Mt. Pleasant Rd. feels like a throwback to a different era half a century ago. The dozen or so blocks between Mount Pleasant Cemetery and Eglinton Ave. E., officially known as “Mount Pleasant Village,” are quaint and often quirky. It feels like a small town. That’s a cliché all “main street” Toronto strips like to trot out about themselves, but Mount Pleasant lives up to it.

The first quirky thing drivers notice is the weird lane size. Cars can park in the somewhat oversized curb lane, but traffic will also squeeze into it, so there are two lanes of traffic in each direction in what is essentially just 1.5 lanes of space.

In a place as officious as Toronto, the anarchic jockeying on Mount Pleasant is strange, but perhaps it’s representative of the still wild-west nature of driving in this city: We feel like it should be easy, but there just isn’t room for all the cars to fit comfortably, so we drive on, endured to the chaos.

The sidewalks here are tame though and, you could say, quite pleasant to walk on because each block has a unique variety of shops and restaurants. There are a few chains here and there, but it’s mostly independent, mom-and-pop style places. For a retail strip in a rather upwardly mobile neighbourhood, the lack of chain domination is a bit of a throwback, too; wandering along here feels like a period piece or mid-century movie set. It also feels solid, and there’s a reason for that.

From the mid-1920s until 1976, Mount Pleasant had a streetcar that ran from the St. Clair subway station, but it was removed when the bridge over what was the former Belt Line Railway cut, now a recreational path, had to be rebuilt at the northern edge of cemetery. Today, that bridge allows mourners as well as joggers and cyclists on the Belt Line Trail to pass between the east and west halves of the cemetery underneath Mount Pleasant traffic.

At its height, there was even night streetcar service here and that, along with the streetcar itself, explains why this stretch is rich with storefront retail, handsome pre-war walk-up apartments on adjacent streets, and two fine old movie houses, the Regent and the Mount Pleasant.

When streetcar tracks are removed there’s a sense a neighbourhood loses its connection to the rest of the city. Older residents of the Junction have mentioned to me they felt this way when the Dundas streetcar stopped at Bloor St. instead of going all the way to Runnymede Rd. Yet here’s Mount Pleasant, still vibrant in its own rather antiquarian way.

There’s the Little Dollhouse Company, with a store full of miniature worlds that are like dioramas of city life. Across the street is Alexandre Antique Prints, Maps and Books, a shop filled with old maps and plans of Toronto and beyond.

A most curious place is the rather austere 1970s storefront of the Toronto Camera Club. In existence since 1888, the club has been in this location since 1965, where they also host exhibitions. As photography becomes more ephemeral in the digital age, there’s something compelling about their prominent bricks-and-mortar sidewalk presence: a place for pictures to take root.

That solid feeling continues all along Mount Pleasant. At the south end of the strip by the staircase next to the old Belt Line bridge there’s a Heritage Toronto plaque memorializing the old Dominion Coal and Wood silos that stood there until 2001, an odd bit of industrial architecture in a neighbourhood that, at first glance, seems anything but. Now a residential building, there was a movement to save the silos that ultimately lost.

Dominion sold coal here until 1999. Not so long ago. Perhaps Mount Pleasant is where old things and ways get to linger a little longer than usual.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef