Forest Hill was originally incorporated as a
village in 1923, and later amalgamated by the province into the City of Toronto in 1967, along with the Village of
Swansea. The village was named after the summer home of John Wickson, the father of Toronto architect
Frank Wickson; previously, it had been known as Spadina Heights (a name that continued to be applied to the neighbourhood into the twentieth century). Spadina Heights is a derivative of the
First Nations (namely
Ojibwe) word
ishapadenah, meaning a hill or sudden rise in land. Rather than electing a mayor as in a city, the leading
municipal official was the
reeve of the village. In the late 1960s, the City of Toronto planned to construct a highway that would run from Highway 401 to downtown Toronto via the Cedarvale Ravine and
Spadina Road. Forest Hill and
the Annex would be bisected by the proposed route, and numerous local houses would be sacrificed for the new expressway. This prompted local residents to rise to protest and raise the awareness of the greater public. On March 1, 1971
Bill Davis replaced
John Robarts as head of the ruling
Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. Public opinion was divided and Davis was facing a provincial election in the fall. While the Tories held 12 of the 25 seats in Metro Toronto the expressway threatened to physically divide influential downtown ridings that were key to Tory support. The
Liberals, who supported the expressway, had 7 Metro seats. The
NDP, who opposed, had 6. Though Toronto Metro Council was largely in favor of continuing the expressway, by the end of May Davis, accepting the argument that Spadina would increase rather than decrease traffic congestion and pollution, made his decision to cancel it, while also undercutting a major NDP issue, and on June 3rd he rose in the legislature to make the announcement. The Forest Hill War Memorial was erected by Page and Steele Architects at Eglinton Avenue and Vesta Road in 1980, in memory of those who lost their lives in the First and Second World Wars. When the Village was amalgamated into the City of Toronto, the agreement granted local residents the right to have their garbage picked up from their doorstep rather than from the curb. It wasn't until 1993 that the public learned that this extra service cost $420,000 a year and was paid for by the municipal government. This time, the public opinion of other Torontonians forced the city to discontinue this favour to Forest Hill residents. The neighbourhood's original boundaries were
Bathurst Street to the west,
Upper Canada College to the east, Eglinton Avenue to the north, and Lonsdale Road and a portion of Montclair Avenue to the south (the original boundaries of School Section 30). Neighbourhoods north of Eglinton are sometimes though not unanimously regarded as Forest Hill. In 1999
Robert Fulford compared Forest Hill to Rosedale, the other traditional home of Toronto's elite: "While Rosedale has remained stable for half a century, Forest Hill's prestige has been growing steadily. There's a key tonal difference in the architecture of the two places: where big Rosedale houses shout 'history,' big Forest Hill houses shout 'grandeur.' More than any other district in the central city, Forest Hill has become the site of spectacular new 'neo-traditional' homes built on a grand scale, usually with lawns to match." ==Location==