[URBAN NOTE] "Exploring Toronto’s Hidden Waterfronts"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Mark Mann describes Toronto's several coasts, products of geology and humanity.

“Waterfront” is a relative term. Torontonians tend to think of the waterfront as the place where they can see water, as the term implies. But the city also keeps a few extra waterfronts in the back, where there’s no water in sight. Just because you can’t see it, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

The oldest waterfront, by far, is the steep hill that runs east-west between Davenport and St. Clair, which marks the former banks of the large inland sea left behind from the last Ice Age. Today, it’s mainly an excuse for cyclists to avoid going north of the Annex.

Heading south on the old lakebed toward Lake Ontario, the next shoreline lies just south of Front Street—hence the name—about half a kilometre from Toronto’s present-day waterfront. That was the edge of the lake when the city was originally founded as the Town of York in 1850. Between then and now, all of the intervening land was unceremoniously dumped there to make space for the expanding city. But as Toronto grew out into the lake, the water never gave ground.

Gazing out toward the Gardiner Expressway from Front Street, this former waterfront doesn’t look that convincing. There are only roads and buildings in sight—no water. But the people who erected those buildings know better, because throwing dirt in a lake doesn’t actually make the water table get any lower. If you took a backhoe to the parking lot across from the Air Canada Centre, for example, the hole you dug would quickly become a pond. When developers excavate foundations for new buildings in that part of the city, they might as well be building directly in the lake.