Massie’s grew up on Foxbar Rd.\u00a0in another house owned by her parents. She told the papers she had always planned to\u00a0stay on the street\u00a0for life.<\/p>\n
Imperial Oil offered as much as $100,000 for her\u00a0house and property, but it didn’t work. “All they could offer her was money\u2014and she wasn’t interested in it,” reported the Globe and Mail.<\/em><\/p>\n Isabel Massie’s stubborn refusal\u00a0forced builders to move the footprint of the tower closer to St. Clair Ave. As the Modern-style structure rose from the ground, it dwarfed the startlingly isolated\u00a0two-storey home.<\/p>\n Rather than find ways to spite Massie, Imperial Oil appeared to accept the situation with reluctant good will. The company\u00a0built her a new fence, planted a hedge, and landscaped her yard. When a chunk of construction material punched a hole in the roof of the carriage house at the end of her yard, the structure was quickly repaired.<\/p>\n Aerial photos taken in the 1950s and 1960s show just how much the Massie house affected the Imperial Oil building. Her fenced-in yard backed right\u00a0up against the tower and the employee parking lot abutted it on all both sides.<\/p>\n A decade after\u00a0Isabel Massie’s victory over\u00a0big oil, another holdout situation was brewing on St. Patrick St. near Queen and University.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 1967, developer Windlass Holdings was aggressively acquiring land for what\u00a0would become the Village by\u00a0the Grange complex. The original proposal requested three 29-storey apartment buildings on the site east of McCaul St., south of Dundas St.<\/p>\n Slowly, the developer secured the rights to dozens of the small properties\u00a0it needed in order to realize its high-density project, upsetting many locals in the process.<\/p>\n Abner Steinberg, who rented his former family home\u00a0on St. Patrick St. just south of the development site, said Windlass’ policies were “an extreme example of blockbusting.” He told the Toronto Star<\/em> in 1973 that he’d received more than 300 directives on his home and countless visits from building inspectors.<\/p>\n “One building inspector felt so bad about coming back to our house repeatedly,” Steinberg said. “He told my wife: ‘I’m under extreme pressure. I understand Windlass is trying to buy your house. Why don’t you sell it to them?'”<\/p>\n Kay Parsons, a member of the Grange Park Residents Association that opposed the\u00a0development, echoed the sentiment.\u00a0“I don’t want to move to the suburbs and I don’t want to move to the other side of Spadina,” she said. “Windlass is better able to move than I am.”<\/p>\n The owner of a mid-terrace house at no. 54 1\/2 St. Patrick St. felt the same way. Despite\u00a0the three\u00a0other houses in the same row being bought and demolished for Village by the Grange, two hung on, refusing to sell.<\/p>\n After a protracted planning battle, the city under mayor David Crombie, the developer, and local residents came to a compromise: The three-tower concept would be replaced by townhomes\u00a0and a group of mid-rise residential buildings, none of them exceeding 12-storeys.<\/p>\n 20 percent of the properties were made available to the Ontario Housing Corporation as\u00a0affordable housing and a\u00a0retail outlets and a daycare were added to the blueprints.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, all this came too late for the row of Victorian homes on St. Patrick St. Portions of the terrace were awkwardly demolished, leaving two mid-terrace homes marooned\u2014their carved-up exterior making their fate obvious to passers-by.<\/p>\n In the decades that followed, the remaining pieces of the terrace were also\u00a0demolished, leaving 54 1\/2 awkwardly marooned.<\/p>\n In 1965, two more holdouts threatened to disrupt the massive St. James Town development at Parliament and Bloor streets.<\/p>\n First there was tailor\u00a0Lucio Casaccio at 600 Parliament St. He turned down multiple offers from developer\u00a0Howard Investments\u00a0for the little timber-framed home that had incubated him and the family\u00a0business started by his father in 1915.<\/p>\n As his\u00a0neighbour’s home gradually met the wreckers,\u00a0Casaccio insisted Howard\u00a0pay $100,000 for the right to clear his property.\u00a0They refused, and he dug in deep, eventually becoming the only pre-1960s building on the west side of Parliament St. north of Wellesley St.<\/p>\n “It sticks out like a sore thumb,” said controller William Dennison, who called for a change in the laws governing expropriations. The future Mayor of Toronto wanted the city to have the right to purchase land and hand it over to developers\u2014an idea the Star<\/em> called “a dangerous doctrine” in a 1965 editorial.<\/p>\n At the time, land could only be expropriated for a genuine public purpose. Because\u00a0St. James Town was a private development, the city couldn’t force\u00a0Casaccio to sell, even though Howard\u00a0owned all the other properties between Ontario, Parliament, Howard, and Wellesley streets.<\/p>\n “We have told him we are reaching the point where we are no longer interested in buying his property for anything more than its nuisance value, but he won’t believe it,” said Elmore Houser, lawyer for the developers.<\/p>\n In the end, the first phase of St. James Town was built around\u00a0Casaccio. His house is still there in a heavily altered form as\u00a0New World Coin Laundry.<\/p>\n During construction of the second, western phase of the high-rise apartment complex, 68-year-old grandmother Francis Berghofer found herself in a similar situation.<\/p>\n Her 12-room Victorian home on the east side of Sherbourne St., just north of Earl St., was directly in the way of a planned building.<\/p>\n Together with a neighbour,\u00a0Berghofer decided she wouldn’t sell. She’d had enough of moving. Her first\u00a0home on Maitland Pl. was expropriated by the Board of Education, and her second, also on Sherbourne St., at one time looked likely to be claimed by the Ontario Cancer Institute, so\u00a0Berghofer and her husband moved again to their presently threatened home.<\/p>\n “It was in terrible shape,” she told the Star.\u00a0<\/em>“We fixed the floors and the ceiling and the walls and the heating\u2014my Lord, we must have spent $10,000.”<\/p>\n “I’ve had enough of being pushed out of places I want to stay in.”<\/p>\n Berghofer appeared prepared to fight\u00a0on until her neighbour and ally suddenly sold. “She cried to me, said she shouldn’t have done it, said she should have listened to me,” she told the Star<\/em>.<\/p>\n In November, 1970, her husband in a long-term care facility, Berghofer\u00a0agreed to sell the\u00a0home. Photos taken at the time show her beloved property\u00a0marooned in a sea of rubble.<\/p>\n “It was no use arguing any longer,” she said. “Next place I move to will be the cemetery.”<\/p>\n And then there was Kate Burgess, the\u00a0indefatigable 79-year-old Hillsdale Ave. resident who attempted to block a high-rise residential development that called for\u00a0the demolition of\u00a0the home she built with her husband in 1910.<\/span><\/p>\n In 1966, Greenwin Construction Co. offered Burgess $40,000\u00a0and the opportunity to live rent-free\u00a0in the house for the rest of her life\u00a0if she agreed to part with the semi-detached property that was standing in the way of their 24-storey, 478-suite complex.<\/p>\n Unswayed by money or offers of alternative accommodation, Burgess fought back against\u00a0Greenwin and many of her neighbours, many of whom had\u00a0optioned their homes to the developer on the condition\u00a0the project be able to proceed.<\/p>\n “I sandpapered every bit of woodwork there is,” she told the Globe and Mail<\/em>. “I couldn’t let it go. Every brick they knocked down would be a drop of blood out of my heart and I’d have no blood left.”<\/p>\n “The only way they’ll get me out of this house is over my dead body and I hope the good Lord spares me for a few years yet.”<\/p>\n The Greenwin proposal would have razed much of the block bound by Hillsdale, Redpath, Soudan avenues, and Mt. Pleasant Rd. The 24-storey apartment tower would be the first of four phases of construction to be completed over several years.<\/p>\n Realizing Burgess wasn’t going to budge, the developer altered its\u00a0plans, offering to incorporate her\u00a0home in a row of townhouses. The city’s Buildings and Development Committee approved the revised idea\u00a0by a vote of 9-1 in February, 1967, and\u00a0council followed suit, voting in favour 15-5.<\/p>\n As a gesture of goodwill, Greenwin agreed to put $40,000 in a trust account for Burgess or her heirs should they decide to sell within 20 years.<\/p>\n Then, with the beginning of construction at hand, the Ontario Municipal Board blocked the city’s decision by refusing to alter the zoning on the site, killing the project.<\/p>\n Burgess died of a heart attack six days after the OMB handed down its decision.<\/p>\n “I’ve had sickness, sorrow, death and happiness in that house,” she told the Globe and Mail<\/em> in June, 1967.\u00a0“Do you think I’m going to turn those memories away for the greenbacks? Not me.”<\/p>\n![\"toronto](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2016\/03\/20160318-Holdouts-Aerial.jpg\")
![\"toronto](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2016\/03\/20160318-Holdouts-Parliament.jpg\")
![\"toronto](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2016\/03\/20160318-Holdouts-Hillsdale.jpg\")
![\"toronto](\"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2016\/03\/20160318-Holdouts-Foxbar.jpg\")