[citation needed] It remained largely rural, with orchards, gravel and clay pits and a few market gardens.

[6] Workers at Kodak and the nearby stockyards once located at Weston Road and St. Clair Avenue, as well as CCM, Willys Overland and other factories north and south of Mount Dennis built their own homes before municipal services were in place, and small developers built "infill" homes, gradually filling the streets with the current housing stock of former cottages and small, fully detached homes, among the most affordable housing stock in Toronto for recent immigrants and first-time homeowners.

Working out of a single unit in a nameless strip mall on Weston Road, just like many others on that stretch, Duncan’s tiny office has turned into a community hub of sorts.

And with Kodak gone, people lost ownership and pride in their neighbourhood leading to a downward spiral,” says Duncan of ANC.

Instead of saying there are too many, let us brand Weston-Mount Dennis as a go-to place for black people to do their hair.” Located in the riding of York South-Weston, Weston-Mount Dennis is the landing spot for hundreds of immigrants, making it a microcosm of Toronto's diversity, with dozens of ethnic groups represented - the largest being from the Caribbean and West Africa.

"With this diversity comes incredible challenges," says Lekan Olawoye, project director at the For Youth Initiative, a charitable organization that aims to boost civic engagement.

"Language barriers, parental disconnect, lowering the bar for kids in priority neighbourhoods have led to Weston-Mount Dennis having the dubious distinction of having the third-highest high school dropout rate in Toronto," says Olawoye, who also grew up in a similar priority neighborhood in Rexdale.

[7] Designed by Toronto artists Daniel Young and Christian Giroux, the piece is part of a series of revitalization projects targeted at supporting the neighbourhood and its residents as it evolves beyond its industrial past.

[10] With respect to religion, there are many black store front churches representing the many faiths of the African and Caribbean communities as well as Western-European, Middle Eastern and Asian faiths such as Christian, Roman Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Seventh Day Adventist), Muslim, and Buddhist as seen along the Weston Road Corridor.

According to a CBC article on Mount Dennis, "Aggressive community policing [part of the Toronto police's anti-violence intervention strategy initiative] is intimidating, and black males in particular feel racially profiled rather than supported," says Shadya Yasin, a Somali-Canadian who works and lives in the neighbourhood.

Yasin, who heads the York Youth Coalition (YYC), is leading the charge to obtain a receipt component to police carding.

[17] When he was a candidate for Mayor of Toronto, John Tory's platform included a transit plan he called SmartTrack.

[20] SmartTrack was to share the rights-of-way of existing rail lines—except for a turn-off at Mount Dennis, where he imagined the route could run parallel to Eglinton, using the right-of-way that had been set aside decades ago for the Richview Expressway.

Further, Tory's plan overlooked that the turning radius for large heavy rail vehicles would require extensive tunneling under Mount Dennis itself.

In late 2015 Metrolinx made public its plans to include a gas-fired electrical generator on its Mount Dennis campus.

The area is frequented by gangs like the Eglinton West Crips, Five Point Generalz, Dixon Bloods, Jamaican posse, Shower Posse, Organized crime in Nigeria like the Black Axe Crime Ring, Trethewey Gangstas, Scarlett Blocc and Baghdad Crew.