Large Victorian houses divided into rooming units stand on wide side streets above a mixed storefront strip on Queen Street West.
What Parkdale looks like
Parkdale runs from to Dufferin Street, with the CP rail line at its north edge and Lake Ontario along the south. The Toronto House Building Association began buying land here in 1875, ahead of a rail station that opened at Queen and Dufferin in 1878. The village incorporated the next year, and Toronto annexed it in 1889.
Large houses went up through the early twentieth century, some of them run as tourist hotels for visitors to the Sunnyside amusement park along the lake. The Gardiner Expressway was built from 1955. It demolished the park and Parkdale's own southern blocks, cutting the neighbourhood off from the water. Many of the surviving mansions were divided into rooming houses afterward, and filled in with cheaply built apartment towers.
Victorian houses from the same period stand on and south of King Street, and a short row of Georgian Revival houses with their original gaslights runs along . A cluster of former civic buildings from those years also stands on . A former fire hall there is now a community centre and a former police station is now an art gallery. A former Methodist church nearby holds a different congregation.
runs the length of the neighbourhood, with restaurants, shops and galleries at street level and streetcar tracks down the centre of the road. Parkdale has been home to a large Tibetan population since the late 1990s, informally called Little Tibet, one of the largest such communities outside India and Nepal.
Films shot in Parkdale
Shelved is a CTV sitcom created by Anthony Q. Farrell, a former writer and showrunner on The Office. It is set at a fictional library based on Parkdale's own, and the production shot on location in the neighbourhood for a few days. Sam & Me, Deepa Mehta's 1991 directorial debut, was also filmed and set here. Shazam! used a house at 208 as Billy Batson's new foster home. He and Freddy test his new powers in a vacant lot off O'Hara Avenue, in front of a mural on the back of a bike shop. The two spots stand in for a Philadelphia neighbourhood in the film.
Shelved, 2023
Anthony Q. Farrell created the show after writing for and running The Office in the U.S. He told NOW Toronto the production "actually shot on location in Parkdale for a couple of days to make sure that the authenticity is there." The show is set at a fictional library called Jameson Library, based on the real-life library in the neighbourhood.
What Parkdale can double for
Parkdale can stand in for a working-class Philadelphia neighbourhood in Shazam!.
