Homes for Sale in Ajax

Harwood Avenue is the spine, running from the lake at Rotary Park north past the 401 to Taunton Road. Downtown sits where Harwood meets Bayly Street: the town hall, the main library and Pat Bayly Square, a civic square with residential and office buildings that opened in September 2018 on land the town sold for the purpose in 2012. TRREB's South West and South East communities are everything below the 401, split roughly at Harwood: to the west, Riverside, Duffins Bay and Lakeside back onto Duffins Creek and the marsh; to the east, Pickering Beach, Lake Vista and Carruthers Creek run to the Whitby line. Central, Central West and Central East cover the band between the 401 and Rossland Road, with the town's oldest wartime streets near Harwood and Kings Crescent, Pickering Village at Kingston Road and Church Street on the west, and Clover Ridge, Salem Heights and Applecroft toward the east. Northwest Ajax and Northeast Ajax, north of Rossland, are the 2000s and 2010s subdivisions of Westney Heights, Nottingham, Audley and Deer Creek reaching up to the 407. The town lists 28 local neighbourhood names, so a listing may use one of those instead.

Ajax GO Station at 100 Westney Road South opened on December 4, 1988, with its platforms on the south side of the 401; a multi-level garage added in 2013 lifted parking to 2,148 spaces. The station is 37.5 kilometres from Union, and under the September 2021 timetable local trains come every quarter hour on weekdays and every half hour at weekends. Ajax GO is also Durham Region Transit's western hub: PULSE 915 leaves the station up Westney Road and along Taunton Road to Harmony and Conlin in Oshawa, PULSE 900 runs Kingston Road between Scarborough and downtown Oshawa, and PULSE 916 follows Rossland Road from Pickering Parkway Terminal, with the transit agency's west garage beside the station. On the road, the 401 has full interchanges at Westney and Salem, the 407 crosses the north of town with ramps at Westney Road, and Highway 412 runs along Lake Ridge Road on the Whitby boundary between the two, its tolls ended on April 5, 2022. Kingston Road, the old Highway 2, is still the retail strip, and Bayly, Rossland and Taunton carry the east-west traffic.

Lakeridge Health Ajax Pickering on Harwood Avenue South opened in 1954 as the Ajax and Pickering General Hospital and joined the Lakeridge Health system on December 1, 2016; it has a full emergency department, which is why a large share of Pickering and west Whitby also treats it as their hospital. Schools come from four boards. The public English schools are Durham District School Board schools and the Catholic ones belong to Durham Catholic District School Board; between them they run five secondary schools in town. French-language families are served by Conseil scolaire Viamonde and Conseil scolaire catholique MonAvenir, whose Durham schools may be in a neighbouring city. Attendance boundaries are the boards' to draw and redraw, so check the exact address with each board rather than assuming the nearest school is yours. Ajax has no university or college campus of its own: Durham College's Whitby campus is one exit east, the Oshawa campuses are a PULSE 915 ride, and the University of Toronto Scarborough is the western end of PULSE 900.

Ajax was the first town on the Great Lakes Waterfront Trail to build a pedestrian-only paved lakeside path, in 1995, and the stretch here was named the William Parish Waterfront Trail in 2018. It links Rotary Park at the foot of Harwood, Veterans' Point with its ship-bow landmark, the beach at Paradise Park and the parkland at Pickering Beach, where the conservation authority cleared cottages in the 1970s to open the shore. Duffins Creek, which drains 283 square kilometres from the Oak Ridges Moraine, ends in Duffins Marsh at the Pickering line, and Carruthers Creek does the same on the Whitby side; both valleys are Toronto and Region Conservation Authority land with trails. For shopping, Durham Centre at Harwood Avenue and Kingston Road is the big-box hub, with Harwood Place Mall and Ajax Plaza, both from the 1960s and 1970s, close by. Ajax Downs at 50 Alexander's Crossing pairs a racetrack with a casino, and Durham Live's Pickering Casino Resort, open since July 26, 2021, sits just over the Church Street boundary.