A Saturday in Mill Pond

The pond is still at seven in the morning. Mist sits on the water, the boardwalk is damp, and the only sound is a heron lifting off from the reeds at the west end. We have started many Saturdays here, usually before showing a house nearby, and it never looks like a suburb. It looks like what it was: a mill pond at the edge of a village, with the village still there.

The pond, early

Mill Pond Park is at 321 Mill Street, a few hundred metres west of Yonge Street. The pond is a kettle lake left by the ice sheet, dammed in the early 1800s to drive a sawmill, which is where the name comes from, and for a century it was the industrial heart of the settlement that became Richmond Hill. The mill is long gone. What remains is a sheet of water ringed by a path, with a boardwalk carrying you out over the shallows, a gazebo, a playground and benches that face west so you get the sun on your back in the morning.

The loop is short, perhaps fifteen minutes at a slow pace, and most people do it twice. Dog walkers come first, then runners, then by nine the families. In winter the city holds its carnival here, around the corner of Mill and Trench streets, and in summer there are free concerts on weekday evenings. On a Saturday in autumn there is nothing scheduled and nothing needed.

The old streets

From the pond we walk east along Mill Street toward Yonge. This is the part of Richmond Hill that was a village before it was anything else, and the houses show it: nineteenth-century frame and brick cottages with deep verandas, a few grander Victorian houses, and between them the twentieth-century infill that every old village acquires. Trench Street and Church Street run north and south, and the lots get wider as you move away from Yonge, which is where the estate-scale houses of Mill Pond begin.

The pleasure of these streets is their irregularity. Setbacks vary, roofs vary, one house is a 1920s bungalow and the next is new and three times the size. Nothing is uniform, and the trees are old enough to make that work. Compared with a planned estate subdivision, where every house was built to a single plan in a single decade, Mill Pond has the texture of a place that was lived in before it was designed.

Coffee on Yonge

Yonge Street between Major Mackenzie Drive and Crosby Avenue is Richmond Hill’s historic core, and it still has the rhythm of a main street: short frontages, a mix of old and new buildings, and a café every block or so. We take our coffee here and sit outside if the weather allows. The street is not precious. There are banks and dry cleaners between the restaurants. That is part of its appeal; it is a working village centre, not a reconstruction of one.

The market, if it is running

In recent summers a Saturday farmers’ market has set up in the parking lot behind the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts at 10268 Yonge Street, running from July into September. It has moved more than once over the years, and seasons vary, so check the city’s events calendar before building a morning around it. When it is on, it is a good small market: Ontario produce, bread, preserves, flowers, and the kind of crowd that knows the vendors by name. When it is not, the centre itself is worth a look. It is the city’s main performing arts venue and anchors the north end of the old core.

A longer walk

After coffee we go back west, past the pond and along Mill Street toward Bathurst. The houses on this stretch are the ones buyers ask us about: deep lots, mature trees, and a mix of original mid-century houses and the custom homes that have replaced many of them. The street is quiet enough to walk down the middle of, and the lots are big enough that the houses barely register from the road. This is the estate side of Mill Pond, and the fact that it begins a ten-minute walk from a café is the reason the neighbourhood holds its value.

Those who want a proper hike can pick up the trail network that threads through the small parks and ravines west of the pond. We usually settle for an hour and head back.

The Heritage Centre

The Richmond Hill Heritage Centre is at 19 Church Street North, in Amos Wright Park, a few minutes from the pond. The building is an 1840s Regency-style cottage, once the home of Amos Wright, a local politician and parliamentarian, and it was restored and opened as a museum in 1997. It is small, staffed by people who know the town’s history well, and open to the public on set days; the city posts the hours. The displays explain how a milling hamlet on Yonge Street became a town, and how the pond you have just walked around fitted into that.

We send almost every buyer who is new to Richmond Hill here. It takes half an hour, and afterwards the streets make sense.

Late afternoon

By four the light is low across the pond and the benches on the east side are the place to be. The Mill Pond Gallery, in the house at 314 Mill Street directly across from the park, often has an exhibition of local work and is a pleasant detour. Otherwise this is the hour for doing nothing in particular, which the neighbourhood rewards.

Dinner

Yonge Street has enough restaurants in the old core that the choice depends on mood rather than availability. There are long-standing Italian and Mediterranean rooms, newer places that change hands every few years, and a steady supply of Persian and East Asian kitchens reflecting who lives in Richmond Hill now. We do not have a single recommendation; we have several, and they change. The point is that dinner is a walk away, not a drive, which is rare in a neighbourhood where the houses sit on half-acre lots.

Why it matters

We write this not as a travel piece but because it is what people are buying when they buy in Mill Pond. The house is part of it. The rest is a Saturday like this one: the pond at seven, coffee at nine, a walk past houses that have been there for a hundred years and houses that were finished last spring, a museum that explains the place, and dinner without the car. For buyers weighing Mill Pond against South Richvale or Bayview Hill, that walkable village edge is the deciding factor more often than any feature of the houses themselves.

If you own in Mill Pond and are thinking about what comes next, or want to know what is quietly available on these streets, tell us what you are looking for and we will keep you informed.