Victorian rowhouses in red and yellow brick line block after block, with iron fences and mature trees over the road.
What Cabbagetown looks like
Cabbagetown is a downtown Toronto neighbourhood of Victorian houses, mostly semi-detached and built in red or yellow brick. The Cabbagetown Preservation Association calls it the largest continuous area of preserved Victorian housing in North America. The Francis Shields House on Sackville Street was built in 1877. It is a Second Empire example, banded in stone with a mansard roof and arched dormer windows.
Irish immigrants who settled here beginning in the late 1840s gave the neighbourhood its name, said to come from the cabbages they grew in their front yards. Many worked in the lakeshore industries of neighbouring Corktown, and the brick houses that still line the streets went up through the following decades. The area fell into poverty after the First World War, and its southern blocks were cleared in the late 1940s for the Regent Park housing project. A 1970s preservation fight over what remained led to a city bylaw capping new buildings at four storeys.
Parliament Street, between Gerrard and Wellesley Streets, is Cabbagetown's commercial street. It has not been given the heritage protection the surrounding houses have. The Winchester Hotel, on the corner of Parliament and Winchester, opened in the 1880s and was one of the city's main hotels until 1903. The Cabbagetown Festival is held every September at Carlton and Parliament.
The , the city's main cemetery since 1850, sits off Sumach Street. A few blocks north, occupies the site of one of Toronto's first zoos, which closed in 1974 and moved to Scarborough the same year the farm opened on the same land.
Films shot in Cabbagetown
The Freeform series Shadowhunters filmed a walk and talk scene on Carlton Street in October 2017, doubling the block for Brooklyn. The CIA thriller series Condor returned to Cabbagetown the same year for pickup shots along Gordon Sinclair Lane and Riverdale Park Road, standing in for Washington, DC. In September 2021, the Apple TV+ children's series Jane filmed around Winchester Street and Metcalfe Street, at a corner residents call the Coop. The show was made with the Jane Goodall Institute.
Shadowhunters
The Freeform series Shadowhunters filmed a walk and talk scene on Carlton Street between Ontario and Parliament Streets on October 24, 2017. The same day, a second unit shot a car stopping at a light at the Parliament and Winchester intersection. The series is based on Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments novels and follows Clary Fray, who is accepted into the fictional Brooklyn Academy of Arts and discovers she is connected to the New York Institute. It ran on Freeform for three seasons, from 2016 to 2019. Filming was based primarily in Toronto.
What Cabbagetown can double for
Cabbagetown can stand in for Washington, DC in the CIA thriller series Condor and Brooklyn and the fictional New York Institute in the Freeform series Shadowhunters.
