[URBAN NOTE] The old Harbord streetcar route

[rfmcdonald]

Last Sunday, I had tremendous fun with Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton as we traced (mostlu) together most of the length of the Harbord streetcar route described by James Bow at the Transit Toronto site.

The Harbord streetcar was almost as misnamed a route as Carlton, given what percentage the streetcar tracks on Harbord comprised of the route. Just before it was abandoned, the service began at Lipton Loop on Pape Avenue just north of Danforth and ran south on Pape, west on Riverdale and south on Carlaw Avenues to Gerrard Street. Then the line ran west along Gerrard, south along Broadview and west along Dundas to Spadina Avenue. After running north on Spadina to Harbord Street, the streetcar turned west and ran to Ossington, jogging north and west along Ossington and Bloor to Dovercourt Road. After running up Dovercourt, cars turned west again at Davenport and ran to St. Clarens Loop, just one block east of Lansdowne Avenue. The Harbord streetcar probably had to negotiate more right-angle turns than any other streetcar line on the network.

The Harbord streetcar connected the residential neighbourhoods of Riverdale, Kensington, Little Italy and Dovercourt with the downtown, as well as serving such major high schools as Harbord Collegiate and Central Tech. Service was moderately frequent throughout the day, but no night service was ever offered. Abandoned before the arrival of CLRVs, no route number was ever assigned to this line.

Alas, as Andrew wrote, this and other streetcar routes soon met sad fates.

Fifty years ago, streetcars were king in Toronto. While the opening of the subway from Union to Eglinton in 1954 had expelled them from Yonge Street, in 1959 those iconic Presidents' Conference Committee streetcars still clattered along Rogers Road, Dupont, Bloor, and Harbord. While the Rogers Road route's 1970s disappearance represented one of the last gasps of the TTC's streetcar abandonment policy, the other three were made obsolete by the 1966 opening of the Bloor-Danforth subway.

Today, very little evidence remains of them, but they're part of this city's history nevertheless. The Harbord route in particular, meandering this way and that through residential neighborhoods east and west of the Don River and rocketing through downtown, is still fondly remembered by some transit aficionados. On September 13 and September 20, I took my camera and walked the route of the Harbord streetcar as it was in 1959, looking for impressions left in the concrete.

I, also, have photos--I'll post them as soon as the month ends and I get to upload more photos to my Flickr account--but you should really go to Andrew's blog to remain his. I certainly remain very, very impressed by his ability to find the, well, impressions of the past.

Modern streetcar lines are embedded in concrete, a sight that should be familiar to anyone who's done much walking in Toronto's downtown core or along streets that have retained their streetcar service. In the 1950s these middle lanes were cobblestone rather than concrete, but the principle remains the same. Take a look down the two middle lanes of Dovercourt in the photo - and it's not a trick of the shadows. The two middle lanes of the street are darker than the two outer lanes. This, to me, is prima facie evidence of the streetcar.

What I believe happened is that, after the line's abandonment in 1966, the two inner lanes either were ripped out and put back in without tracks, or just paved over entirely. Dovercourt Road, being a purely residential road only a block away from Ossington, is not particularly high-traffic. It may well be the case that there has not been a need for roadwork along Dovercourt in the forty-three years since the removal of the tracks. The darker, fresher cast of the two inner lanes' asphalt is almost like scar tissue, covering the wound of their removal.

[. . .]

Fifty years ago, it would have been folly to contemplate a streetcar reaching to what was then a country road only beginning to see development boom. Fifty years ago, the streetcar network occupied a different place in relation to the people of the city. One thing I noticed throughout the route was the ubiquity of on-street parking. It's simple why; the houses along this route were built before automobile ownership became an end into itself, when no one really needed a car to get around.

Go to his blog and read the whole thing. It's great.