A Walking Tour of Moore Park

Welcome to Moore Park! The Moore Park Residents Association welcomes you to one of Toronto's great neighbourhoods.

We invite you to explore Moore Park and learn more about the history through this site. A suggested walking tour through the neighbourhood follows a brief history of the area, with opportunities to explore deeper by strolling through lush ravines.

Moore Park sits on a promontory framed on the north by Mount Pleasant Cemetery and on the south by the Canadian Pacific Railway and it is surrounded by deep wooded ravines overlooking the city and Lake Ontario beyond. In prehistoric times, the shoreline of the ancient glacial Lake Iroquois reached Moore Park's southern border.

By the 18th century, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, on whose ancestral lands Moore Park now sits, may have bypassed this remote and heavily forested area in favour of the more amenable Davenport Road portage to the south. At the time of the Toronto Purchase in 1805, British officials had surveyed a 200-acre rectangular plan for the Town of York, but the inaccessibility of Lot 16 – the future site of Moore Park – would deter settlement for another century.

Enter John Thomas Moore – chartered accountant, financier, railway magnate – a man with a vision. Influenced by the City Beautiful movement, and stirred by the economic boom of the 1880s, Moore filed a subdivision plan in 1889 for an elegant residential district in a park-like setting, with large homes of brick or stone, laced with roses and flowering shrubs, and set well back from the street. He called this planned garden enclave Moore Park. He built bridges on the east and west sides to open access to the property. Perched high on the escarpment it came to be known as "Toronto on the Hill".

Integral to Moore’s plan was the new Belt Line Railway, of which he was vice-president. Chartered in 1889, it was intended to provide a modern commuter service from downtown to the developing suburbs in "The Highlands" north and west of the city. But the great depression of 1893 dampened investment and saw the failure of the railway after only two years in service. Except for the few early homes that Moore himself had built, the neighbourhood would not see any significant development until after the First World War.

By 1912 Moore Park was annexed by the City of Toronto, ​increasing the appeal of living ​in this northern suburb ​away from the increasingly congested and polluted city core​​. Following the war, Moore Park became a destination for a community of artists and photographers, writers and composers, scientists and physicians. Throughout its 130-year history, it has been home to such luminaries as the Gooderham and Ross families; the Reverend Joseph Locke whose son George Herbert Locke married John Thomas Moore's daughter Grace, and was Toronto's Chief Librarian; WWI flying aces Roy Brown and Billy Bishop; composer Healey Willan; physicians Sir Frederick Banting and Lady Henrietta Banting; Lady Iris Mountbatten, cousin to Queen Elizabeth II; literary theorist Northrop Frye; historian Margaret MacMillan; and rock legend Neil Young.

Among Moore Park's most colourful residents were renowned sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, partners in life and in work, whose war memorials and sculptures are among the great art treasures of Canada. Their friends Charles Ashley and James Crippen, award-winning portrait photographers and life partners, built Toronto's first modernist house in Moore Park on Ingleside Drive. Their studio – Ashley & Crippen – continues today.

These are just some of the notable residents whose fascinating homes you'll see on this walking tour.

Community pride continues to be a hallmark of Moore Park. With a thriving Moore Park Residents Association (MPRA) and a close-knit women's network, many of its citizens are engaged in philanthropy and civic action, such as the annual fundraiser featuring the streetscape of giant Santas known as "Kringlewood" on Inglewood Drive east of Mount Pleasant Road. In 1984 the MPRA published A History of Moore Park (rev. 2004) on which this walking tour is based. Fittingly, our tour concludes with the Loring-Wyle Parkette, a sculpture garden established in 1984 by the MPRA in honour of its two most beloved residents, whose studio home is the last stop on our tour.

Though the suggested tour below starts at the west side of the Vale of Avoca Ravine on St. Clair Avenue East, feel free to explore Moore Park from wherever you like, and at your own pace. This walking tour mostly follows flat terrain on city sidewalks, with a short segment following the Belt Line Trail between Heath Street and Moore Avenue. The tour route should take 60-90 minutes to complete in its entirety.

Please be respectful of Moore Park residents' private property and mindful of everyone's personal privacy as you enjoy this tour of the neighbourhood, but do feel free to linger in Moore Park's lush public parks and ravines.

After walking through the neighbourhood, we invite you to take the opportunity to explore the beautiful Vale of Avoca Ravine on your way home, or at a future date. The ravine is accessible via a steep staircase on the east side of Mt. Pleasant Road, just south of Inglewood Drive. A gentler paved trail also takes you into the ravine from Avoca Avenue at Pleasant Boulevard, on the west side of the St. Clair Bridge.

The Vale of Avoca has always held appeal for Toronto day trippers, from Victorian times to the present day. Known in the late 1800s as Reservoir Park, it was named for the 1873 Rosehill Reservoir above the ravine on Rosehill Drive – a popular destination for picnickers that once was open to the air.

As you descend into the peaceful calm of the ravine, you can cross the babbling Yellow Creek via a wooden footbridge. Just north of this point are the remains of a 19th-century sawmill (point A in the map below). The mill dams once created a pond that stretched back upstream flooding the south end of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Today most of the structure of the mill has collapsed into the stream, whose eroded embankment now reveals some jagged timbers and part of a concrete retaining wall. Other chunks of the mill structure are strewn on the eastern hillside.

Turning south toward the Canadian Pacific Railway bridge, you will see two brick pillars – the eastern columns of what was a 19th-century picturesque footbridge, on which visitors could be seen posing in souvenir postcard and stereoscopic views of the day (point B in the map below). These two columns (of the original four) have been preserved in situ by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, and a historic plaque will be placed here in 2024.

The elevated CPR bridge beyond replaces an earlier trestle bridge for which the cut-stone foundations remain. This point marks the ancient glacial Lake Iroquois shoreline. Continuing under this bridge brings you to the Rosedale Ravine, which eventually loops to the Evergreen Brickworks and the Moore Park Ravine. Immediately south of the CPR bridge, a steep path up the west side of the ravine leads towards Yonge Street and Canadian Pacific's beautiful old North Toronto Station, now a flagship LCBO store.

Thank you for visiting Moore Park. We hope you have enjoyed this walking tour!

For further inspiration, check out the many paths and walkways leading from Moore Park to neighbouring parks, historical sites, and friendly neighbourhoods. Below, the map of Moore Park and environs shows connecting walkways, nearby attractions, and transit access to continue your journey.