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.

Here they are. Even numbers are on the west side, and odd numbers are on the east side.

120 Lee Avenue

Then

Now

123 Lee Avenue

Then

Joe’s son, Leslie Price, the elder of the famous “Price Brothers”, lived in this house with his family.

Now

126 Lee Avenue

Then

This is the house that Joe Price built for his family. They lived in it from about 1902 until about 1916. My grandmother, Helen Price, grew up here.

Now

The house has been renovated recently and, reportedly, given a modern interior. It’s a shame that trees block the view of the house in both photos.

129–127 Lee Avenue

Then

Now

130 Lee Avenue

Then

Now

132–134 Lee Avenue

Then

Now

133–131 Lee Avenue

Then

Now

136–138 Lee Avenue

Then

This is where the other Price brother, Earl, lived with his family.

Now

140 Lee Avenue

Then

Now

144–146 Lee Avenue

Then

Now

It’s unfortunate that both photos are blocked by trees.

148 Lee Avenue

Then

Now

The house at number 148 was undergoing a major renovation when we came to look in September of 2026.

150–152 Lee Avenue

Then

Now

There was no way to photograph the house without that sign blocking it. Just for fun, I asked AI to remove the sign, and the rendering below is what it came up with.

It’s not bad, but it had to do some guessing about what was behind the obstruction, and it seems to have left out the railing on the stairs.

158 Lee Avenue

Then

This is the only photo with people present. The family’s pre-war clothing helped me to date the photo and, by association, all the photos.

Now

A second front door was added sometime in the past hundred years, and the house was converted into two units. The new one became158A Lee Avenue.

Postscript: One of these houses is not like the other ones

This photo resides in the same album as the thirteen photos taken on Lee Avenue. It looks like a Price-built house and bears the number 142. The problem is that it looks nothing like the house we find at 142 Lee Avenue now (in the second photo). The houses on either side of it are also clearly not 140 or 144 Lee Avenue (which you can see in the photos above).

It appears that this house was number 142 on some other street, and the photo was included, perhaps in error, in an album of Lee Avenue houses. If you recognize it, please let me know in a comment.

Footnotes

  1. I’ve estimated the date of the photographs based on the clothing of the family you can see sitting on the steps of 158 Lee Avenue. ↩︎
  2. The photos are part of a trove of family photographs and other artifacts that has come down to us through Leslie’s branch of the family and is currently in the care of one of Leslie’s grandsons. ↩︎