Beneath Our Feet: How Old Surveys Reveal Toronto’s Hidden Waterways

Garrison Creek and the City It Shaped

Long before tall buildings, streetcars, bike lanes, and concrete paths, Toronto was shaped by its natural waterways. Among the most famous of these waterways was Garrison Creek, which flowed from the St. Clair Ravine down through what is now Christie Pits, Trinity Bellwoods, and Fort York, where it opened into Lake Ontario.

Looking through the survey records of Toronto, from the 1800s, you can see many traces of winding waterways coursing their way through the city. In fact, many of Toronto’s quirks, such as strange street angles or oddly shaped lots, are directly inherited from the topography of these creeks.

Clues in the Streets

A good good example of this occurs in and around the Little Italy neighbourhood, more specifically, on Crawford Street and Montrose Avenue, between College and Harbord Streets. College and Montrose do not follow a typical grid pattern, as landowners in the early 1800s laid out their own roads and paths according to natural features of the land. As the city grew and formalized the street grid, some of the older paths were grandfathered in, which is the likely cause for the perplexing layout around these roads.

It is fascinating to imagine what these roads would have looked like before the city built up around them, and to recognize that these roads were laid out well before any official urban planning came into place. They were purely designed by the land itself, rather than a grand design.

This historical survey captures Garrison Creek as it winds beneath the Crawford Street Bridge, a buried yet structurally intact piece of Toronto’s lost landscape. Once an open waterway shaping the neighbourhood’s topography, the creek was gradually buried in the early 20th century.
Survey courtesy of Krcmar Surveyors.

Why Did We Bury Our Rivers?

As Toronto grew in the late 19th century, open rivers became less picturesque and more problematic. Garrison Creek and others like Taddle Creek and Castle Frank Brook became polluted with industrial waste and sewage.

City planners also saw the rivers as obstacles to expansion, so one by one, the rivers were converted into underground sewers and erased from the city grid.

Historic Surveys may show a creek surrounded by large plots of land, but by 1910, that same area may show straight-lined, grid-like subdivisions.

Traces of the past:

Though now out of sight, Toronto’s lost rivers still have a presence within the communities they helped to form:

Trinity Bellwoods Park: Once a deep ravine carved by Garrison Creek, the Crawford Street Bridge once spanned the creek. In 1966, rather than demolishing the bridge, the city decided to fill in the creek and bury the bridge where it stood. A small plaque marking the area where the bridge is buried commemorates the bridge's history and location.

Christie Pits Park: This area was once a sand pit where the Garrison Creek flowed through. It was transformed into a public space in the early 1900s. To this day, the area is still prone to water accumulation.

Philosopher’s Walk: This is a short pedestrian path on the University of Toronto grounds that follows part of the route where Taddle Creek once freely flowed.

This historical survey reveals the original path of Taddle Creek as it once flowed through the grounds of the University of Toronto, long before it was buried beneath Philosopher’s Walk and adjacent academic buildings.
Survey courtesy of Krcmar Surveyors Ltd.