'Hidden gems in the city'
Kitchener’s laneways offer quiet escape from busy city streets
KITCHENER — It’s a scene from 50, or even 100 years ago: the oldest neighbourhoods in Kitchener are threaded with sleepy lanes tucked behind homes and businesses. Some of the lanes look like country byways, with tall maples shading the narrow pavement, and rambling flowers tumbling over wooden fences.
The laneways are “hidden gems in the city,” says Catherine Owens, whose house on Duke Street West is right next to a laneway.
The laneways are an important part of her neighbourhood’s character, she says. They are quiet places to walk the dog, where kids first learn to ride their bikes, spots for neighbours to gather on summer evenings to socialize.
Her neighbourhood holds a yearly fry fest, where people fry up everything from mussels to ice cream, and recently was awarded a placemaking grant from the city to put in planters for flowers, strawberry and blueberry plants. “The thought was people walking or playing in the laneway could eat the fruit,” she said.
Neighbours also used the grant to paint flowers and bumblebee designs — by student Kaitlyn Hinch from nearby Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate — on fences and garages as a way to discourage graffiti.
Residents see the lane as an extension of their properties, a quiet, public space, Owens said.
The city has 56 laneways, totalling 15.5 kilometres, mostly concentrated in the old North Ward, between King Street and Margaret Avenue.
In some cases — Arthur Place, Hermie Place
and Pearl Place — the garages and carriage houses have given way to actual homes, likely built when there were fewer restrictions on where and what you could build, and the lanes have evolved into miniature streets.
There are at least half a dozen houses on Hermie Place, creating “a unique ambience ... much like a small cottage community,” says the conservation plan for the Civic Centre heritage district.
“It’s unusual,” admits Ella Maaser, who has lived on Hermie since 1987. “People never find it, if they’re delivering something. They never see the (street) sign.”
Leandra and John Sbardellati moved into their 1885 home on Hermie Place about eight years ago, and love the street’s character. “It’s kind of a hidden little oasis,” she said. “It’s very quiet, very walkable and very quirky.”
Some lifelong Kitchener residents have told her they didn’t realize the tiny street existed. Houses are so close, she and her neighbour across the street can easily chat in normal tones, each standing on their porches. That proximity may not appeal to everyone, but it creates an intimacy among those who live there. “We feel a sense of community on this street,” Leandra Sbardellati said. “I think there’s a pride of place because it’s so unique.”
The lanes were built to provide discreet access to homes and businesses, allowing carriages, and later cars and garbage trucks access behind the home to preserve a pristine street facade, says local historian rych mills.
In a few spots, such as on Heit Lane, you can still spot centuryold carriage houses that once were at the back of grander homes fronting other streets.
“In many cases, the lanes predate the automobile,” said Greg McTaggart, Kitchener’s manager of infrastructure planning.
Most of them probably started as dirt tracks, but over time have been paved. They don’t have curbs, sidewalks or proper drainage.
But they’re considered municipal rights of way, and so are a city responsibility to maintain. The city clears them each winter, using two 4X4 pickup trucks because the lanes are too narrow for normal plows. About five kilometres of laneways have no room for snowbanks, so the snow has to be trucked away to the city’s snow dump.
Since 2012, the city has been working to rehabilitate the laneways, some of which simply were paved over dirt. It has spent $628,000 to repair 1.5 kilometres of lanes, and it could cost $5 million to fix them all. “They’re falling apart,” said McTaggart. “They’ve come to the end of any possible reasonable life that you could expect from such an informal treatment.”
The laneways are unusual in the region — there are some in the West Galt area of Cambridge, and in the Clair Hills and Eastbridge subdivisions in Waterloo — but the lanes didn’t prove popular with modern buyers so builders discontinued them.
The city’s older laneways should be considered “valuable assets” that tell a story about the historic development pattern of the neighbourhood, and that serve as important links through the community, the Civic Centre heritage plan says.
Leandra Sbardellati agrees. “You feel that you’re kind of slowing down time on this street.”