Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.

“And, oh, what a glorious pleasure to again be in Toronto after an absence of twenty years!”
The year is 1928. Reginald Fleming is laid back comfortably in the smoke-room of the Dominion Hotel. Twenty years earlier, Fleming found himself disappointed with his business prospects in Toronto and left to seek his fortune in the publishing industry in New York City. Now, befitting his success, upon his first return to the city of his youth he is staying at Rosedale’s fashionable Dominion Hotel. Rising to an astounding 250 feet (76 metres or 18 storeys), the Dominion is “Canada’s costliest, largest and most elaborate hotel; noted as a model of elegance and delicate beauty.” It has huge balconies, a marble staircase, and elegant ballrooms, as well as mural paintings, “bas reliefs and beautiful interior decorations.” On the grounds, along a magificent drive, there are store houses for airships and aeroplanes used to whisk hotel guests for tours of Niagara.
Of course, the Dominion Hotel never existed.

The Dominion was, actually, an imaginative projection in Toronto in 1928 A.D. (National Business Methods & Publishing Company, 1908), author Frederick Nelson’s fictional view of the future, published in 1908. With a population he imagined to be one-and-a-half million, the prosperous Toronto of 1928 undoubtedly deserved such a luxurious establishment.
In reality, the city’s population was about 630,000 when the similarly luxurious Royal York opened (in a slightly different location) in 1929.
“And now,” Nelson writes, “after a good night’s rest and a hearty breakfast [Fleming] felt he must run all over Toronto and renew his acquaintance with old familiar sights,” with a talkative taxi driver, Frank, as his tour guide. “Drive slowly and let us have a good time,” Fleming tells him. “I’m glad you have always lived in this city, for you will be able to answer a lot of questions I am sure to ask….Now, you choose your own route and do not be particular where you go. It is sure to be all new to me.”

Image of the Canadian National Exhibition, near the Dufferin Gates, in 1908. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 272.

Frederick Nelson’s forty-eight page speculative novel was produced to be sold to visitors at the 1908 Canadian National Exhibition. In the introduction, the author explained his motivations: “[T]he work is a forecast, and should not be taken too seriously. Rather I hope it will be looked upon as a passable reading to provide amusement for those who peruse it; and that the public will remember the work is written by a humble Torontonian.”
He mostly discusses the physical cityscape rather than the system of government, political culture, or the city’s artistic life. He admitted these blind spots, noting that if he hadn’t rushed the book’s composition, he “would have dealt with questions and sections of the city that have been omitted.”
Little is known of Nelson’s background. He didn’t appear in the era’s Who’s Who books or the Society Blue Books. In Science-Fiction: The Early Years (Kent State University Press, 1990), researcher Everett Franklin Bleiler concluded simply that Nelson was “[p]resumably a Canadian author.”
Critics have not been kind to Toronto in 1928 A.D.. David Ketterer called it an “[u]ninspired, racist fictionalized futurology.” Bleiler added that the book is “[a] vanity curiosity.” Researcher Karen Bennett has judged that the book “has no literary merit,” but conceded that Nelson’s “‘predictions’ do have some curiosity value.”
Setting off on his taxi tour, he quickly comments on how widespread automobile ownership had transformed the city. A garage was a necessary appendage to all newly-built houses, and each factory had ‘special store houses’ for workmen’s cars. In the neighbourhood surrounding the hotel—which Nelson doesn’t specifically locate but which was likely near Castle Frank—Fleming noted the existence of not only a bridge like the Prince Edward Viaduct (1918), but also a high-screen suicide guard. Likewise, Nelson predicted that Bloor Street had grown up from the dirt road of isolated structures surrounded by vacant lots to a fully matured commercial district.
“Great Caesar Frank! Is this the old Yonge Street?” Fleming exclaimed as the taxi wheeled onto what had been, in 1908, a modestly-scaled business district with buildings of two-, three-, and four-storeys. “No,” the driver, Frank, replied, “this is the new Yonge, the Broadway of Toronto.”
For miles in the distance—as far as Newmarket, Frank said—huge buildings of seven or more storeys and hundred-foot-wide frontages towered on either side of Yonge. Frank explained that a high-speed electric streetcar service covered the distance to Newmarket in fifty minutes, including stops. Fleming also noticed that the streetcars were no longer powered via “cumbersome and dangerous” overhead wires, but via a contact in “a trench between and beneath the rails.”
The northern sprawl was an accurate prediction, and a natural one to make in 1908. By that time, the city had already annexed Yorkville, Rosedale, the Annex, and grown northward past St. Clair. Within a matter of years, as J.M.S. Careless detailed in Toronto to 1918 (James Lorimer & Company, 1984), the city limits expanded to include East Toronto, Riverdale, Balmy Beach, Wychwood, Earlscourt and West Toronto among other annexations. In his meandering taxi tour, Fleming found that the city’s wealthy had systematically migrated north to make the vicinity of St. Clair and Avenue Road—a muddy and isolated intersection in 1908—the “best residential district of Toronto.”

Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.

Nelson’s novella suffers from his casual and unthinking racism—particularly toward the city’s Chinese and Jewish communities. Given that the city’s overwhelming Anglo-Celtic majority only shrunk from 91.7% in 1901 to 86.4% by 1911, it seems odd that Torontonians of Nelson’s vintage were so threatened by newcomers. The author seemed completely unaware that (as depicted in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion) it was the very newcomers Nelson derided who would have built all the magnificent new landmarks of his futuristic vision.
Nelson argued that Queen’s Park, once an enjoyable park, had been doomed—in the century’s first decade—by the proximity of foreigners living nearby in The Ward. But, Fleming discovered on his 1928 tour, “University Avenue had improved wonderfully. The homes of the foreigners no longer existed.” In their place were expanded university buildings and athletic fields, a massive hospital, and a massive public marketplace attached to the still-extant Armouries.
Instead, the city’s immigrants and labouring classes lived in a slum district stretching between Sherbourne Street and the Don River, which had only Riverdale Park as “breathing space.” Nelson described it:

Here you found dirty and squalid tenements—the awful hives of neglected humanity. ‘Twas an unsafe district to travel by night—the shady places proved too good a hunting ground for persons of shady practises. Such districts are often termed the resorts of the scum of the earth. Truly, the races of the earth were pretty fully represented here….Yea, in this district could be found representatives of almost every civilized nation in the world, huddled together and living in wretched tenements; and whose furniture generally consisted of bundles of rags or old mattresses as beds, and rough wooden boxes for use as chairs and cupboards; whose winter light was obtained from cheap candles stuck in old or broken bottles and which diffused but feeble rays through the vile rooms.

It was inhabited by all the city’s immigrants—clearly undesirable, from the tone of Nelson’s writing—including English and American immigrants, “and, sad to say, even the Canadian who had seen better days.” Nelson accurately predicted the real-life Cabbagetown, but his demographic description didn’t reflect the area author Hugh Garner has called the “largest Anglo-Saxon slum in North America.”
Nelson made a solitary comment about social reform in his book, and it had less to do with social consciousness than with beautifying the slum’s blight. “Toronto now owned her millionaires in plenty,” he wrote. “Here was a district to which they could turn their wealth in the alleviation of distress and the building of clean and sanitary lodging homes.”
On Yonge, near the greatly expanded university district, stood a majestic library. “Well-lighted through the roof,” this tower was one of twelve library branches “circulating over one-and-a-half million volumes a year.” The post office, too, was spread across Toronto with eleven outlets connected by a “pneumatic dispatch system” to the city’s many skyscrapers. Although several tall buildings had existed in turn-of-the-century Toronto, like the Beard Building (1894) and the Temple Building (1895), not even Nelson predicted that they would be stretching to upwards of twenty-eight storeys by the end of the ’20s in the real Toronto.
Anticipating the growing importance of major retailers like Simpson’s and Eaton’s from the turn of the century, Fleming next saw “[a] great departmental store [towering] ten stories in the air, [and] surmounted by a giant dome that shone like silver in the sunlight and which was a landmark for miles around.” Keeping in mind that the city’s Great Fire had occurred only four years before Nelson dreamt the future, the author predicted that all the city’s buildings would be outfitted with fire alarm systems connected to giant switchboards in fire stations. Furthermore, structures were surrounded with “concrete and iron passage-ways opening from every floor and fitted with electrically-worked emergency doors.” Fire safety was an even higher priority than architectural design, because Nelson noted that these safety features “interfered somewhat with the usual layout of windows and the interior natural light.”
Once the fashionable shopping district, Fleming found “[v]ery few respectable retail stores” in existence along King Street. Now the district to the south and east of the downtown core was filled with “colossal wholesale warehouses and sheds.” The area from Bay to Bathurst was a manufacturing district where, Fleming saw, major factories competed “with each other to turn Toronto Harbour into a chemical pond” with no regard to what citizens or city council might think. This neighbourhood also housed shipbuilding yards and “the huge smelting works…whose night glare was a beacon for the mariner.”
At the turn of the century, Toronto’s prosperity as a manufacturing centre was driven by its railways, steam-powered factories, plentiful (often immigrant) labour, and abundant raw material. There were 847 factories in 1901 and 1,100 by 1911 (while the number of manufacturing workers grew from 42,000 to over 65,000 in the same period). Nelson predicted Toronto would have 8,000 factories employing 200,000 workers, manufacturing goods with a wholesale value of $600,000,000. In reality, 1929 statistics showed 102,406 employees at 2,236 factories producing products valued at $371,090. Furthermore, by the 1920s, major manufacturers no longer headquartered in the downtown core. Shortly after the First World War, companies like Kodak and Goodyear began locating their facilities in the city’s industrial suburbs like Mount Dennis and New Toronto. In addition, by the late ’20s, Toronto’s growth and prosperity—to finally surpass Montreal as Canada’s foremost economic centre—was due to financial services, with its stock exchange and banks closely linked to the mining and extractive resource sector in northern Ontario and Western Canada.

Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist.

“The island,” Fleming learned from the taxi driver, “had become the Coney Island of Toronto. Scores of thousands of dollars were spent here every summer—and all for pleasure. Here you would find variety shows, merry-go-rounds, inclined railways, shooting galleries, museums, wooden toboggan slides, aquariums, skating rinks, air-ships, concert halls; in fact, everything that could be thought for amusement.” Only a handful of residences and clubhouses existed on the east end of the Island. It had been improved with sea-wall embankments and park-like drives. And, in order to overcome flooding and infestations of mosquitoes and typhoid brought on by standing water, the whole island had been built up on five feet of earth. Nelson predicted that bridges east and west side of the Island would connect to a lake-front drive that stretched to the Humber River.
In Nelson’s time, Toronto was hog-tied by acres of railway tracks and the decks and piers of a working waterfront. In the author’s view of the future, it still was. Infill had been used, he said, to expand the waterfront, and the piers had been vastly improved after the creation of a “great waterway—the channel of trade and commerce from all parts of the world”—connecting Toronto to Quebec.
Many of these were elements in a comprehensive 1912 waterfront plan by the Toronto Harbour Commission, which had been established in 1911 by the federal government. Although many of the Commission’s recommendations were implemented—such as, Careless notes, “rebuilding and increasing dock facilities, deepening and protecting the harbour, and rationalizing shore land-uses”—the First World War slowed the plan’s implementation and the eventual lake-front parkway across the city took another route.
Above these rail and port-lands, Fleming saw:

A great bridge had been erected at the foot of Yonge and Front streets; other bridges ran in sections from York, Bathurst and Sunnyside—the four joining in one great wide way near, and leading to, the Island. The bridge of bridges consisted of upper and lower divisions and was a splendid reality of engineered skill. The lower way was used for the double track cable railroad. Above were the ways for vehicular traffic and pedestrians. The footwalk for pedestrians provided a delightful means for ‘doing it on foot’, and seats were provided at frequent parts—thus enabling one to rest and enjoy the harbour view below.

Some of Frederick Nelson’s predictions were prescient; others create an alternate reality of Toronto in the late 1920s and beyond. But one prediction made by the author was undoubtedly accurate. “Toronto was growing,” he concluded in 1908, “and would grow for a long, long time.”
For further reading, a 1904 speculation of how Toronto would look in 2004 written by leading architect E.J. Lennox is discussed in Mark Osbaldeston’s Unbuilt Toronto (Dundurn Press, 2008).
Other sources consulted include: Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy 1900 to 1950 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); James Lemon, Toronto Since 1918 (James Lorimer & Company, 1985); and Jesse Edgar Middleton, Toronto’s 100 Years (The Centennial Committee, 1934).

Panoramic view of Humber River. No date. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 163.

It is a quirk of fate that Robert Home Smith merited almost three pages in the Canada’s Who Was Who—for his activities as a lawyer, businessman, financier, civic planner, and real estate developer—during the 1930s, but that he is virtually unknown in the present day. Perhaps the only memorial of his substantial impact on the city’s early twentieth century development is the park named in his honour along the Humber River.
A young man of vision, Home Smith’s greatest legacy was a carefully planned real estate development, catering to businessmen and their families with luxurious homes set in park-like surroundings. The Humber Valley Surveys, as the massive development was known, stretched northward from the lake to Eglinton Avenue along both banks of the Humber River, and it included all or portions of the present-day neighbourhoods of Swansea, The Kingsway, Baby Point, Old Mill, and the Humber Valley Village.
Some observers at the time (and since) painted him as a heartless businessman who unscrupulously used his political connections and position on the Toronto Harbour Commission (THC) for his own ends. From another perspective, he was a heartfelt civic booster who thought Toronto could be among the foremost cities in the world. He was determined to see his long term vision for the city come to fruition, and seemed to make little distinction between pursuing this goal through public institutions or private developments.

Humber River and Old Mill, 1907. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 1239.

Born in Stratford, Ontario, in 1877, Home Smith demonstrated a keen interest in arts and architecture as a youth. But under pressure from his mother, he studied law at Osgoode Hall. After articling in Stratford and being called to the bar in 1899, he joined James J. Foy’s Toronto firm. Any “[d]reams of a spectacular courtroom career, debate in the public forum, and high political office,” as James H. Gunn put it in a biographical chapter in Carol Wilton, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law (The Osgoode Society, 1990), were dashed in 1901. He suffered an illness thought to be meningitis, which left him with impaired hearing—a disability he apparently thought made pursuing these public careers impossible.
Like many lawyers in the early twentieth century economic boom, he found his knowledge of legal intricacies and courtroom skills of negotiating and bargaining to be in hot demand in the business community. Dapper and personable, Home Smith was destined to be a success in business. In 1902, he was hired to manage the National Trust’s estates department, and also gained a reputation for ability and integrity in doing the company’s bankruptcy work. Through his work, he began to hobnob with leading businessmen like E.R. Peacock, James Dunn, Joseph Flavelle, and William Mackenzie. With his powerful behind-the-scenes role as a campaigner, fundraiser, and bagman for the Conservative Party, he counted prime ministers, premiers, and federal and provincial members among his friends.
In addition to varied investments in railways, mills, shipping, and real estate, Home Smith was an early investor in northern Ontario mining since the turn of the century. It was Home Smith’s shrewd speculation in mining investments—rather than his own real estate companies—that provided his wealth and the leisure to engage in his other interests. Tall and handsome in appearance, Home Smith also solidified his social and professional connections through membership in the Canadian Club, Albany Club, York Club, and National Club.
Over the years, he would be offered positions on numerous public commissions, such as the city’s Board of Trade, and usually assumed such civic duties for little or no financial compensation. Home Smith always seemed ready to serve the public good.

Lake Shore Rd. – Sunnyside to Humber, September 8, 1914. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 58, Item 311.

Smith was also a leading member of the community of architects, local politicians, businessmen, and artists known as the Guild of Civic Art. Adherents to the City Beautiful movement, the Civic Guild developed and released a comprehensive plan for the city in the first decade of the twentieth century, which promoted a park system, landscaped parkways, thoroughfares cutting across the city at diagonals, and public squares surrounded by grandiose buildings. The plan’s loftiest proposals were not built, but this membership seems to have reinvigorated Home Smith’s childhood love of architecture and design.
He was determined to transform Toronto for the better. “I am absolutely certain this city has a great future before it,” he exclaimed in a speech to the Canadian Club on November 27, 1913. His heartfelt passion was evident as he called for the Guild’s ideas to be more fully implemented. “We [have] talked much, but done little,” he stated, having had enough of words without action. He advocated for government reform to strengthen the bureaucracy and to grant greater financial powers to city-appointed commissions.

Humber Valley, July 31, 1913. Toronto City Archives, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 52, Item 65.

An implicit undercurrent of his speech was a call to arms for business leaders in attendance to take action themselves. He clearly thought Toronto had an opportunity to be among the foremost cities in the world. Are you going to have a Birmingham or a Pittsburgh, Home Smith asked rhetorically, or a London or Paris? For Home Smith and others of the day, large scale, deliberate city planning was, Gunn argues, a means of balancing public and private interests. In Home Smith’s case, his private developments fit within the comprehensive plan of the Civic Guild.
By the time of his speech, Home Smith—at only thirty-four years of age—had already been appointed to the THC. A joint municipal-federal government creation, the THC was tasked with redeveloping the waterfront from Victoria Park to the Humber River. Home Smith remained on the commission from its creation in 1911 until 1923, serving as president from 1921.
In preparing a redevelopment plan, according to Wayne C. Reeves in Visions for the Metropolitan Toronto Waterfront I (Centre for Urban and Community Studies, U of T, 1992), “[t]he THC aimed at a vision that was comprehensive, coordinated, and large in scale.” Moreover, with broad property holdings and financial powers (of the sort Home Smith advocated), the THC not only had the initiative to prepare large scale plans, but also the financial powers to actually implement them. The plan, presented to city council in 1912, used strict segregation of land uses between industrial and recreational and accounted for every need “from aquatic recreation to factory space, and from bridle paths and boulevard driveways to freight sidings, ship channels and docks,” according to Wayne Reeves.

Humber Valley Surveys, Riverside Subdivision, 1911, created by Speight & Van Nostrand, National Trust Co. Ltd. From the University of Toronto’s Map & Data Library.

In the west end of the waterfront, the plan called for a Lake Shore Drive (an element culled from the Civic Guild) and a new amusement park, Sunnyside, constructed on reclaimed land. Work on the ambitious plan began in 1914, but was delayed until 1919 because of the war. As Reeves noted, “the THC’s endeavours represented the pinnacle of large-scale planning in the Toronto region before the City’s Master Plan of 1943.”
While engaged in bankruptcy work, Home Smith was put in charge of selling off a troubled company’s land holdings near High Park to repay shareholders. Although few gave him much chance of recouping the hoped-for $900,000—because the lots, already subdivided for residential use, were isolated and under-served by city services and infrastructure—his hustle had raised $1,500,000 by 1911. His success gave him an idea and he turned his eyes to the Humber River valley.
At the time, the Humber valley, far beyond the city limits, was a wilderness punctuated by rough-cast farmhouses and mills along the river bank. Home Smith had ambitious plans to transform it into an exclusive neighbourhood catering to the business class. With backing from expatriate Canadian financiers in England, like Peacock, Dunn, and Beaverbrook, Home Smith quietly began purchasing more than three thousand acres along both banks of the river.

Valley of the west branch of the Humber River: proposed park from Islington Avenue to the Indian Line, September 1956. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 213, Series 1464, File 27.

By 1911, Home Smith had worked out plans detailing development on both banks of the river. Collectively known as the Humber Valley Surveys, the plans called for large, luxurious homes on tree-lined roads curving to follow the contours of the land, as well as reserves for church, recreation and commercial uses, including a farmer’s market. In Toronto, a city accustomed to organic expansion of unplanned, ramshackle suburbs, Home Smith undertook—in Gunn’s words—”one of the most ambitious, exclusive residential housing schemes ever devised in North America.”
Although by 1912, the city government’s enthusiasm for annexing the outskirts had waned, Home Smith sought government concession, striking what must have seemed to him a mutually beneficial arrangement. He gave the city 105 acres along the river’s edge for use as parkland. Home Smith clearly thought that he was saving the natural beauty of the Humber ravine from the same fate of the Don River and Garrison Creek. And as a member of the Civic Guild and the THC, he had even campaigned against the private ownership of natural features such as the Scarborough Cliffs.
In exchange for the park, the municipality would construct a roadway that would connect the Humber Valley Surveys with the THC’s new Lake Shore Boulevard. The suburb was also to be connected with an electric radial railway that would travel as far north as Caledon (where Home Smith also had extensive land holdings), a plan that was eventually abandoned with the growing domination of the automobile.
The precedent for the dominant architectural style of the area was set by the Old Mill Tea Room, which was designed in the Elizabethan or Tudor style by architect Alfred Chapman (whom Home Smith knew from mutual involvement with the Civic Guild and the THC). It opened in August 1914 and established the neighbourhood as “A Little Bit of England, Away from England,” according to the company’s Latin motto and advertising copy. To ensure an architecturally harmonious neighbourhood, as a condition of sale, lots included thirty year covenants that required that building plans be vetted by the Home Smith Company’s architects.

The Old Mill Hotel, 27 Old Mill Road, Kingsway Park, circa 1945. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 533.

As an area resident (his own home was at Edenbridge Road and Edenbrook Hill), Home Smith took great personal interest in the aesthetic beauty of the area. “Mrs. Harry Jacob who resided in the second house to be erected on Old Mill Road,” Esther Heyes writes in Etobicoke: From Furrow to Borough (Borough of Etobicoke, 1974), “recalled that Home Smith took a lively interest in [her house's] building. He had, she remembered, a special love for trees, and would allow as few as possible to be destroyed.” He set up two local nurseries where homeowners could “help themselves to quantities of plants, shrubs and young trees to beautify their grounds and gardens.”
Despite a lavish marketing campaign—and strong positive public reaction—sales were slow after the interruption of the First World War. Some building occurred on the east bank of the Humber, along Riverside Drive, between Bloor Street and Lake Ontario. But access to building lots on the west bank was encumbered by the only river crossing—an antiquated wooden bridge at Old Mill Road. Calling on social and political connections, Home Smith succeeded in having the Toronto and York Roads Commission build a stone bridge in 1916. A high level bridge connecting Bloor Street to the west bank in 1924 further stimulated sales.
Smith’s dual roles as a member of the THC and as private real estate developer inevitably sparked controversy. “Serving the Commission for more than a decade,” Gunn noted, “Home Smith had repeatedly been subjected to questions by members of City Council over integrity and conflict of interest.” Many thought the THC’s proposal for a Lake Shore Drive rather conveniently fed traffic into Smith’s real estate holdings. Moreover, as Carolyn Whitzman notes in Suburb, Slum, Urban Village (UBC Press, 2009), the new boulevard came at the expense of the expropriation and demolition of almost two hundred Parkdale homes—which Smith and E.L. Cousins, the THC’s consulting engineer, proposed at one time to turn into luxury apartments in the style of Chicago’s Lincoln Park.
While the optics of Home Smith’s entangled public and private involvements were troublesome, it doesn’t appear that he ever actually personally profited. The Home Smith Company (as well its subsidiaries) never paid a dividend in Home Smith’s lifetime. In 1926, a Royal Commission that had been formed under Judge Denton to investigate the dealings of the THC and its commissioners cross-examined Home Smith closely. But, according to Gunn, he was “fully exonerated of any impropriety.”

Death Notice for Robert Home Smith from the Globe, February 5, 1935.

More questionable was Smith’s bungled involvement with the Advisory City Planning Commission, a city-appointed commission that unveiled a far-reaching (but largely unfulfilled) plan for the downtown core in 1929. Knowing the plan would propose the extension of University Avenue beyond Queen Street to Front Street, Smith and other leading businessmen formed a syndicate—Amulet Realty—to buy all the affected property. In an act of selfless public duty, the syndicate proposed to hold the property to prevent speculation and price inflation, then sell it to the city at cost. However, after the downtown plan got bogged down at city council, the syndicate’s offer to sell the land to the city for $190,000 in 1929 was rebuffed by civic authorities. So, when the city was finally ready to purchase the land in 1931, for reasons that remain unclear, Home Smith wanted $350,000, a sum closer to market value. It produced another round of newspaper exposés.
In other instances, he took a hit in the pocket book as a sacrifice to public service. By the mid-1930s, with the country in the throes of the Great Depression and mortgages difficult to obtain, only about 1,200 acres of the Humber Valley Surveys had been sold, and the Home Smith Company owed municipalities a great deal in back taxes. But Home Smith never halted construction. “To provide employment, Home Smith laid out roads far ahead of schedule,” Heyes writes. “The work was performed by local men hired by the Township and paid by Home Smith. To lengthen their hours of employment and put more money in their pay envelopes, most of the work was done by hand, pick and shovel and wheelbarrow.” Such make-work labour was evidently a result of his sense of civic responsibility, a sense that businessmen ought to be good citizens.
Home Smith died of cirrhosis of the liver—a result his inclination towards alcohol, some said—in February 1935. He was fifty-eight years old. “Home Smith was one of the outstanding Canadians of my acquaintance,” former premier George S. Henry told the Globe on February 5, 1935, before praising his contributions as a member of the THC. The Globe called his real estate developments along the Humber River “a monument to his dreams.” Home Smith’s estate, valued at about $400,000, passed to his long-time friend and business associate, Godfrey Pettit. Pettit continued to manage the Home Smith Company and develop the Humber Valley according to Home Smith’s intentions, and the development eventually began to pay dividends.
Shortly before his death, Home Smith was said to have met several times with E.P. Taylor, a colleague from the Moderation League and the Conservative Party, to discuss real estate. It seems then that, apart from the Humber Valley Surveys (which remain a picturesque residential enclave), Home Smith’s planning ideas also impacted Taylor’s own suburban developments (and all the suburban developments that followed).
Other sources consulted: Villages of Etobicoke (Argyle Printing Company, 1985); and Mark Osbaldeston, Unbuilt Toronto (Dundurn Press, 2008).

CORRECTION: MAY 8, 2010 This article originally mistakenly said that Robert Home Smith was born in 1887, the result of a note-taking error—he was born in 1877.