cross near the middle of the Junction. The neighbourhood takes its name from the West Toronto Diamond, the rail crossing where two railway lines meet at grade. Brick storefronts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries line Dundas Street West in both directions, most still two or three storeys tall.
Daniel Webster Clendenan laid out the village in 1884, on land that had been a racetrack, once the railways arrived. Manufacturers followed within a few years, among them the Heintzman piano company and the Union Stock Yards. Canada Packers ran a meatpacking plant at the stockyards, on Keele Street at St. Clair Avenue West, until the stockyards closed in 1993.
In 1904 residents voted to ban the sale of alcohol. The ban kept bars and liquor stores off Dundas Street West for most of the next century. Vesuvio Pizzeria and Spaghetti House, on the street since the ban years, led the campaign that ended it. Craft breweries and alehouses have since opened nearby.
, completed in 1913, is Toronto's oldest synagogue still in regular use. The , at Keele and Dundas Streets, dates to 1888 and once housed the Junction College of Music. The Annette Street library is a Carnegie building from 1909. A former Presbyterian church nearby, with a copper spire, is now condominiums called .
Police Academy used the corner of for the recruits' riot training scene in 1984. The city it is meant to be playing is never named on screen.
