TORONTO 2007 - ROSEDALE
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ettml/sets/72157594507953864/
some of these are amazing!
Rosedale is ok. It's alot of very old money. Very stuffy, very WASPY and old It's more hyped than it should be imo.
Another very nice area is Forest Hill. I actually prefer Forest Hill to Rosedale. It's more Jewish than Rosedale because alot of folks at that time period were pretty anti-semitic, so as Jewish merchants became more prosperous and moved away from Spadina, since they couldn't live in Rosedale, they went to Forest Hill. Alot of late 19th & 20th century money resides in Forest Hill, like the Westons, Eatons, etc. imo, the ultimate in privacy and luxury within Toronto itself is The Bridle Path area. Some of those homes are simply amazing. That's where the artist formerly known as Prince bought. The Bridle Path is mostly relatively new money, and the homes are far more modern than anything you'll find in either Rosedale, and in some ways Forest Hill as well.
We used to shoot in some of those Bridle Path mansions, and my friend Jasmine lives there. I met her when we used her house as a location for 3 scenes for an Ellen Barkin movie. They made their money in computer software during the dot com boom. It was really wierd for her, because her and her husband were once struggling university students barely able to feed themselves. Their idea of a culinary feast was having a few veggies to toss into their packet of Ramen noodles... then swoosh, overnight, they became 20 something dot com multi-millionaires living along the Bridle Path. It was a tough job, ...but somehow, ...she managed to get used to her new status in life.
The production company rented her front foyer, & kitchen for the shoot, ...and her driveway & front courtyard for honeytown. They located the costume department as well as our green room in her 5 yr old daughter's playroom. The playroom had to be at least 2,000 sq feet. Her back deck accomodated over 300 cast & crew for dinner, 3 catering set ups with plenty of room to spare. Incredible! The rental fee... $10 grand for one night. Not bad for renting out a couple of rooms.
Another absolutely amazing mansion is the the one that used to belong to the former chairman of GM out in Oshawa. I forget the name of it, but it's a pretty common location we'd use for shoots. The grounds were like Tuscany gardens, incredibly expansive with Etruscan statuary.
