A Quick Thought About Toronto Sparked By London's Tower Bridge

UK TOUR DAY THIRTEEN (LONDON): Tower Bridge. It's one of the most famous historic landmarks in the entire world. When I was there on a Wednesday evening, it was packed with tourists. Foot traffic crawled across as people — like me — paused to Instagram the living crap out of it. When the drawbridge lifted to let a tall ship sail through, things got even crazier. And that kind of crowd isn't unusual: Tower Bridge is one of the Top 20 most Instagrammed tourist attractions on Earth. Photos of the thing get posted with a #towerbridge hashtag more than 200,000 times a day. That's two and a half times, on average, every second.

But what really struck me about the old landmark was just how new it is. I assumed Tower Bridge was ancient. But it was actually built in the late 1800s. It didn't open until 1894. That makes it only 24 years older than the Bloor Viaduct.

And that wasn't the only time I was struck by the age of historic sites in London compared to the age of sites at home. The majestic Natural History Museum opened in 1881. That's only about 30 years before the ROM did. The Houses of Parliament at Westminster were built in the mid-1800s. They weren't finished until after the first Parliament Buildings in Ottawa had already opened. Queen's Park had been around for 20 years by then. Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square is more than 30 years younger than Nelson's Column in Montreal. And while I was awed by the deep groves worn into Westminster Abbey's stone floors by hundreds of years of footsteps, when I got back to Toronto I noticed the same process is already underway in St. George Station.

Of course, there's lots of stuff in London that's waaaay older than the city of Toronto. And far more of their old buildings have survived. But while I expected the UK Tour might make our city's own history seem ever-so-brief by comparison, it was actually a reminder that our history is much richer than we give it credit for. Many of our landmarks are just as old as many of the most famous historic landmarks in Europe. And, of course, our history also stretches back into a time long before Toronto was founded — just like it does over there.

So the trip, in the end, actually made me feel optimistic about the future of Toronto's history. We may never have as many people Instragramming the Viaduct as they do Tower Bridge (though the plan to light up our bridge with LEDs sure won't hurt), but I do think that as we learn to take our history and ourselves more seriously — preserving our built heritage, telling our stories, investing in new landmarks that are worth Instagramming in the first place — other people will too.

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Read more posts about The Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour and the connections between the history of Toronto and the United Kingdom here.

The Railway By The Brickworks in the early 1920s

In this photo we're looking north up the Don Valley, not too far north from Bloor. It's the early 1920s. Those are the smoke stacks of the Don Valley Brick Works on the left-hand side of the photo and this is the railway that still runs along the eastern edge of the property today. The bridge is called the half-mile bridge (although it's actually shorter than that) — and it's a slightly earlier version of the bridge that's still there today. The current one was built in 1928. And, amazingly, they rebuilt the whole thing without shutting down service at all. The new sections were slipped in during the time between trains.

The whole line was originally laid down in the late-1800s as part of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It opened up the first CPR route directly into downtown Toronto. Before that, they had to go all the way west to the Junction and then literally reverse their way into the heart of the city.

The line was finally decommissioned in 2007. Today, it's unused and overgrown:

Torontoist has a post all about walking down the length of the line here.

Top photo comes via Mike Filey on the Toronto Railway Historical Association website here.

And the bottom photo comes via my own Instagram account, which you should be following if you aren't already: @TODreamsProject.

Photo: The Glen Road Bridge in 1885-95ish

I suppose at some point I'll write up a short history of Rosedale, but for now I give you this photo from that neighbourhood's Wikipedia page. (Don't get too exited; those dudes aren't ghosts, they just moved during a long exposure.) That's the Glen Road Bridge, an earlier incarnation of the one that's still there today. These days it's a footbridge, stretching from the gorgeous old money mansions of Rosedale across the tree-lined valley below—over Rosedale Valley Drive—before linking up with a dirty concrete tunnel. The graffiti-lined tunnel passes under the roar of Bloor Street, by the dingy back entrance to Sherbourne Station, and into St. James Town, one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in Canada and one of the poorest in the city, where abandoned Victorian homes, built just before this photo was taken, have been left to decay on South Glen Road, in what the Heritage Toronto website calls, during one of their more melodramatic moments, "a pit of despair".

Today, there's also an historical plaque on the north end of the bridge. (That would be the non-despairing end.) It has to be one of the most sweetly heartbreaking historical plaques in the city, about the author Morley Callaghan. He used to be friends with Hemingway back when they both lived here and then were sent to Paris as correspondents for the Star. (I wrote about their famous boxing match in my first full post.) Well, a while after his days hanging out on the Left Bank with the Lost Generation, Callaghan moved back to Toronto with his wife and eventually settled down in Rosedale, on Dale Avenue, not far from the bridge. The last line of the plaque: "Neighbours often saw and talked to him as he crossed this bridge with his wife and dog, Nikki, then with his dog, then alone until he died in 1990."

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