rfmcdonald | [URBAN NOTE] "Bringing Toronto’s Don River back from the dead" (Reply)

Roy MacGregor's long article in The Globe and Mail about the Don River's history and rehabilitation is well worth reading.

The Don, however, was not always “heavily polluted and laden with scum.” First Nations traders found it a perfect encampment, the waters clean and the game plentiful. There was a time when the prisoners at the nearby jail protested because they were being fed too much fresh salmon from its waters.

Prof. Bonnell, in her research, discovered that the Don Valley was considered a paradise to early beekeepers. In going through the records of the Ontario Beekeeping Association from the late 1800s, she found that the valley was often sown with clover to produce sweeter-tasting honey and that the beekeepers were the first group to raise concerns about the health of the watershed.

“They were interested in environmental change because it was in their economic interest to do so,” she says. “They were among the first to speak out against insecticide poisoning. They spoke out against roadside spraying.”

But by then, of course, the Don River was quickly becoming a lost cause.

York had become Toronto and was spreading rapidly. The river was the perfect location for early grist and timber mills, then tanneries, brick works, chemical factories, oil refineries and the growing city’s increasingly busy port.

It stands today as the most urbanized watershed in Canada, with 1.2 million people living within it and roughly 90 per cent of the catchment area having residential, commercial or industrial development.

“Over the past 200 years,” Prof. Bonnell writes, “almost all of the significant wetlands within the watershed have been drained or filled to support urban development. The six tributaries of the lower river have mostly disappeared, buried by fill or encased within sewage infrastructure.”

The river and valley were once considered prime locations for such structures as the colony’s first parliament buildings, but gradually it became a place for necessary structures that the establishment might prefer a distance away. In a time of fears over cholera and malaria, the hospital was relocated from the city centre to the Don. An asylum followed, then a shelter and reformatory for the poor and vagrants – “idiots,” as well. The Toronto Jail and Industrial Farm (better known as the Don Jail) opened near the asylum.

“Linked to perceptions of the Don Valley as a ‘space for undesirables’ was its reputation as a frontier of sorts,” Prof. Bonnell writes, “a place that harboured and facilitated a certain degree of lawlessness.”