Thursday May 11th, 2015

After previously publishing this area as Garbage Park Toronto I wanted to come back and show some of the beauty of this green space.  After pressuring the city through several agencies they came and did a very poor job of cleaning up the years of garbage that had accumulated.  I will continue to work at getting a satisfactory resolution to this mess.  In the mean time, this park has much to offer because it is virtually unused.  The pictures presented below were taken during several brief explorations on lunch breaks or after work, however, most of them were taken on the 11th of May on my lunch.

Dufferin Street, like other roads in York Township, went through seasons when it was impassable mud.  In 1855 The Gore and Vaughn Plank Road Company was formed to surface the road with planks.  These were cut strips of wood several inches thick that were held together by long steel nails.  The construction and maintenance of these roads was financed through the use of tolls.  A toll booth was built at Dufferin and Sheppard where it operated until 1891.  It can be seen in the historical atlas picture on the cover photo.  There are still traces of the early Gore and Vaughan Plank Road in the Dufferin Creek valley on the west side of the road.  These have been uncovered by the recent channel work on Dufferin Creek.  The picture below was taken on April 28th during a brief exploration of Dufferin Creek on the west side of the road.

When the road was built the pioneers chose to make the decent into the valley by going along the edge of the ravine, crossing in the bottom and then curving back up the far side of the ravine.  The cover photo shows the 1877 historical atlas map of the area.  I have coloured Finch Avenue yellow and Dufferin Street in pink.  The park is green to denote it’s upcoming status as a green space instead of a polluted brown one.  The curve in the road is shown on Dufferin just south of Finch.  In the 1947 aerial photo below, the curve in the old road can still be seen. Dufferin now runs straight up on left side of the picture across a tall berm that hides a large culvert in the valley.  The old road bed can still be seen in the “S” curve that begins just to the right of the road just up from the bottom of the picture.  Finch runs across the top of the picture below.  Two homes (white spots) are seen in the park area just south of Finch with driveways off of Dufferin.  Three driveways of increasing length run south off of Finch, east (to the right) of Dufferin.  The home with the longest driveway is lost under a subdivision but the locations of the other four can still be found.

This archival picture shows the corner of Dufferin and Finch in 1958.  The view is looking north where Finch crosses near the middle of the picture.  A house stands on the north east corner where the bus stop currently is.  Across the street on the north west corner stands an old blacksmith shop where a used car dealer now stands. Two mail boxes stand in the near right corner, one for the home whose foundations remain on that corner and one for the building across the road.

Walking north from Dufferin Creek the driveway to the first house is marked by a yellow pole. There is an area of old concrete and the remains of the garage are along the side of the dell to the north of the house.  A tree is now growing in the former garage.

The only trail in the park leads from the back of this former house down to the creek valley. Most of the park area to the east of the creek is untamed bramble and hawthorn bushes.  At the valley floor the creek spreads out into a large mud flat before passing under Finch Avenue and entering the West Don River in the G. Ross Lord flood reservoir.

The house on the corner of Dufferin and Finch is almost completely lost now.  A few bricks and the remnants of a chimney are all that survive.  I went down to the valley floor where starting this spring the creek has been channelized for about half of its length.  This quiet section has been replanted with shrubs and small trees.

Along the east end of the park are the driveways of the three homes that used to stand here. Two patches of pavement in the trees are all that remain to mark the location of the home that used to stand closest to Finch Avenue.

The hairy woodpecker is considered to be a species that is not at risk because there are an estimated 9 million individuals in North America.  The one in this picture is digging for his lunch as I was thinking about my own.

The picture below was taken on April 13 and shows the work crew busy creating the new channel for Dufferin Creek  on the east side of Dufferin Street.  A new mouth for the culvert under Dufferin is being constructed with large blocks of cut stone.  A new channel for the creek has been cut and lined with stone.  Along the edges a mesh has been laid down for erosion control.

Now complete, the mesh has been covered with a spray of soil and seeds.  Small trees have been planted along either side of the creek.  Over the coming years this creek will become more natural along either side as the green takes over again and hides the efforts of the work crew.

Dufferin Creek park is unique among our green spaces in that it doesn’t have any maintained trails.  When the city finally gets the mess along the two streets cleaned up this will be one of the truly pastoral places in the heart of our city.

Google Maps Link: Dufferin and Finch

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