Dodgeville

I’m a little behind on my reading, but I couldn’t resist sharing this nugget of prognostication from the May 1857 issue of Scientific American:

We believe that no particular use is made of the fluid petroleum, from the ‘tar springs’ of California, except as a lotion for bruises and rheumatic affections. It has a pungent odor, and although it can be made to burn with a pretty good light, its smell is offensive. This, perhaps, may be obviated by distilling it with some acid; we believe that this is not impossible in this age of advanced chemistry. If the offensive odor could be removed, a valuable and profitable business might be carried on in manufacturing burning fluid from it.

This quote was published earlier this year in Scientific American’s monthly “50, 100 & 150 Years Ago” feature, where they reprint snippets of interesting stories from back issues of “the oldest continuously published magazine in the U.S.” Pungent, offensive, and the basis of the modern world. Seems about right.

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For people of a certain age, memories of the Toronto Zoo begin with riding the old monorail. Only it wasn’t the old monorail back then—it was the super-futuristic monorail. The line was abandoned following a 1994 accident that injured about 30 people, and the train’s power supply rails and portions of the guideway were removed a few years later. But if you know where to look, most of the route remains visible as it snakes through the grounds of the zoo.

The abandoned station above is in the Canadian Domain, midway between the grizzlies and the enormous bison enclosure. The guideway remains intact under all that foliage at the edge of the platform even though the vegetation gains ground every year. Other sections are still in pristine condition, almost as if the next train is only minutes away. Watching the monorail be consumed by nature is a small preview of what the world would be like without us.

Take a Google Maps tour of the monorail starting here. The train ran on the track in the center of the map curving down to the right. You can trace the remnants of the route three-quarters of the way around the zoo before it finally peters out, passing by two abandoned but still-standing stations along the way. A third remains in service near the main entrance, used for the monorail’s rather pedestrian replacement, the Zoomobile.

The really surprising thing about following the train’s route in Google Maps is just how much of it goes through what are still completely undeveloped parts of the zoo in the southern portion of the grounds. It’s easy to forget just how enormous the zoo is—at 710 acres, it’s seven times the size of the San Diego Zoo. The monorail used to be the only way to see to the bison, which are kept in an enclosure that itself is probably larger than many zoos.

In addition to visiting the Canadian Domain station in person, you can catch a glimpse of the other lost station if you take the Zoomobile ride: look down and to the right as you cross over a bridge after the Americas Zoomobile stop. Pay attention transit fans, this is what the Sheppard subway could look like after sitting unused for a few years.

Oh, and of course, an abandoned monorail isn’t the only thing to see at the zoo; the animals are worth a trip too.

A version of this article appeared on Torontoist.

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I wrote about my encounter with a delivery truck driver in an earlier post. With the two of us living and working in the same neighbourhood, it was inevitable that our paths would cross again. That came on Saturday, a scant three days after our first encounter.

This time, we were headed in opposite directions on Danforth. He was turning his van left at an advanced green. I was in my customary position at a red light, straddling my bike in the centre of the curb lane. Indeed, it’s the very stance I’d maintained during our first meeting.

In stark contrast to Wednesday’s shouts and frustration, we exchanged only smiles and friendly waves on Saturday before heading our separate ways. Surely this shared gesture counts as a small victory in the battle to get motorists and cyclists to respect one another. Maybe we can all just get along after all.

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A member of one of my mailing lists recently posted a link to a story at the Daily Mail called How children lost the right to roam in four generations. It looks at four generations of a family in Sheffield and examined how far from home children of each generation were able to wander from home unaccompanied. The great-grandfather was allowed to walk six miles to the local fishing hole at the age of eight, while his eight year old great-grandson is now only allowed to roam within a 300-yard radius.

The gradual erosion of kids’ freedom is so universally accepted that it’s not really news. But what makes the Daily Mail article so compelling is the graphic that accompanies the story: it overlays a map with the roaming area of the four eight-year-olds, showing how dramatically children’s worlds have been shrinking.

With that in mind, I’ve taken a Google map satellite image of my old neighbourhood in East York and overlaid my own roaming area as an eight-year-old in the late ’70s. The result is the graphic below.

The farthest from my home that I was allowed to venture alone was a little over 500 metres. But within that 500 metres were two playgrounds, a school yard, a swimming pool, a wading pool, a library, numerous stores, a restaurant, a haunted house (or so we imagined), and most of my friends.

Venturing farther afield or crossing any of the local main streets required being accompanied by an older friend or family member. We moved to Scarborough the next year, where my authorized roaming radius increased to well over a kilometre; my unauthorized radius, previewing the explorer I would eventually become, was larger still. When we moved back to East York three years after that, my catchment area expanded to virtually anywhere the TTC, my bike, and my twelve-year-old feet could take me.

How far were you allowed to wander as an eight-year-old?

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One of the wonderful ways to pass an afternoon at the Toronto Archives is browsing through the aerial photographs of the city. You get a real sense of how the city grew from year to year, swallowing productive farmland at virtually every step.

The photos here show the relentless march of progress in a section of the city around York Mills Collegiate.

1950

It’s still all farmland in 1950. The main intersection at the left is York Mills & Bayview. That’s Wilket Creek flowing through the intersection. York Mills Collegiate will soon be built at the right side of the picture, in the farm field directly north of the little half-circle driveway on York Mills.

(more…)

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I rediscovered the mostly-forgotten northern portion of the Martin Goodman Trail quite by accident last summer. I was stuck in a surprise downpour while riding along Queens Quay and scooted up to Lake Shore to hide under the Gardiner for a few minutes. And there they were, the familiar blue and green lines marking the original alignment of the Martin Goodman Trail.

I rode along and was quite surprised at how much of the original trail remained despite more than 15 years of encroachment by condo projects and neglect by the city. I was able to ride from York Street to Stadium Road without interruption, even though one section of the trail has been co-opted for a condo building’s back lawn.

I started cycling this portion of the trail regularly again this spring and met with another surprise: riding along here can be a lot faster and easier on the nerves than riding along Queens Quay. Not only is there less traffic to contend with, but the traffic lights usually favour traffic along Lake Shore rather than the intersecting streets. As a result, you can frequently zip from York Street to Stadium Road with only one or two brief stops for cross traffic. No more stopping for red lights at every driveway and parking lot along the way.

Old-timers like me will remember that the downtown section of the trail was always a bit of a puzzle. The original westbound alignment had you crossing from the south side of Queen’s Quay near Sherbourne to the north side, continuing along the north side to York Street, sometimes on the road, sometimes on a marked section of the sidewalk. You turned north on York and continued riding beside Lake Shore Boulevard all the way past the pre-loft Tip Top Tailors building and HMCS York driveway before swooping into Coronation Park.

Going east, cyclists were expected to ride on the north side of Queens Quay until Sherbourne, and then cross back to the south side before picking up the off-road portion of the trail again.

The various north-south transitions were so poorly designed with zero traffic control that most cyclists eventually ignored them completely and rode straight along Queens Quay for the entire distance.

The city eventually acknowledged reality and redesigned both ends of this stretch. The eastern portion of Queens Quay got proper directional bike lanes along each side of the street between Parliament and Yonge, and the western end got bike lanes from Spadina to Stadium Road and a direct connection behind the Tip Top building to the off-road trail.

With the extremities fixed, the middle seemed to fade bit by bit. The trail on the north side of Queens Quay east of York was repaved at some point and the distinctive blue and green trail markings were left off. Signs pointing to the continuation of the trail a block north disappeared. The trail beside Lake Shore was degraded one section at a time by adjacent construction. Eventually, memories faded with the paint and the trail just seemed to stop at Yonge and resume again at Spadina, with nothing but a stressful ride along Queens Quay in between.

The original alignment was never beautiful and was only barely functional. Sadly, it was and remains better than the current alternative. The upcoming Queens Quay redesign (previewed as Quay to the City last summer) should go a long way toward finally fixing this section of our waterfront trail.

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Back in the mid-70s, there was big controversy on Brooke Avenue in North York. The owners of 196 Brooke, just east of Avenue Road, wanted to add a second storey to the house to create room for their growing family. It was quite the scandal in this suburban neighbourhood dominated by bungalows.

Petitions circulated in protest and several residents declared that it would mark the end of the neighbourhood as they knew it.

The proposal didn’t even include a full second storey addition: the roof peak was only moving up by about six inches. In fact, it was closer to a shed dormer than a second storey, effectively a protrusion from the side of the attic that changed the shape of the roofline but had virtually no impact otherwise.

Granted, it’s not the prettiest addition ever to grace a house, but it’s hard to see what the uproar was about, especially considering that the street already hosted a handful of modest two-storey homes.

My great-grandparents lived a few doors up the street and were virtually alone in their non-opposition to the planned abomination. I remember listening from the kitchen one day when my great-grandmother told one of the petition-toting neighbours that it was none of her business if the family wanted to add to their house. It didn’t affect her one way or another and she didn’t understand why any of the other neighbours were so pig-headed. Even though the entire neighbourhood seemed to be against the development, North York council allowed the construction anyway.

Thirty years later, Brooke is one of those streets overrun by monster houses. In the block between Avenue Road and Elm Road, only 4 bungalows remain on the north side, surrounded by monster homes built within the last 20 years. A few more bungalows survive on the south side. The original monster house (on the left in the picture below) that caused the uproar 30 years ago now looks tiny compared to the true monsters that line the street.

But wait, there’s a bonus to this tale: one of the few bungalows left on the block is the one where my great-grandparents lived. The house of the only people who didn’t oppose development is among the small handful that haven’t since been developed. You can’t buy irony that good.

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