Meadowvale Village

Used to be I was pretty good about blogging stuff I did. I think the project of arranging things for eventual donation to an archive takes some of the wind out of the those sails. You spend a Saturday actually doing the running around and photographing stuff, and then the evening and next day geotagging, key wording, and changing formats on the various images and videos, and about the last thing it occurs to you to do is write about it. Also, sometimes, there's really not much to tell.

But I want to be able to remember these things, and one thing the past 15 years or so has taught me is just how easy it is for a decade of your life to seem to just blur into a handful of murky summers and winters if you don't drop some breadcrumbs along the way. So...

For a while now it's been in my mind to get back to northwest Mississauga and revisit a few places interesting to me, and I finally got around to it last Saturday [N.B. "last Saturday" at this point was the one before last, Feb. 4th] because the weather was bright and dry enough that it made sense. My plan also included videoing the drive along Steeles Avenue from about Mavis to Appleby Line and back, but that didn't happen. Oddly enough, other things I hadn't planned to record did.

When I was much younger, and just had my license, I was rather familiar with the area of Meadowvale Village, but only in passing, really. Centred on the intersection of Derry Road and Second Line, it's existed since about 1820, when it was founded by, oddly enough, Irish New Yorkers. Even when I was driving through it in the early 1990s, it was still just a handful of streets off in the middle of nowhere. Traffic on both roads was two-lane. It had only just become a signaled intersection by the time I was driving there. Sleepy little place with a corner store, a church, a library, a gas station. Funny how charming that is to me now... back then, it didn't impress me much. It was just on my way places.

In the years between, there's been a lot of change there. The old village is still there but it's almost completely wrapped around by new subdivisions. Derry Road, now "Old Derry Road", and Second Line are each interrupted in both directions, and can only be accessed by using other roads. Mavis Road, which once ended miles south at Eglinton, now soars past on the east side, making Second Line superfluous, and Derry Road was diverted widely to the north in the mid-90s to bypass the village. The long, straight drives east and west on Derry and north and south on Second Line are now impossibilities consigned to my youth.

When I started driving, there was pretty much nothing on Second Line between Eglinton Avenue and Meadowvale Village (much less north of it) except the landfill at Britannia (oh, the hours I spent lined up there before anyone ever heard the word "blue box")... which is now a golf course (yeah, like I'd want to stick my hand down THOSE holes after a ball). Now, just south of the bridge is a big subdivision. It actually erases part of Second Line, splitting it into a ring, before it comes back together north of Britannia Road, where it's now called Silken Laumann way after a local Olympian, and Terry Fox Way between Britannia and Eglinton. North of Old Derry, it now dead-ends at the wall of what is new Derry Road's crossing of the Credit River. Between new Derry and Hwy 407 is a completely abandoned stretch that I've walked a few times, but in my youth, drove many. It's hard to believe they're the same stretch, but they are. I didn't shoot anything south from the bridge on Saturday, but I do have some previous shots... a couple of them 1989, I think, taken in black and white (me trying to be artsy) looking south on Second Line towards its end at Eglinton. It looks a little different these days, at least on the west side. Might even have filled up on the east side by now for all I know. I see from GoogleMaps now, though, that Second Line continues south from Eglinton for a bit... "Terry Fox Way" becomes "Wainscot Drive". Changes on changes on changes. One of the glories of growing up at the very edge of urbanity.

The Second Line bridge over the 401, just south of the village, is due to come down shortly, and not be replaced. It's stood since the 401 was built there, at the end of the 1950s. But the province is extending the collector system westward to Mississauga Road, and the Second Line bridge is not wide enough to accommodate it, so it's going to vanish. I wanted to record what it looked like while I still can.

I was supposed to visit my high school buddy Jay while I was there, so I gave him a call about quarter to twelve. Turned out his battery had died and he wondered if I'd give him a lift to buy a new one when I was done. I promised I would. He said not to hurry but it did kind of put a hustle in my bustle.

About a mile to the west is the Creditview Road bridge over the 401. As far as I know, that bridge has a future. Well, not that bridge itself, per se; it's too narrow too. But it'll have to be rebuilt because it's now an important feeder between the residential area south and the industrial park that now fills up the fields and former road allowance of (Old) Derry Road north of the 401. So I took some shots of that too. Jay occasionally writes action fiction, and in one of his stories years ago, he had agents blow up this bridge. Looking up the 401 at Second Line, I'd say he picked the wrong one.

The "intersection" of Old Creditview Road and Old Derry Road is really now just a turn. But until the end of the 90s, it was actually a comparatively complicated intersection. What's now the Orangeville Brampton Railway (OBRY) cuts through the intersection, and so at some point in the past, the leg of Creditview on the north side was shifted to the other side of the tracks. I can remember driving down the little hill on that side of the level crossing 15, 20 years ago, heading north to Churchville. Well, that part is now closed, simply a path now, as is the stretch of "Old" Derry Road between Mississauga Road and Creditview. The quiet country drive up to Churchville is lost; Creditview Road now no longer exists between the 407 and Old Derry Road, except for a short lost stretch of abandoned pavement north of the new houses on the south side of the 407. Can hardly believe we drove there, so often.

More interesting still, and something I didn't even know until just the last few days, is that the big empty field on the southeast corner of Creditview and Derry used to house Meadowvale Station; a stop on what was then the Credit Valley Railway (now the OBRY). I would love to find a picture of that. I never gave the trestle just north of there much thought; it was just something you passed on Creditview back in the day, but it's the Howe Truss Bridge, apparently.

Same view as above, but how it looked back in 1999:

I have various shots of this intersection from over the years, and even a couple of the old road that's now gone. I think the most notable thing, though, was that I was there in a windstorm six or seven years ago that blew down the direction arrow sign just beside me, just six or seven feet away. All told, it must have weighed about a hundred pounds, and if the thing had actually struck me, it might have killed me.

Still in use is the charming Old Derry Road bridge over the Credit River.

I've often wondered, in passing, why there is a string of telephone poles in the middle of the field to the east of the river. Well, something else I didn't know: they ran alongside an interurban railway that ran between Toronto and points northeast, abandoned now for nearly a century. It continues to amaze me how long ago people put that kind of effort into so many such schemes to move workers around, and how they all seemed to bite the dust in the 1920s, just when you'd think that kind of thing would only be becoming viable.

Anyway, I did my bit in Meadowvale, and headed over to Jay's place. We went and got him a new battery, but while we were at the mall, he asked me if I'd been "under" Derry. He might as well have been asking me if I'd been "beside north" or "over yellow" or something. It made no sense. So, he directed me eastward, back to Meadowvale Village. I finally got what he meant: that closed section of Second Line that can only be accessed by taking the path "under Derry" at the Credit River bridge.

This was another road that he and I had driven many times in our younger days. It was closed in the late 90s by a combination of being pinched off in the south by the new course of Derry Road, and in the north by the construction of the 407. Six or seven years ago I came out here alone with my camera and took photos of the place. This time, with Jay, we wandered up the hill, cracking jokes and making old familiar references, feeling our age as we looked around at a lost road once so familiar to young eyes going places. I noticed that the cement was even more bitten-into by the grasses and plants than it had been the last time. In 20 years, you'll barely be able to tell it had ever been paved, I expect.

For me, it's all worth recording. It's all going to be given, one day I hope, to people younger than me who never had the chance to see these things for themselves. I really enjoy that idea and it's a big part of what gets me out there.

A summer of bridges

Well, this summer I’ve done more than my usual share of lost bridge exploration. This is the kind of thing I love, but I didn’t really know why. I’ve long been an aficionado of closed roads for the romance of what were once well-travelled public places, surrendered back to the nature out of which they were once cut; there’s something humbling about that. But bridges are different. They tend to persist much longer than mere lines of asphalt between fields and trees. They’re a much more tenable symbol of human intent and ability. A chunk of asphalt in a clearing can be evocative of a former human presence. But coming across a span of stone, or better yet of iron, across a river, is a thrilling and even eerie sensation. There’s a power to a bridge that transcends simple engineering and utility. A bridge is not just an artifact, it’s a presence. To observe one alone in nature is almost to feel as though you are being observed in return; something like with the Monolith in the movies 2001 and 2010.

And so this summer was so often about seeking them out; the lost, or soon to be lost, examples of what we’ve wrought. Unfortunately, for all my ground work, I’ve done little enough about recording my impressions and putting them up here for my own memory, and for the interests of others. Aside from the Gorewood Road bridge, I’ve completely neglected this chore. So now, in one fell swoop, I’d like to correct that.

Beechwood Drive

I don’t know much about his bridge except that it predates the 1950s, because I discovered it in a photograph taken by James Salmon in the 50s. At that time it was still a going concern and you can see a building at the far end of the bridge in the shot. From what I’ve seen in contemporary aerial photos, this bridge didn’t really go anywhere except to what appears to have been a quarry on the far side of the river. In the field on the near side was an elaborate set of outbuildings that were probably for processing whatever it was that came from the quarry. That’s just a guess, of course. I had assumed the road must have connected to Pottery Road at one time, the only major road to come down into the valley on the west side back then, but there’s no evidence I’ve found that it ever did.

The road still leads to the bridge and amazingly, you can still drive down into the valley on it, although not much further than that. The rest of the way to the bridge has to be undertaken on foot; a very pleasant walk of about a half a mile. The area is still well-used by strollers and bicyclists, and crisscrossed by rail lines, some still in daily use, others forgotten to the point of having been removed.

The bridge itself is fairly modern design; built entirely of steel and formerly road-surfaced in cement (I think). I’ve been under the bridge, which was a little tricky but manageable, and it’s holding up extremely well, for all the years and floods it’s seen. The aerial photo I have shows a bridge in this spot in 1953; if it is indeed the same bridge, then it’s one of the few hardy enough to have survived Hurricane Hazel in 1954 intact and undamaged enough to stay in business to the present day.

These shots date from on and around Canada Day, 2010.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sneath Road

Sneath Road is a little suburban street in Bolton that crosses the Humber River. The bridge is one of the vanishing breed of one-lane pony truss bridges that once proliferated in the rural fringe around Ontario’s cities, but began vanishing in favour of more ambitious replacements in the late 1950s and wholesale by the 1960s. There aren’t many left in existence and far fewer still in operation. Sneath Road bridge was an exception to both rules until very recently; it was closed to vehicular and pedestrian traffic at the beginning of October, 2007. Our visit there made it self-evident that pedestrians have, willy-nilly, reassumed the use of the bridge, but it remains closed to cars. Even more recently, local residents have fought off a proposal to remove the bridge and/or replace it. So it looks like this rare pony truss will persist for some time to come, and motorists will simply have to find another way. :)

 

 

Rebecca Street

This find was accidental. I was enjoying a park on Bronte Creek with a friend several weeks ago and we noticed the bridge. I waded out into the creek and down to the bridge. We noticed old abutments there and I assumed these were from a former bridge there that had recently been replaced. But when I went looking for the story of it all, I discovered that this had long been a gap in the road system and that the Rebecca Street bridge was only built just after the start of the current century. There’s no mention I can find of a previous span, even one torn out by Hurricane Hazel. So this is a mystery I haven’t solved yet... what, then, are these paired abutments on either side of the river?

Sept. 20, 2010 – I've actually stumbled across the answer in the meantime. It turns out that the abutments were part of a bridge built for the Hamilton Radial Electric Railway. It was built in 1905, went into service in 1906, and was taken out of service in 1925. The site I found the information on showed the route, and it did indeed follow what is now Rebecca Street. I don't know when the bridge was torn down, but while it stood, it looked like this (photo from the Milton Historical Society):

16th Avenue

This one-lane, wooden-plank bridge carries 16th Avenue traffic back and forth over the Little Rouge between Reesor Road and York-Durham Line, and I know for a fact it’s for the chop. At some time in the next 10-15 years, if not sooner, this bridge will be removed, and the course of 16th Avenue changed to eliminate the dogleg at Reesor Road. The road will be widened at the same time, and in all likelihood, suburbia, which already exists walking distance to the west, will overflow the fields shortly thereafter. For the moment, it’s a strange, noisy little bridge in the field that cars already cross with surprising frequency. It took some doing to get down there to get the under shots, including being bitten on the neck by a big spider whose web I busted up crossing the field.

Sept. 20, 2010 — Also, I'm wrong: I found a document that points out that while they will be rerouting 16th Avenue, possibly saving this bridge on request of Rouge Park's administration, they won't be widening 16th Avenue. It's going to remain two lanes east of Donald Cousens Parkway.

King-Vaughan Road

This little one-laner over the East Humber might be around for a while yet. It’s still pretty isolated from suburbia, and it’s in a river valley that might wind up slated for conservation purposes, which would limit the access to it. It’s also on a weird diversion from King-Vaughan Road’s natural right-of-way that, if the road is ever improved, might see this bridge survive by being totally bypassed. It’s hard to say. Oddly enough, all the wear on this bridge seems to be on the side away from the flow of the river, which is contra-intuitive to me.

Kirkham’s Road

At one time, Kirkham’s Road was the name for what’s now Meadowvale Road, skirting the east side of the Toronto Zoo since circa 1975. Now only a little bit of the road still has its original name. In the area where it crosses the Rouge River, it’s had a wild history of course changes since the 1950s. In order aerial shots, it’s clear that an even older bridge was once there, a bit to the west of where the current one, built in the mid-to-late 50s, exists today. The bridge, along with its southern connection to Meadowvale Road, was closed as structurally unsound in 2005. Its fate is still undecided but it looks to me like, before too long, it will be torn down, and the water main it carries will be put under the Rouge. So, I thought I’d get down there and photograph the bridge and the closed part of the road while it was still possible. It’s surprising how quickly and aggressively nature has begun to reclaim that stretch after just five years of disuse.