One Street
Dan Seljak and Sebastián López Cardozo
One Street_December 2025
Eleven Decades of Apartment Building
Dan Seljak and Sebastián López Cardozo
December 2025
Late in 2025, I invited Dan Seljak to walk Toronto’s Bathurst Street—one of the city’s main north-south thoroughfares extending from the shore of Lake Ontario to Holland Marsh. From that walk came eleven photographs of apartment buildings, one from each decade between 1910 and 2020.
Dan fits Jane Jacobs’ description of the pavement-pounding urbanist. He has walked practically every street in Old Toronto while advocating for the presence of retail on residential streets. Bathurst, however, resists any easy categorization. It is messy and inconsistent, reading at times like a city without zoning—Houston, perhaps, if colder. Just as the street begins to thin into something recognizably suburban, towers reappear, and density returns at Toronto’s northern edge.
The photographs are arranged by year of construction. Most were taken during the walk itself; a few were re-shot later, in warmer weather. Considered together, they sketch a loose chronology of how Toronto has housed itself over more than a century—without a single master plan, but not without pattern. My hope is that the images invite you to draw your own conclusions, or better yet, to walk Bathurst yourself. Credit is also due to Shawn Micallef, whose book Stroll first inspired me to take the street seriously as an urban document.
1597 Bathurst Street, built 1915. Photo by Sebastián López Cardozo.
1560 Bathurst Street, built 1925. Photo by SLC.
1510 Bathurst Street, built 1933. Photo by Dan Seljak.
1660 Bathurst Street, built 1943. Photo by DS.
2601 Bathurst Street, built 1953. Photo by DS.
4415 Bathurst Street, built 1962. Photo by DS.
3636 Bathurst Street, built 1974. Photo by SLC.
6091 Bathurst Street, built 1985. Photo by DS.
3036-3050 Bathurst Street, built 1992. Photo by SLC.
38 Niagara Street (facing Bathurst), built 2006. Photo by SLC.
109 Wolseley Street (facing Bathurst), built 2017. Photo by SLC.