When the Toronto Hunt Club relocated to the east end of the city in 1895, the Birch Cliff area began to be developed. The Toronto Hunt Club was established by British Army officers of the Toronto garrison (Fort York) in 1843. It held equestrian events at various sites around the city, and in 1895 it acquired its first permanent home in a rural area east of the city between Kingston Road and the waterfront – the future Birch Cliff Village neighborhood. Within two years of the Hunt Club’s relocation, the city’s fledgling streetcar and transit system was extended eastward to the new Hunt Club site, and soon the area became a cottage district.
Essentially, Birch Cliff started off as a streetcar suburb. By the time the city’s new transit commission established a streetcar line running along Kingston Road to Birchmount Road, Kingston Road had become a busy shopping district.
In the early 1900’s many Toronto residents were building summer cottages on the property adjacent to the Toronto Hunt Club. One of the main attractions for the cottagers was the magnificent view of Lake Ontario provided by the Scarborough Bluffs. Throughout the main ridge of the Bluffs, birch trees lined and dotted the landscape, prompting a cottager named John Stark to name his cottage “Birch Cliff”. The Birch Cliff name stuck and was adopted by the local post office, which opened in 1907. This post office resided in Arthur Mitchell’s grocery store, which was located at the corner of Kingston Road and Birchmount Avenue.
In the 1910’s and 1920’s Birch Cliff emerged as a year round residential community, and from 1922 to 1947, it held the distinction of being the meeting place of the Scarborough Municipal Council. This was because Birch Cliff was the most populated part of the borough.
A short time after World War II, Birch Cliff’s residential development was completed. During the years following World War II, the streetcar disappeared and Kingston Road become a major route to cities and towns further east. The area south of Kingston Road, by the lake and the ravines, remained a wealthy residential district. The area further north is now referred to as Birch Cliff Heights, and the western part of the neighborhood, just west of the Hunt Club, is known as Fallingbrook. These two areas alone are among the most sought after residential areas in the entire city of Toronto.
