Jameson Ave. was an unexpectedly great entrance into Toronto.

On a hot Friday afternoon in August of 1999, we drove up the 401 from Windsor in an old Ford Escort with no air conditioning to visit a friend who lived on the west side.

He told us to exit the Gardiner and take Jameson, and as we turned north and crawled in slow, late-afternoon rush-hour traffic between the rows of apartment buildings with our windows down, the city came at us full force after speeding across the Ontario countryside.

The sheer number of people on Jameson was both intense and intimate: all the sounds, conversations, smells, and the hustle of it all came through our open windows. What is this place? It seemed like the opening credits of a Hollywood city film that cast hundreds of extras to ply the sidewalks and hang out on balconies.

I knew nothing of Parkdale then, but discovering busy Jameson in a place that seemed far from the downtown areas I knew from previous visits made Toronto seem infinite; a city filled with many dense short streets like this that pour people out onto the sidewalk on warm summer eves.

Of course, it isn’t a city like that. Jameson is the kind of midrise apartment street Toronto doesn’t have many of. Certainly we have apartments — both rental and condo — across the city, in clusters or alone, but Jameson’s handsome street wall is rare. It’s been called Parisian in scale and form, and runs just under a kilometre.

Other streets like it are St. George north of Bloor St., Avenue Rd. north of St. Clair, or Cosburn Ave. between Broadview and Pape. All of them are linear clusters of apartment buildings built in the 1950s and 1960s in what are otherwise low-rise, single-family neighbourhoods. Today, transforming our arterial streets to Jameson-style density meets constant resistance from homeowners.

In the first few decades after the Second World War, as Toronto expanded into surrounding farmland, it also went upwards, building apartment towers across the older parts of the city, some short, some rather tall. Much of that stopped in 1973 when the legendary reform council, led by then-mayor David Crombie, was elected, capping heights and slowing down development in the name of defending neighbourhoods.

According to Carolyn Whitzman’s book Suburb, slum, urban village: transformations in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, 1875-2002, 48 eight-to-23 storey apartment buildings were built between 1953 and 1967 in south Parkdale alone, on Jameson, but also avenues like Spencer, Tyndall and Dowling. The Queen St. subway was still talked about then, so these buildings anticipated that kind of transit arriving one day, though it never came.

The reform era spared Toronto from some of the harsher aspects of modern city building projects, but it came at a cost: in a city that already vilified apartment living, we stopped transforming the city into one that embraced it.

A typical characterization of these buildings can be found in Toronto: A Literary Guide, Greg Gatenby’s great 1999 book that documents where writers have lived and worked in Toronto in the form of walking tours across the city. Jameson is described as, “Now one of the uglier streetscapes in Toronto, thanks to the destruction of the Victorian homes which used to line its blocks, the street has been home to a surprising number of authors, although the careful reader will note that all but one of the authors did so before the highrises blighted the area.”

It’s ironic that in the opening of the book Gatenby makes no apologies for including writers who became unknown because their work went out of fashion, but the same happened to Jameson’s midcentury buildings when a few generations of Toronto’s politicos and tastemakers decided they were bad.

While that reform council probably made the right decision in 1973, we’re also lucky to have a street like Jameson today. They remain relatively affordable units and a “landing pad” neighbourhood for newcomers. Gatenby’s disdain is doubly ironic as, unless a writer is putting out Harry Potters, they’re likely to live in affordable apartments like these today.

Walking up Jameson, some buildings are in good condition, with new balcony railings and windows, while others need some love. Like a lot of apartments around the city, garbage collection is also a mess, with gaggles of dumpsters and blue bins scattered about, along with the odd mattress. How do Paris, New York, and other apartment cities manage to avoid this messy Toronto condition?

On the corner of Jameson and Springhurst, next to the Gardiner on-ramp, there’s an old house on a plot of land that was likely too small to develop. It’s number 80, an odd number for a street to begin on but a vestige of a numbering scheme that was established when Jameson continued right down to the lake. Those houses and other streets were removed to create the Gardiner Expressway in the 1950s.

Across the street at number 79 is the “Northshore,” perhaps a fittingly named memorial to Parkdale’s obliterated Riviera. All the way up to Queen, buildings have names like “Ambassador,” “The Imperial,” “The Kingsview,” “Grandview,” and “Sunset”: breezy, glamorous names befitting the optimistic era.

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On tree planters along the way are 560 photographs of area residents, a photo gallery called “Impressions” by artist Jim Bravo and photographer Kate Young. Though some are fading eight years after their 2009 installation, they celebrate the multicultural nature of this place.

Jameson is still a great entrance to Toronto, home to many, and the kind of street we need many more of.

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