The stone-clad outfall of the Belt Line Sewer, at the top end of the Vale of Avoca, just south of Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
East of Yonge Street and north of St. Clair Avenue, a drain runs out of Mount Pleasant Cemetery into the Vale of Avoca, flowing cold and clear, and feeding one of the remaining open stretches of the Yellow Creek. Toronto has no shortage of lost creeks in drains, but the Belt Line Sewer carries more ghosts than most as it flows from north of Eglinton southeast through Toronto's largest cemetery; these are the ghosts of a buried creek, the city's buried citizens and leaders, and a failed railway and suburban development scheme from the last decade of the 1800s. Read More
A colleague stands knee-deep in the (new) Garrison Creek Sewer, where it passes beneath the curve of College Street and snakes southwest towards Fred Hamilton Park. This section of sewer was likely installed c. 1912, and shows the progression towards concrete construction.
It was a great privilege to find our way into Garrison Creek, Toronto's most legendary lost river, which lives on today as one of its most awe-inspiring sewer systems. Draining a wide swath of the city's old west end, the network of sewers that has been constructed since 1884 largely mirrors the surface watershed obliterated as development marched west and north and the creek became a hindrance, nuisance and health threat to urban living. Beneath the streets and parks, the creek still lives in glorious tunnels of brick and concrete, forgotten yes, but never removed entirely. Read More
The Parkside Relief Sewer begins at abandoned stand-by tanks in the northeast corner of High Park, which once served to provide temporary storage relief for the High Park and Earlscourt Trunk Sewers.
Built c. 1910-1912 to relieve sewers in Earlscourt and north of High Park, the Parkside Relief Sewer continues to serve as the western-most overflow sewer for both the High-Level and the MTI. While overflows from Parkside are now intercepted by the Western Beaches Storage Tunnel, the recent sewage overflow into Budapest Park calls into question the success of that expensive infrastructure addition. Read More
