Hunt Club Residences

History of Hunt Club Residences

The Toronto Hunt Club goes back to 1843; the Eglinton Hunt Club was based here on Avenue Road from 1919. In 1929 it built this red-brick clubhouse, designed by Vaux & Bryan Chadwick, with bow windows, dormers and tall chimneys.

In 1939, as the war began, the federal government bought the club and it became the RCAF's No. 1 Clinical Investigation Unit, a secret research centre for aviation medicine connected to Sir Frederick Banting's work. Dr. Wilbur Franks, a University of Toronto researcher, had invented the Franks Flying Suit, the first anti-G suit, to keep fighter pilots from blacking out in tight turns, and it was tested here on one of the first human centrifuges built in the Allied countries.

After the war the site stayed military: RCAF auxiliary squadrons were based here in the Cold War, and from 1960 to 1994 it was the RCAF Staff School, later the Canadian Forces Staff School, which trained more than 10,000 officers. In 1998 the government transferred the land to the Toronto Catholic District School Board, which built Marshall McLuhan Catholic Secondary School on part of it.

Aspen Ridge Homes converted the clubhouse in 2003 and 2004 into 21 lofts of about 1,500 to 2,000 square feet, with ceilings of 10 to 17 feet. The ground-floor units kept the original bow windows, the old officers' mess is now the residents' lounge, and there is a large shared garden behind the building.