This, according to me, has to be one of the most beautifully pastoral photos ever taken of Toronto. It shows us what it looked like in 1889 at the very south-east corner of Etobicoke, in the spot where Mimico Creek meets Bonar Creek just before they empty into the lake. (Well, where they used to meet anyway; most of Bonar Creek was buried in the 1950s.)
It's just a few block west of the mouth of the Humber, and these days it's easily recognizable thanks to the gleaming white arch of the Mimico Creek Bridge (which purposefully looks like a smaller version of the bridge over the Humber).
Amazingly, even though it looks like these Victorian Torontonians are in the middle of the countryside, not far to the east of them our city was undergoing a crazily enormous boom, quickly becoming a full-blown metropolis. Between 1861 and 1901 the population quadrupled from about 60,000 to about 240,000 people.
I came across this photo in the veryvery good book I'm reading at the moment: HTO: Toronto's Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost River to Low-flow Toilets. So you can probably expect a bunch of water-related posts over the next little while. You can also buy the book for yourself from Coach House here or borrow it from the library here.
It's just a few block west of the mouth of the Humber, and these days it's easily recognizable thanks to the gleaming white arch of the Mimico Creek Bridge (which purposefully looks like a smaller version of the bridge over the Humber).
Amazingly, even though it looks like these Victorian Torontonians are in the middle of the countryside, not far to the east of them our city was undergoing a crazily enormous boom, quickly becoming a full-blown metropolis. Between 1861 and 1901 the population quadrupled from about 60,000 to about 240,000 people.
I came across this photo in the veryvery good book I'm reading at the moment: HTO: Toronto's Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost River to Low-flow Toilets. So you can probably expect a bunch of water-related posts over the next little while. You can also buy the book for yourself from Coach House here or borrow it from the library here.
There's an area on the Humber just north of Queensway that looks like this today...
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