Alexandra Park consists of private and public housing, with at grade retail along Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue, some institutional, and several commercial buildings scattered through the neighborhood.

The park is named for Queen Alexandra, whose husband, King Edward VII, was the first future monarch to visit Toronto.

The recorded history of the area begins with the original survey of the northern shore of Lake Ontario conducted by Augustus Jones in 1791.

The area was purchased from the Denison family in 1841 by Sir Casimir Gzowski, a Polish engineer who built his grand home, which he called 'The Hall', at what is now the south-east corner of Dundas St. W. and Bathurst St. A neighbourhood sprang up around Gzowski's home that was inhabited largely by Polish and Ukrainian immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s.

[2] The public housing projects brought in many migrants from Nova Scotia, as well as many immigrants from the Caribbean, East Africa, China and Vietnam.

In the early '90s, a group of Alexandra Park residents sought to convert the government housing complex to self-governing co-operative housing, in order to attempt to make a difference in the struggling community in an effort to stop the oppression and drug wars the project had been facing for many decades previous.

Today Alexandra Park is recovering from its harsh battles in the past, and making an effort to turn a new leaf.