Modest Hopes: Homes and Stories of Toronto's Workers from the 1820s to the 1920s

Celebrating Toronto’s built heritage of row houses, semis, and cottages and the people who lived in them.

Despite their value as urban property, Toronto’s workers’ cottages are often characterized as being small, cramped, poorly built, and in need of modernization or even demolition. But for the workers and their families who originally lived in them from the 1820s to the 1920s, these houses were far from modest. Many had been driven off their ancestral farms or had left the crowded conditio...