Brickworks

Down in the Don Valley Park not so far from the condo there is an old brick factory ( old brick factory ) that has been converted into an artist colony and a summertime farm market, but years ago they obviously produced bricks to be used in house construction. Based on the number of brick houses in the area, I can assume a lot of these bricks were used to build many of the beautiful old homes in the neighbourhood you have seen in some of my posts. After a few freezing days (Coldest day of the winter in fact!), the temperatures went up above freezing today so we went out for another walk in a different area of the neighbourhood. 

If you look out the windows at the back of the condo you get a great view of the skyscrapers in downtown Toronto, but the view out the front windows do not really have the same high building, so I decided to head into that section of the city and see what was there.

What I found was many more of the beautiful old houses, and most of them were made of bricks. I’m sure you would have liked to see more photos of the houses, but instead I decided to focus on some of the interesting designs built into the brickworks on these houses. It was like the contractors who originally built the houses were competing with each other to come up with interesting designs to make their houses a bit different and more interesting than the others. It really was rare to find houses built with bricks simply laid in neat rows, and most of those were recent construction; most of the older houses featured unique and interesting designs in the brickworks. 

Here are some of the brickworks I found on our walk. 

Sometimes the vines were taking over the bricks

Sometimes the bricks just needed work.

Yes, there are bricks under there . . . .