Continued from the post above
Knowing a city makes a difference in comprehending it.
One of the most fascinating discoveries in my (half-hearted)
attempts at knowing Toronto better happened accidentally.
A couple of weeks ago when the Luminato festival’s Literary
Picnic at Trinity Bellwood was washed out, I went to the Harbourfront Centre to
see Nine Rivers – Toronto’s Extraordinary Waterways.
I didn’t know the city that is by the lake has in the past
found its sustenance through rivers. Moreover, I had heard of just the Don and
the Humber. Which were the other six rivers? At the exhibition I discovered
that the city has three rivers and six creeks. The rivers are Don, Humber and
Rouge. The creeks are Etobicoke, Mimico, Duffins, Petticoat and Carruthers. The
photographs are aesthetically appealing. The exhibition is on for a year. Read about it here, and then go see it.
 |
Aaron Vincent Elkaim The Black Creek
1pm December 19, 2012 Highway 407 and Jane Street |
Then, earlier this week, I read Anya Moryoussef’s piece Judith
Vogelnest / Alice Coe, The Cartographer in Descant (Issue 160 – The HiddenCity). Moryoussef’s memoir about her grandmother traces her chequered personal
history and her deep and abiding interest in tracing Toronto’s lost rivers. The
author, an architect by training, share her grandmother's interest in Toronto’s rivers.
Here’s a passage that describes their meeting.
“From her stack of papers, Alice extracted page after page
of lightweight vellum covered in lines like veins. Every line was accompanied
by a monologue delivered with urgency and agitation, each monologue accompanied
by a series of dramatic hand gestures. Her finger nails looked like they had
been stretched too long and too fine for her small palms and plump forearms.
The skin on them was thin and polished, like satin pulled taut over branches of
bones and tendons. They were translucent and they shook, and as they moved
through the air, illustrating how rivers had been rerouted and covered over,
encased in brick tunnels and buried by layers of dirt and sod and other waste,
they trailed ghosts behind them. Her fingernails were dirty.
On pages with earlier dates, the
lines were prominent, creeping across the paper in all directions. On later
ones, the lines were fewer and shorter, drawn with less conviction. Solid
strokes were replaced by dotted lines, smudges and hatchings some of which began
and ended with question marks. Graphite was smeared across the pages from years
of handling, covering them in a dull sheen of grey.
The maps illustrated the rivers
disappearing. The first started to go around 1800s, Alice explained. Taddle
Creek, she said. See here? She pointed to one of the lines, indicating that
between 1800 and 1833 the creek had been interred as far as the University of
Toronto campus. From about 1850 until 1900, settlements and industries that
grew along the creeks used the water as a dumping ground. Creeks became
corridors of plague and pestilence, and the city was forced to turn to the lake
for clean water. In time, she said, the creeks were systematically reduced to
sewers. The last to go was Mimico Creek, in 1935.”
Occasionally cities die. Death is a slow, protracted
process. Cities die when growth ceases, but also when there is rampant,
unchecked growth.
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