[URBAN NOTE] "These unbuilt streets almost changed Toronto entirely"

[rfmcdonald]

In a well-illustrated post, blogTO's Derek Flack goes through a listing of various street projects that never went through. It's terribly tempting to imagine any number of alternate histories. What if there was a Vimy Circle, or a Spadina Expressway? How would the city look now?

Toronto has a robust archive of scrapped projects that would have dramatically changed the city, from abandoned transit lines to soaring skyscrapers. Some of the most intriguing entries in our unbuilt legacy, however, are streets and highways.

The road grid in this city is far less static than one might imagine, even if some of the most grandiose ideas for changing it were ultimately shelved.

Perhaps the most dramatic of these plans was for Vimy Circle, a roundabout that would have been located at the intersection of University and Richmond. At the centre of this grand circle city planners envisioned a war memorial and public space.

In fact, Vimy Circle was one of a number of plans in 1929 to alter the Toronto road map in a major way. Planners at the time complained that the city was "not providing any open spaces, or the beautifying in any considered way of the downtown business area."

Cambrai AvenueAs such, another grand thoroughfare was proposed under the name Cambrai Avenue. Plans for a street here went back a while, but construction of new buildings in the early 1920s thwarted the route of what was then known as Federal Avenue.