Radar Park and the Wartime Factory Still Standing Around Laird and Eglinton
Leaside's newest park is 1,718 square meters of lawn, play equipment and native planting at 939 Eglinton Avenue East. Ward 15 Councillor Rachel Chernos Lin cut the ribbon on July 22. At first glance it looks like a pleasant extra from a condo project. It is also the newest part of the Research Enterprises Limited site, a wartime factory that once covered this whole stretch of the east side. A few of the factory's buildings still stand close by, and the park was designed so people would ask why it carries the name Radar.
Research Enterprises Limited, usually called REL, was a Crown corporation that ran from 1940 to 1946. It became Leaside's largest single employer. At its peak it employed more than 7,500 people, almost half of them women, and most came to work by TTC. Leaside's population at the time was about 5,000. That means the factory brought in more workers each day than the town had residents.
The City's own summary of REL, written this summer, describes plants that covered most of the land between Eglinton Avenue, Laird Drive and Research Road. Smaller shops and storage buildings reached south to Wicksteed Avenue. The whole estate covered 22 hectares with 70,000 square meters of floor space, and it produced $220 million worth of radar systems and optical instruments for the Allied war effort. Before that, the level ground had served as a military aerodrome during the First World War. The architecture firm Allward and Gouinlock designed the factory buildings in a modernist style, and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada recognized them in its journal at the time.
The buildings kept working after 1946. Leaside Life lists Corning glassware, Honeywell thermostats and Rogers-Majestic radios among the peacetime products made there. Rogers-Majestic is the company now known as Rogers Communications. The City adds a Corning Glass plant and Philips Electronics to that list. Its summary also notes that "only a few of the original buildings still stand, used primarily for light industrial and small commercial enterprises."
According to Leaside Life, Radar Park sits in what was once the heart of the REL complex. The park has been planned since 2021. When 939 Eglinton was approved for housing, the settlement required the owner to give the City land for a park and to pay for its design and construction. The development is Upper East Village, built by Camrost-Felcorp.
Jonah Rannie, a landscape architect at Arcadis, was one of the park's designers. The site had been a parking lot. His team began the design during the pandemic, and the City asked for play equipment that was not the usual kind.
"The City wished for non-traditional children's play equipment, so we created a unique structure that is both interactive and reminiscent of equipment manufactured at REL."
The play structure includes a pair of binoculars. Look through them and you see a vintage photograph of a woman working at REL. In a factory where almost half the workforce was women, that photograph sums up the site's history well.
The rest of the park is built for everyday use. It has an outdoor amphitheater, an open central lawn, extra-wide concrete paths, an accessible ramp system, a tree canopy and gardens of native perennial shrubs. Rannie said his favorite feature is the sunken rain garden. The whole site slopes toward it so that rainwater collects there.
One local business has followed the REL story more closely than any other.
Charmaine Sweets opened in Leaside in December 2015. It started in the basement of Teresa Ho's East York home and later moved into a freestanding white brick building at the corner of Vanderhoof Avenue and Brentcliffe Road, at 115 Vanderhoof. In 2019, Leaside Life said it looked like a cake box. Teresa Ho runs the bakery with her daughter Charmaine and Charmaine's husband, Dustin Kuruc. Charmaine and Dustin both trained under the Toronto chef Marc Thuet.
In 2021, a Spacing article on REL's surviving buildings identified a single-story brick shed at 115–119 Vanderhoof as the factory's former canteen. The family's own moving notice says the bakery spent 10 years there, so for about a decade a family bakery fed Leaside from what appears to be the building where REL fed its workers.
The bakery's website now gives its address as 939 Eglinton Ave. East, at the southwest corner of Eglinton and Brentcliffe, inside Upper East Village. That is the same development that holds Radar Park. In their moving notice, the family wrote that they "will miss the old iconic white brick building." The new location has tables inside and a patio. It is open Monday to Saturday from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., and customers get one hour of free underground parking. Croissants and beignets lead the list of what the bakery is known for.
The canteen building is not part of a land-use application now in front of the Ontario Land Tribunal. That application covers 105–109 Vanderhoof Ave. and 10 Brentcliffe Rd., and its hearing is scheduled to start May 10, 2027. We have not confirmed what occupies the white building at 115 Vanderhoof now that the bakery has moved.
The other surviving building has the most to look at. Spacing identifies 20 Research Road as REL's Radio Stores Building No. 16. An original blueprint for it is dated March 1942. Parkhurst Knitwear used the building from 1946 to 2016. In October 2019 the Toronto Preservation Board recommended adding it to the City's heritage register, and City Council confirmed the listing that November. Apple Self Storage now occupies the building and opened it for rentals in 2022.
What to look for is the glass. The Spacing writer photographed the building's ribbon windows and roof monitor in 2017. She described thousands of aged panes, each one different, "whether intact, cracked, patched, fogged, or painted over." Those photographs are nine years old, so the windows may look different today.
Line 5 opened on February 8, 2026, which makes Radar Park easy to reach by train. REL's workers mostly arrived by TTC as well.
The route works well for a Saturday morning when the bakery is open. It is also a good outing for guests who think of Leaside only as Bayview Avenue.
Not all of the park's history signage is in place yet. On July 14, Councillor Chernos Lin moved a motion to give Heritage Toronto $10,000 for a plaque commemorating REL. The money comes from Section 37 community benefits secured from the development at 146–150 Laird Drive. The motion says the plaque will complement "planned interpretive signs in Radar Park." City Council adopted the motion, item MM43.15, without amendment at its meeting of July 29 and 30. As of early October, we have found no announced installation or unveiling date for the plaque.
So the park, the plaque and the planned signs all point to one site that shaped the Laird and Eglinton corner long before the condos, the LRT or the bakery's new patio. Today, the binoculars on the play structure are the clearest marker of that history at the park.
If your home sits near Laird and Eglinton and you want to know how the area's history and recent changes affect what it's worth, Claire Speedie is happy to walk the area with you and talk it through. Start your new chapter. Request a home valuation.
Claire has a keen interest in investment properties and looks forward to continuing to help her clients build their real estate investment portfolios.