A ghost owns my laneway

York County Sheriff Frederick Wm. Jarvis
Harbord Village land speculator 1818-1887

Copyright © Wendy Smith 2008. All rights reserved.
Read this article in my Spring/2008 newsletter

Fred Jarvis keeled over in a horse-drawn cab on Queen Street on the evening of April 16, 1887, and was dead in his bed before midnight.

The mighty sheriff's heart attack — not entirely a surprise — was the talk of muddy York for days. His funeral procession along Wellesley St. three days later was followed by judges, lawyers and much of Ontario's elite.

Fred Jarvis — Sheriff of York County for 33 years — died 121 years ago. Nonetheless, he remains today the registered owner of the 9-ft-wide dead-end laneway that runs behind my Harbord Village 5-house row — where I sometimes park my car. Fred also owns the narrow walkway between my house and my neighbour's (approximately 2.5 x 34 ft.), and a similar walkway between another pair in the row.

When I first saw his name on the survey of my property — "F.W. Jarvis", owner of "Part 3" (all the rights-of-ways adjacent to our row) — I thought he must be one my neighbours. That's how rights-of-ways (a.k.a. encroachments) are normally managed these days. A neighbour needs to pass over your land to get to his own property, so a right-of-way is recorded on both parties' deeds.

Over time I met my neighbours: no Jarvis among them. At the Toronto reference library I checked old city directories for owners and occupants, searching back a century. No luck.

Years later I went to the land registry office and there he was, on Plan 87: PLAN OF THE PART OF THE CITY OF TORONTO SHEWING THE SUBDIVISION OF PARK LOT NO. 17 NORTH OF COLLEGE STREET AS LAID OUT INTO VILLA LOTS BY F.W. JARVIS.

Dated June 8th, 1854.

This mystery — my laneway owned by a man surely long dead — swept me on through the Toronto and Ontario historical archives, libraries, map rooms and bookstores... And the story unfolded. Park Lot 17, granted in 1798 to the Hon. Alex Grant, went through several hands before Fred Jarvis purchased most of the north half of the lot in 1854 from Robert B. Denison, son and heir of the late George T. Denison.

The property bordered north/south on Bloor and College Streets, and east/west on Major and Borden Streets: more familiar to us today as the central third of Toronto's historic Harbord Village.

Fred's plan to sell off "villa lots" was almost completely stalled by a depression between 1854 and 1865. The few early sales were financed with mortgages held by Fred; some of those early buyers couldn't keep up their payments and later lost their land.

Over the years lots were slowly sold to developers of the day, who typically built several semi-detached Bay-and-Gable houses on each lot. To protect rights-of-ways between and behind houses, Fred (and other developers throughout historic Toronto) often just deleted the passageways from the titles, and retained ownership of the bits of land themselves.

These days the city sometimes expropriates the larger ghost-owned laneways for public use; smaller pieces of land can remain in limbo until someone acquires adjacent properties (often for a condo development) and needs clear titles on the entire parcel before development permits can be issued.

By Fred's death in 1887, about a quarter of his Park Lot 17 property had been developed, mostly north of Buller (Ulster) Street. The following decade saw homes built through most of Harbord Village and beyond.