Smithfield/Jamestown

Smithfield, also known as Jamestown, and known by the city as Mount Olive-Silverstone-Jamestown, is located in northern Etobicoke. Much like most of the east end of old Toronto is associated with Greater Riverdale, most of northern Etobicoke is considered Rexdale. So Smithfield could be considered part of Rexdale or even greater Rexdale if you will. Due to issues of gang violence in the area, a play on the Jamestown name created the alternate nickname Doomstown. There was even a TV movie called Doomstown based on the gang issues in the area dating back to the Jamestown Crew. The Jamestown name comes from a social housing complex on Jamestown Crescent in the southern end of the neighbourhood.

The Smithfield name on the other hand comes from an early landowner named Robert Smith. In the 1830s he donated land to build the area’s first church, Smithfield Church.  In 1874 Smithfield School was built, and a small community started to form around it near Martin Grove and Albion Road. However, most of the current development and structure of this neighbourhood dates back to the 1960s. Like much of northwestern and northeastern Toronto, it is a diverse neighbourhood housing many newer immigrants. It also contains large amounts of subsidized housing.

Smithfield/Jamestown is kind of an odd shape, but it is roughly south of Steeles, north of the west branch of the Humber River. It is east of Martingrove for the most part except for a small portion sticking further west. Finally it is west of the east branch of the Humber River or Kipling.

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I started walking north from Kipling and Finch and ended up going south at Kipling and Esther Lorrie Dr.

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Smithfield was walked on January 20, 2012

Finch West is a vast street in this area, with few intersections, wide lanes, and even sound barriers and pedestrian bridges to help people cross between intersections. Obviously inappropriate for LRT.

Further north on Kipling from Finch, you can find North Kipling Middle School and Community Centre. As Smithfield is a large neighbourhood, smaller local names develop such as the North Kipling moniker which has developed here. Both public infrastructure such as schools and community centres, and private infrastructure such as stores and plazas bear the North Kipling name.

This stretch of Kipling has an unusual feel with sidewalks located far from the street. There is an offroad path of unknown purpose (to me) wide enough to support a car located between the road and the sidewalk. Whilst I was walking, there was a maintenance vehicle parked there doing some work on the hydro poles. On the other side of the sidewalk, the large amounts or apartments have private roadways and driveways, often well below the height of the sidewalk. It all makes for a unique pedestrian experience.

On the eastern boundary of the neighbourhood is Rowntree Mills park containing the eastern branch of the Humber River. It is quite a beautiful area, especially when we are having typical (but unusual for 2012) winter weather. The fresh snow on the banks, blanketing the small creeks that feed into it is very peaceful. The cold air creating thinly frozen edges and small ice islands simultaneously creates calm and represents danger.

The adjacent neighbourhood’s name, Thistletown, sometimes pops up in this neighbourhood too. Examples include Thistletown Baptist Church at Kipling and Finch, and the Thistletown Regional Centre for Children and Adolescents located in an isolated campus on Panorama Court, just east of Kipling. It is a mental health centre and school program for children with complex mental health, behavioural, and developmental challenges, or those who have experienced sexual abuse.

Up at Steeles we find more big roads and an even more barren landscape. Aside from a small comercial/light industrial complex at Kipling, and one Vaughan seniors building, the place is empty. Vacant lots, hydrofields, and some industry are all to be found on the Vaughan side of Steeles, while large concrete fences leading to backyards dominate the Toronto side. Looking southeast from Martin Grove and Steeles, you can see the Kipling apartments in the distance behind the aforementioned houses and yards.

Further south on Martin Grove, closer to the historic Smithfield community, you can find Smithfield Park, attached to Smithfield Middle School. Connected to the other side of Smithfield Park is Mt. Olive Dr. with more single family homes, but still mixed in with apartment buildings.

Further down on Mt. Olive Dr. is Highfield Jr. School which has an interesting decentralized design, with a series of walkways connecting newer and older parts of the school.

Back on Finch West, is the neighbourhood’s mall and gathering place, the Albion Centre.  The Albion Cinemas have proven popular for showing  Bollywood films, which they have been doing for almost 20 years. The mall is also an important community hub that was just bustling with activity, particularly the food court as a place to sit down and hang out with neighbours. Community organizations like the Rexdale Youth Resource Centre are also located here.

Outside the mall  is the location of the 23 Division Police Station, as well as some newer plazas. I find many police stations have an architectural style that makes heavy use of curves, and receptive structures and openings. This is likely an attempt to make a police station seem friendlier and less imposing on the community.

As I mentioned before, the neighbourhood does have a lot of social housing, some of which is located in high-rises, while others are in townhouse complexes like these here on Finch West, and the infamous Jamestown Crescent.

At the very south of the neighbourhood is the west branch of the Humber River, which only the major streets like Kipling or Martin Grove pass over. Just south of there is Rexdale, and some ads for Cloud 9 condos. The trendiness of condos is extending the condo boom even into the very northwestern corner of the city. Until next time…

Port Lands Part II – Main Port Lands

Now it is time to finish up the Port Lands with the main areas after focusing on Leslie Spit last time. Again not your typical neighbourhood, at least not yet, as it is mostly a post-industrial landscape.

Most of the area used to be marshland as part of the original larger Ashbridges Bay. This area began being filled in slowly to make more land available for industry in the 1880s. In the early 20th century, the Don River mouth was filled in, and the flow redirected into the Keating channel towards the inner harbour.  A shipping channel and turning basin were constructed south of here to allow ships access right into the Port Lands.

The filling process was completed around the mid-20th century, while only a few decades later, industry would start to leave the area. Whilst there are still industrial uses in the area, and lots of heavy truck traffic to go along with it (and Wheel-Trans buses due to the garage here), the area is filled with abandoned brownfield sites begging for redevelopment.

And so we get to its current fate. The area to be most immediately redeveloped (still pretty long term though), is the Lower Don Lands. Basically this is the northwest portion of the Port Lands, north of the shipping channel and west of the line created by the Don Roadway. The northeast section still contains active industry, and the southern part below the channel has numerous current recreational uses such as Cherry Beach, North Shore Park, and Tommy Thompson Park.

Waterfront Toronto had a Lower Don Lands plan that involved creating mixed use communities with access to transit and ample parkland. In addition the plan was to renaturalize the mouth of the Don river and send it through the middle of the Lower Don Lands. This would make the river once again a feature of the waterfront and these communities. It would also provide flood protection as it will be surrounded by parkland. See a brief description and pictures on Waterfront Toronto if you are interested. Or take a look at the framework plan.

Of course then we all know that last summer, the Ford administration proposed an alternative vision based on 1960s principles of separation and spectacle. The spectacle was of course the monorail, megamall, and ferris wheel. The separation is continuing to believe that parkland, residential, and commercial land uses must be kept separate. Luckily we had #CodeBlueTO, and a bevy of  “urban thinkers” sounding out against the plan. Obviously to great effect, as a “compromise” was reached. Basically the original plan but telling Waterfront Toronto to speed up. This can be both a good thing, and a bad thing. First, it may force Waterfront Toronto to realize it may need to finance certain aspects through *gasp* debt to finish the project within this century. However you also don’t want to cut corners on the planning and development to get it done faster. There is also a limit to how quickly the market can absorb residential and commercial units.

Most of you may know all of this already, so hopefully I have not bored you, but something would be missing if I were to do an article on the Port Lands and not talk about the recent controversies. Now, let’s get on with our walk, and see what the Port Lands are like now.

The Port Lands are located just east of the current Ashbridges Bay. They are located south of the Gardiner/Lakeshore and enclosed by the lake on all other sides.

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I started walking at Carlaw and Commissioner’s St heading east, and finished at the same place going west.

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The Port Lands were walked on July 21, 2011

The shipping channel and turning basin are prominent features of this area. A seagull inspects the safety equipment to make sure its ready in the event of an accident, while the empty Hearn Generating station sits solemnly in the background.

The Cherry St. bridge is a great place to look around and get the scope of the Port Lands. An old shipping boat sits quietly in the channel, reminding you of an earlier time, when this was an active industrial landscape with lots of shipping traffic.

Walking around on the usually unfriendly streets, you will encounter lots of heavy truck traffic, and some industrial sites. These include Toronto Hydro, smaller sites like Telesat, and the shipping and cruise ship facility run by the Toronto Port Authority.

You will also encounter many derelict industrial sites and features dotting the landscape.

These large industrial sites have provided opportunities for other industries to fluorish though. Such as the recording industry with Cherry St. Studios or the film industry with Pinewood Studios. Something to notice about Commissioner’s St. on which the latter is located is the large hydro corridor running down the middle of the street.

Entertainment options have also sprung up in the Lower Don Lands already, with the Docks, Go-Karts, the Cherry St. Restaurant, and T&T, which hosts their annual summer night market.

In the southern area of the Port Lands, you have North Shore Park, and Cherry Beach. As you walk along Unwin, past where you go to enter the Spit, the street splits across a bridge over a small channel to separate vehicular traffic from cyclists and pedestrians. Once you cross this bridge, you enter North Shore Park.

North shore park is a weird place. Part of the Martin Goodman trail acts as the main bike/pedestrian path, but there is a labyrinth of smaller unmaintained paths leading into the brush that make you feel like you’re lost in a corn field. And then there’s the isolated patches with people cruising, and discarded concrete with signs indicating “privacy if you need it” with condom wrappers to be found on the ground.

Keep walking, and eventually you will reach Cherry Beach, and the end of our walk. A great place to stop and take a rest on this particularly hot July afternoon (which I’m sure we miss now). Until next time…

Port Lands Part I – Leslie Spit

Sticking out of the Port Lands is a 5km projection of reclaimed land, the Leslie Street Spit. I decided to split up my walk through the Port Lands into two parts. The first part will be just Leslie Spit, and the other will be the main Port Lands area. Since I’m just sticking to the spit today, I’ll leave the discussion of the Port Lands/Lower Don Lands redevelopment and all the recent attention it has received, until next week. Just a walk in the park for today.

The Leslie Street Spit (actually an artificial peninsula), or Thommy Thompson Park is not really a neighbourhood in the strictest sense. Nobody lives there, there are very few structures, and most of the time it is an active construction site, as you can only access the park on weekends and holidays. Tommy Thompson, for whom it was officially named, was the Commissioner of Parks from 1955-1981, and is most well known for the conversion of the Toronto Islands into parkland.

The Toronto Port Authority started constructing the spit in the 1950s as a breakwater for the outer harbour. This effect is quite visible as the eastern shore has vastly more turbulent water than that of the western shore. The expected increase in shipping traffic never occurred though, and so cargo ships kept to the inner harbour. However, it continued to be (and still is) used as a convenient place to dump construction refuse.

It was never planned for it to become a naturalized park, but the ecological succession of a variety of plant life occurred regardless of the city’s attentions. You can see the succession occurring quite clearly when you visit different parts of the spit which were obviously constructed at different times. In the late 1970s, “Friends of the Spit” formed to protect the park and keep it open to the public. It continues to be a great place for a stroll or a bike ride. The splendid city views rival even that of the islands, its much more appreciated sibling.

The Port Lands themselves occupy a self-enclosed location just east of Ashbridges Bay (albeit formed from filling in much of the original bay). They are located south of the Gardiner/Lakeshore and enclosed by the lake on all other sides. Leslie Spit is the large projection heading further south into the lake.

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I started walking at the entrance to the park at the foot of Leslie St, going south and staying to the east side. I then finished heading north where I had previously branched east, and caught the shuttle bus back to the beginning.

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Leslie Spit was walked on June 26, 2011.

The spit has many internal bodies of water. Some of which are enclosed ponds or marshes, and some of which are directly connected to the lake.

For a natural park, it feels very human-made, but that is an interesting thought in itself. What is natural to us, is based upon an assumption. Who is is to say what is better for the numerous species that call the spit home. Do they prefer more typical rocks, or the construction rubble that dots the landscape. Is a sandy or rock beach better than one with smoothed bricks, tile and concrete.

On the eastern shore, you can see the newer parts of the island taking shape. Soil is mixed with rubble, and early plants start to colonize the area. On the western shore, trees dominate the landscape after decades of nature reforming the environment. It makes you wonder what the park will look like in another few decades.

A popular activity at the spit is to make sculptures with the refuse. They can be found all over the park, but often in concentrated gardens as well. The original garden was seeded by artist Brian Pace as a way to work through his grief for those in his life who had been lost. That sculpture garden has since been dismantled, but new ones pop up, and are eventually dismantled themselves. I have contributed to them before, but on this day, there wasn’t one prominent garden that I could find.

It goes to show that waste is not always just waste. This whole place that was once an empty dumping ground, is a thriving park and community space. And the very waste from which it was made, is used by the people who visit to contribute to the beauty of the park, and communicate and share with each other.

The spit is well known, and in fact designated by Nature Canada as an “important bird area”. Hundreds of species migrate through, with many breeding in the spit as well.

Just past the automated lighthouse seen in the above picture is the very tip of the spit. A good friend of mine describes the whole place as the land of the dead. Any way you want to look at it, there is something hauntingly beautiful this place. Its seeming isolation from the city, yet clear view of everything. The intersection of nature and the crumbling remnants of past Toronto civilizations all around you. You feel as though you are surrounded by countless untold ghosts who were a part of these lost structures.

If you look west past the islands, you can just make out Mississauga’s skyline, and the famous Absolute World towers which confirm it.

On the calmer western shore, beds are being created and seeded for aquatic plants. In the second picture which is in the older northwest section, you can see what will be created, and the plentiful trees that have also developed.

And so once again we must come to an end, as this footbridge connects us back to the disparate peninsula on which our path originally started, so we can head back to civilization and explore the rest of the Port Lands. Until next time…