult if not impossible to replicate in the current market. The Toronto Specials, however, are distinctive because they typically occupy no more than a standard-sized residential lot.
Despite their ubiquity, they barely register in the thinking of the City’s planning department. There is virtually no mention of this form of triplex in the City of Toronto’s 2017 urban design guidelines for townhouses and low-rise apartments, a 78-page compendium for developers thinking about this kind of infill.
Perhaps the reason is that they’re easy to miss – at least until one starts looking. “They blend right into our street,” observes Ravi Upadhyay, a tech sector worker who lives on a residential street in Keelesdale, near Eglinton Avenue West and Keele Street, where there are several such triplexes. “It just contributes by not being overbearing. The architecture doesn’t really, like, stand out as much as some maybe newly renovated single detached houses.”
“They are a really successful example of the invisible density,” observes Alessandro Tersigni, a researcher at ERA Architects and a cultural critic who has studied this kind of postwar housing. “They could serve as a physical demonstration of the fact that that can be done with untold thousands of other existing buildings on similar size lots.”
Beyond their trademark façades, the Toronto Specials all feature a stairwell extending directly up from the entrance, which is situated on the front corner, meaning the apartments aren’t broken up internally by access corridors and staircases. The two-bedroom units in Ms. Graham’s triplex are 750 square feet, while the basement flat is 600 sq. ft, with an additional room for laundry. “They’re all roomy and they all have big windows,” she says. “They were built to be a three-family dwelling.”
As with many modernist buildings of that era, the original windows were single-pane, and Ms. Graham has had to upgrade those, as well as the front door, all investments that have brought down the energy bills. Mr. Schotte adds that the Toronto Specials tend to have a fairly low window-to-wall ratio, which is a good measure of the energy efficiency of a building.
Although he hasn’t done a building code analysis on this type of dwelling, Mr. Schotte says they could probably be built according to contemporary standards, although he notes that the upper units aren’t wheelchair accessible.
A few builders have tried to update this kind of stacked form. Mike Manning, owner of Greenbuilt Homes, recently completed a “flexplex” – a four-unit project on a single-family sized lot in Etobicoke. He used a similar approach, based on stacking infrastructure, as a means of maximizing unit space.
But that project may end up being a one-off because the development charges – $112,000 – were so onerous. Indeed, the open question with the use of a standardized design template is whether fees and real estate costs will render most such projects unaffordable.
The Toronto Special, says Mr. Schotte, “was obviously a very repeatable form that provided generous apartments in at a scale that was a similar size to what was there already. They provided a huge amount of good-quality housing, and not necessarily requiring a lot of capital on a per-unit basis. If we were to look to repeat that now, I mean, obviously, the red flag is the land value. How,” he asks, “do you make this pencil?”
For Ms. Graham, who invested in an existing one, her banker provided the answer, green-lighting a mortgage because it was apparent the dwelling came with a revenue stream.
Cookie-cutter multiplexes in other cities
Jan Schotte became fascinated with triplexes while studying in Montreal, where the Plateau is dominated by this form of housing, much of it built in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Montreal plexes were typically owner-occupied, and feature three or four stacked apartments, with their signature external staircases.
As he began cobbling together his Toronto mapping project, Mr. Schotte found other comparable forms in other cities, including Edmonton and Baltimore, but especially Chicago, where there are numerous examples in the so-called Bungalow Belt, a predominantly residential zone that dates to the 1920s.
Many of Chicago’s triplexes are almost identical to the Toronto Specials. It’s not clear which city originated this approach, but some of Chicago’s earliest versions appear to date to the 1940s, and have art deco or Bauhaus design elements. The Toronto Specials began to appear in the late 1950s.
Small builders updated Montreal’s Plateau plex form, and developed hundreds in postwar suburbs such as Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and Côte-des-Neiges.
Vancouver is well known for the Vancouver Special – the original use of that term. The two-storey dwellings, which often have two or three units and are notable for their second-floor balconies, proliferated between the 1960s and 1980s, and were popular with newcomer communities.
“The Vancouver Special is the only house style that developed in Greater Vancouver, found nowhere else,” according to the Vancouver Heritage Foundation. “They were built by the thousands between 1965 and 1985. They were a response to the City of Vancouver’s setback bylaws and the allowable building envelope of the time.”