Garage Door Repair in Historic Downtown, Newmarket

Main Street South is the reason Newmarket does not feel like the subdivisions that surround it. This is the ground the town was first settled on, where some houses date to the 1860s and the streetscape south of the commercial blocks reads as one continuous piece of nineteenth-century fabric. Century homes with deep front porches sit on long, narrow lots that run back to lanes and side drives. Water Street, the Holland River and Fairy Lake frame the eastern edge, and the Tom Taylor Trail threads through the middle of it all. The result is a street pattern that predates the private attached garage by roughly a century.

Since 2013 this has been the Lower Main Street South Heritage Conservation District, designated by by-law and covering 72 properties, with a further 93 properties individually designated elsewhere in Newmarket. The permit list matters here: inside the district a heritage permit is required to erect a new garage, a new fence or wall, a new facade or an addition, and the advisory group's review scope extends to streets, boulevards, squares and parking lots. That does not stop a broken spring being replaced. It does mean anything altering how a garage looks from the street should be settled with the Town before an order is placed.