What is Leslieville? Where is it?
It’s in the east end of Toronto. If you’ve ever visited the city and been right downtown (close to the lake), we’re due east of there past the Don River.
Take a look at some maps, centred on Queen and Leslie Sts.:
There’s a reasonable summary with pictures available, and the Wikipedia entry is decent.
Statistics
Statistics Canada’s page on the Toronto-Danforth federal riding, which includes not only South Riverdale but all of Riverdale, gives the following information:
- Population
- 109,715 (divide by at least half to get South Riverdale)
- Average household income
- $61,154 (lower than the Ontario average, higher than the Canadian average)
Leslieville? South Riverdale? Riverside? Studio District?
For a small neighbourhood, this place sure has a lot of names.
- Riverdale is the neighbourhood running east from Broadview to approximately Pape and south from about Danforth to Gerrard. This site is not concerned with Riverdale, but you have to know where it is to know where South Riverdale is: It has roughly the same western border (Broadview), but arguably runs all the way to Coxwell. South Riverdale starts at Gerrard and extends all the way to the lake.
- Leslieville is a region inside South Riverdale. It’s named after Leslie St., which actually is mostly residential and has little of note. (Leslie is one of those Toronto streets that interrupts itself and picks up later. It stops just north of Gerrard in South Riverdale and resumes again at Eglinton.) Leslieville proper may be said to run along Queen St. from roughly Empire to Leslie.
- Riverside is the district along Queen from Broadview to about Empire.
- The Studio District runs along Eastern Ave. from roughly Carlaw to Leslie. In a pinch you could extend the neighbourhood down to Lake Shore. Heward and Eastern is a main crossroad for the Studio District.
(The Foundry District doesn’t exist yet. It is a proposed redevelopment of the Toronto Film Studios land on Eastern Ave., and I am the main source of independent information on that project.)
These neighbourhood boundaries are somewhat porous, and they leave almost the entire distance from Leslie St. to Coxwell undefined. I tend to view the expanse of Queen St. from Broadview to Greenwood as Leslieville, but this site considers locations all the way out to Coxwell. (The same problem recurs between Coxwell and Woodbine, a district with no name I’ve ever heard. Even South Riverdale residents tend to neglect that part of the city, and Beachers certainly do. Leslieville used to be a place people went through to get somewhere else, and those parts of Queen St. still are.)