[URBAN NOTE] Chris Selley on the ravines of Toronto

[rfmcdonald]

Chris Selley's National Post article is authentically quite interesting.

Toronto’s ravines “are the shared subconscious of the municipality,” Robert Fulford once argued in the National Post. It’s a lovely turn of phrase. These improbable green tears in the skin of the city are where a few of the rivers and streams Toronto co-opted and buried still get to announce their presence, however briefly, which in turn reminds us how we got here. With money and hard work and ingenuity, we built this place up from a wilderness into a great metropolis, mercilessly erasing and starting over — and too often forgetting — as we went.

Yet “remnants of wilderness have been left behind,” as Anne Michaels wrote in Fugitive Pieces. “Through these great sunken gardens you can traverse the city beneath the streets, look up to the floating neighbourhoods, houses built in the treetops.” They are rarely visually spectacular or even, to the average citizen, particularly interesting beyond their very existence as quiet forests in an unlikely place. They are islands of urban tranquility of a type that few cities can offer.

Toronto makes excellent use of the upper Don Valley, our biggest “ravine.” Like much of this city, Thorncliffe Park is socially and commercially vibrant but esthetically rather bleak. Yet residents are minutes away from acres of lush river valley parkland, and on weekends it teems with multi-generation families from myriad backgrounds loving life.

We seem far less sure what to do with the ravines proper: Moore Park Ravine, for example, which runs from the east side of Mount Pleasant Cemetery to the Brickworks; Rosedale Ravine, which runs from the west side of the cemetery, across Mount Pleasant Road and then into the valley; and Cedarvale and Nordheimer ravines, which take you from near Eglinton West station all the way down to Poplar Plains Road.

Even the official paths are haphazardly pavement, gravel and mud. Signposting is all but non-existent: identical-looking paths diverge without notice; stairs offer egress to parts unknown; this week I accidentally found myself on the east side of Rosedale Ravine, scrambling north toward the cemetery.