Ever wondered why central Toronto is so flat? Answer: because people flattened it!
At 4 p.m. tomorrow in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone will perform a long-overdue task: unveil a plaque to the Crawford Street Bridge, one of the seven lost wonders of Toronto.
The bridge, built in 1915, spans a ravine of the late, great Garrison Creek, so named because, from its headwaters north of St. Clair Avenue, it gurgled past the soldiers stationed at Fort York, en route to flowing into Lake Ontario.
According to the plaque, "by the 1880s, the creek was so polluted that it was gradually channeled underground into a brick sewer, built through here in 1885."
City fathers (and mothers) bricked in the creek but left the ravine, and in 1915 one R.C. Harris — yes, the famed Commissioner of Works who built the water filtration plant and Bloor Street Viaduct and was immortalized in the Michael Ondaatje book -- cut his teeth at this very spot, engineering a triple-span bridge to get Crawford Street up to Dundas Street (triple-span refers to the arches, resting on posts, which hold up the bridge deck.)
The bridge, though, received an indecent burial just 45 years later, when excavators digging out the Bloor Street subway line just filled the ravine up with dirt. Gary Miedema, who heads the plaque project at Heritage Toronto, notes, "Trinity-Bellwoods was an immigrant community that would have been relatively voiceless."
Lately, the area has been finding its voice.
"So dumb," Ed Dosman, a professor of international studies at York University, says of the bridge-burying.
Mr. Dosman in his spare time works with the Garrison Creek Linkage Project, which has already done marvelous work using copper letters sunk in cement to label Garrison Creek along much of its length. Here at the Crawford Bridge, they've stuck plaques in cement depicting the fish who once swam here: northern pike, bowfin, white sucker, largemouth bass, brown bullhead, pumpkinseed and rock bass.
But Mr. Dosman won't be content until backhoes undo the mistakes of the past, and unearth the bridge, our own local Téotihuacan.
"I have no doubt that in the next generation the bridge will be dug out," he says. "We could have potentially a water feature in Trinity-Bellwoods park along the lines of Lafontaine Park in Montreal. In Chicago or Seattle this would have been done a long time ago, but we're broke."
In his dream, a one kilometre stretch of restored creek flows from Dundas to Queen Street, passing under the bridge and through the remaining ravine in Trinity-Bellwoods park, which today is a popular toboganning spot in winter.
Mr. Pantalone, Toronto's "tree advocate," says, however, that it's not just about the money.
"We'd have to kill I don't know how many trees to ressurect the old bridge," he said. "Future generations may deem that a project worth doing."
Indeed, I'm fascinated walking here to see the dozens of 40-year-old maple and ash trees thriving in the 1960s fill around the bridge. You can see the former line of the ravine from the much older trees at the edges of the park.
On the plus side, the filled-in ravine around the bridge is now home, on Tuesdays, to the Trinity-Bellwoods farmer's market, which opens for the season tomorrow. I love that market, except that vendors and shoppers trample and kill the grass in the park. Here's my idea: close the bridge stretch of Crawford on Tuesday afternoons, let the vendors set up there, and call it the Crawford Bridge Market, which would celebrate the bridge's memory, and save the grass.
Crawford Street Bridge, West Side, November 16, 1915. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1615
Photo of Crawford Street this afternoon by Peter Redman, National Post
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