Lee Avenue is a quiet residential street in the east end of Toronto, in the neighbourhood known as the Beaches. From Kew Beach on Lake Ontario, it runs a little more than a kilometre uphill and north until it ends at Kingston Road.
It was on the west side of Lee, at number 126, that Joe Price and his family first made their home in about 1902. They had just moved back to Canada after living for several years in Buffalo. The house was the first of roughly forty that Joe and his two sons, Leslie and Earl, would build over the coming decade.
At the end of that decade, probably in 1914 give or take a year, someone in the Price family decided to have professional-qualty photographs taken of nineteen of those forty houses.1 There are thirteen photos (six of them include two semi-detached homes), and I’d like to share them with you here.2 Each is accompanied by a recent photo taken more than 110 years later.
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