• Topham Park

Topham Park is an East York neighbourhood of wartime cottages near O'Connor Drive and Victoria Park Avenue. Between 1944 and 1946, Wartime Housing Limited, a federal Crown corporation, built 197 small homes here on a former apple orchard for war veterans and their families. The houses used prefabricated materials, and at peak production up to 26 could go up in a week. The Crown corporation was absorbed in 1947 by the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

The homes sit on crescents, cul-de-sacs and grassy circles inside a ring of main roads, and street names such as Valor Boulevard and Warvet Crescent recall the veterans who first settled here. A memorial plaque in the neighbourhood's park honours Corporal Frederick George Topham, a Toronto-born soldier who won the Victoria Cross for treating the wounded under fire during the Rhine crossing on March 24, 1945. After four original houses were replaced by much larger ones, the City of Toronto began a Heritage Conservation District study. East York joined the amalgamated City of Toronto in 1998.

The Topham Park tee is for the families who keep a veterans' neighbourhood of small houses and big lawns going.