ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½

After decades of walking around and writing about the city, I think I know the place. But I wanted to look again at how it is now, how it’s changing, how it’s growing. 

So, recently I walked all the way across ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½. I started at the very easternmost point of the city at the Pickering border, and over the course of five work days, made my way to the very westernmost point in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ where it borders Mississauga. I was hoping to see a cross-section of the multitudes this city contains.

Mostly, I took Eglinton.

Yonge Street or Queen Street might seem more obvious — and might offer more familiar landmarks.

But if you want to experience the breadth of the city, Eglinton’s your Avenue: it has a bit of everything that has become typically ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½: towering condo and office towers, sprawling strip malls and parkland, rich areas and poor ones, suburban stretches and heavily urbanized ones, people originating from every corner of the globe. It crosses both the Don and Humber rivers. It intersects with the city’s major subway lines and is the site of our three largest transit construction projects. It meets all of the city’s major expressways except the Gardiner. Large stretches of it are snarled in traffic. That sounds like ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ on one street.

Eglinton is our only street that travels through all six of the former municipalities that made up pre-amalgamation Metro: Scarborough, East York, North York, ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½, York and Etobicoke.

Eglinton is perfect.

But first I had to get there — in the east, it dead-ends at Kingston Road several kilometres short of the city’s borders, and I wanted to walk all the way across ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½. So I started at Rouge Beach and travelled the waterfront to get there.

It was hot while I was walking, so I slathered myself in sunscreen and packed a full water bottle and some granola bars. I put on good, pillowy Saucony Triumph shoes I bought when I was training to run a half-marathon. I chose a playlist of songs about walking (like an Egyptian, on sunshine, on the wild side). And I got dropped off at the very edge of ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½.

Of beaches and bluffs

What pops into your mind when you hear the word “Scarborough�? Malls? Wide streets? Bungalows and concrete apartment towers?

I’m guessing only a small number of people think of an image like you see at Rouge Beach, a gorgeous strip of sand stretching out into the lake on a narrow peninsula created by the Rouge River that forms the border between ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ and Pickering. Sculptural piles of driftwood jut out into the lakefront and an iron bridge across the river juts out of the forests.

Scarborough is a lot of things, but one of its least remarked upon qualities is its expansive natural beauty. 

As I wandered west on a sunny summer day, for kilometres, I felt I was a lifetime away from civilization. Except maybe for the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station visible in the distance. And except that the walking and cycling trail is fairly busy even on a weekday morning, with seniors and schoolchildren and couples holding hands, almost all of whom greet me with a smile and hello. 

If you’re looking for a hidden waterfront gem in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ — for a romantic picnic or solo meditation or mildly risky skinny dipping  — what you do is go to the Rouge Hill GO Station and exit on the south side on the waterfront trail, then head east, keeping your eyes on the treeline for an unmarked dirt pathway through the overgrown brush.

After carefully descending the short, steep decline, you’ll emerge to a bit of beachfront covered in sand and pebbles. Some earlier visitor has used stones to mark a firepit and left some charcoal remains. There’s a fallen log you can use as a bench. The overhanging branches of tall trees provide both privacy and shade. And then there’s the wide-open water, ice-cold and blue-grey and rippling off to the horizon.

Beyond Rouge Hill GO Station, the waterfront wander goes on for hours through various parks and the emerging Scarborough Bluffs. I passed some remaining industrial areas still surrounded by wild forests — remnants of an earlier era when this part of the city was heavily industrial — and then through the idyllic Guildwood residential community of large, architecturally interesting homes. Finally, just beyond that, I came to Eglinton Avenue.          

Into the strip mall bazaar

The stretch of Eglinton extending west from Kingston Road may be most people’s prototypical idea of Scarborough: highrise apartment towers, bungalow subdivisions and, above all, strip malls with busy parking lots.

This is the Scarborough of my youth — I lived as a teenager just a bit north of Markham Road, and this part of Eglinton is what my memories are made of. Though things have changed: landmarks like pool halls and bowling alleys and the A&A’s record store where Barenaked Ladies filmed a music video are gone, replaced by new townhouses that are making the street (somewhat) more pedestrian and residential. Dedicated bus lanes are busy and painted red.

This was an area built for cars: most of Scarborough’s development and layout sprung up in just a few short years in the 1950s, and it was designed for people moving out of the crowded city to find a lawn and drive around to do their shopping and working and recreating. But more and more, Scarborough and other inner suburbs have been landing spots for recent immigrants and poorer people, and the distance — and lack of transit — has become to seem less like privacy and more like isolation. This place is adapting — see those bus lanes and new townhouses — but it’s happening slowly.

And the existing forms are taking on new vibes, too. Just past Brimley there’s Knob Hill Plaza on the south side, where a large parking lot stretches the length of a long block, with small storefronts hosting independent shops. It has Caribbean and Indian foods, textiles, nail salons, hair places, pubs. People hang out in the parking lot. It doesn’t look pretty (and has historically had problems associated with garbage dumping in its alleys and parking lot), but it has an independent vibrancy to it, the kind of marketplace immigrant communities have often built in cities. If you transported this strip mall to a part of the city where the streets are narrower and the parking wasn’t blocking the view, it might be known as a bustling marketplace like Kensington or India Bazaar. It’s a scene you can see across Scarborough (on Ellesmere or Lawrence or Sheppard).

Around Midland, huge swaths of the street are blocked off for construction of the extension of the Line 2 Bloor-Danforth subway to Scarborough Town Centre. It is the first of many sites of transit construction you see along Eglinton. Even though the Crosstown LRT appears set to open soon, it’s obvious transit construction will be snarling traffic on Eglinton for a long time yet.

Reshaping the ‘Golden Mile’

Beyond the transit hub of Kennedy Station, Eglinton East prominently features the tracks of the long-awaited Eglinton Crosstown LRT, set up in the middle of the road and ready to carry trains that still aren’t running yet. Notably, at this part of the line where tracks are above ground, the stations look simply like very long streetcar stops.

It’s been under construction forever and it still ain’t operating. In a bit of a theme that you’ll notice, this is just one of the outward signs on Eglinton of ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½’s longtime inaction on transit. We failed to build for so long, and now we’re building a lot at once, but it still seems to take forever. But when it comes (if it comes), it will further reshape the city. And this stretch of it.

West of Warden Avenue, I come to the Golden Mile, a historic strip that was initially the centre of industry in the 1960s emerged as a home to car dealerships and many of the city’s first shopping plazas (Queen Elizabeth once visited to open a shopping plaza). In the 1990s, it was largely redeveloped as big-box retail, and so it remains today. If the strip-mall stretches to the east are defined by independent businesses, the Golden Mile has your giant chain-store needs covered.

As my colleague Victoria Gibson and I recently wrote, this section is set to be redeveloped over the next 20 or more years into a whole new neighbourhood, adding residences that will contain approximately the population of Peterborough, with new streets running through the middle of what are now parking lots, new parkland and a vastly different retail landscape. It is, today, hard to envision, though the first bits of construction to make it happen have already started on some lots.

Victoria Park marks the historic border between Scarborough and North York, and you can still notice an abrupt shift in the streetscape from Bed-Bath-and-Blah retail structures to low-rise apartment buildings.

How long is my valley? (Very long)

Continuing, I pass a billboard featuring a swinging girl that has been there for more than 60 years, and then to a long stretch of Eglinton defined by green as the street approaches and crosses the wide Don Valley. Both sides of the street are dotted here with the type of concrete apartment buildings that define the adjacent Flemingdon Park neighbourhood, set far back from the street in the lawns and forests.

The Don Valley, up here at Eglinton, is gorgeous. And — you really notice on foot — it is vast.

I cross the tangle of on- and off-ramps that form entrances to the Don Valley Parkway, and on the north side, can see the distinctive architecture of the Aga Khan Museum rising like a blue-grass pyramid from the green grass desert.

That museum seemed poised to form a mini tourism hub in this part of town alongside the Ontario Science Centre at Don Mills Road, especially with the new Eglinton Crosstown station that will also serve as the terminus of the Ontario Line subway set up to become a transit hub. But the Science Centre has of course been closed now to move it downtown, and so it sits derelict beside the lanes of construction hoarding for the new subway line.

I feels noteworthy to me that the Science Centre was built specifically in this location (in the same era the zoo was relocated to the east end of Scarborough) to bring people to visit different parts of the city. Too long later, Doug Ford decided to make it the destination of his big new subway line, which could finally allow those people easier access to an overlooked part of town. And then, suddenly, he decided to abandon the building altogether.

Somehow the fencing marking off the Science Centre site as condemned next to the hoardings marking the subway line construction next to the new but unopened stations for the Crosstown all together paint a poignant picture, though I’m not sure what exactly to interpret from it.   

As I make my way across this swath of pedestrian-hostile valley, I don’t think I encountered another person walking, though I did almost get sprayed by a truck that was watering the parkland through a giant hose that sprayed across and over the sidewalk. 

Signs of urbanity

Beyond Laird Drive, I emerged into old East York, in the upscale neighbourhood of Leaside. The structures here suddenly become more urban (stores and homes rather than parking lots lining the streets).

You also notice an abrupt shift in the demographics: on the crowded bus to the east end of Scarborough, I was the only white person. Passing the bus stops and high streets here, my pale complexion blends right in. It’s been a noted phenomenon that ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½’s immigrant and lower-income neighbourhoods have shifted to the outsides of the city. Here as we get closer to the core, the streets are more affluent and the population is older and more established “old ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½.” Or old East York, as the case may be.   

One thing I’ve always noticed about Leaside, which must be a result of the building codes and regulations that governed East York, is that its homes and buildings appear just a little smaller than in the rest of the city. It’s like Lawrence Park built at 3/4-scale.

Between Bayview (which has no evident view of the bay) and Mount Pleasant (which is up more of a gentle slope than a mountain), the village-like commercial heart of Leaside, you definitively emerge from the suburbs into the crowded condos and dense streetscape of the central city. Coming into the old City of ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½, you’re in midtown.

Construction in Condoland

Near Yonge Street is North ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ Community Centre, which is a reminder of a time pre-amalgamation when Eglinton was considered way uptown. Now, given the concentration of the city’s population who live not just north of here but north of the 401, it is decidedly midtown. In casual political lingo, it is even often referred to as part of “downtown.â€�

And certainly at Yonge Street, it has a very downtown feel: sky-high condos of glass and steel rising from a bustling retail strip. I don’t think people still call the area “Yonge and Eligible� as they did in the late 1990s, but its tiny upscale condos still guarantee a population of younger adults alongside the families in the homes in the surrounding blocks.

More than 20 years ago, Coun. Karen Stintz swept into office opposing the highrise condo construction taking over the neighbourhood. Long after she left city hall, the built form of this neighbourhood shows it was a tide that kept coming despite political opposition. 

Walking across Eglinton, I really noticed just how concentrated that density is along Yonge Street itself. The blocks surrounding it to the west are still two-storey homes and walk-up apartments.

By this point — starting way back at Laird Drive and continuing all the way west — the Crosstown LRT runs underground (on the surface, cars share the road with cycle paths that are still being constructed now that the subway hoardings are down).

You certainly notice that here a lot of real estate has been dedicated to LRT stations. Single-storey buildings for station entrances often occupy lots that would house four or more storefronts, and each station has multiple buildings on different corners of the street. It feels like a lot of valuable space to give to entrances to an underground platform.

A quaint village remains

As you walk along Eglinton, if you pay attention to the street signs you see some that show the legacy of pre-amalgamation ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ — the different kinds of signs once used by Scarborough and East York and North York, sometimes with old logos on them.

But in the neighbourhood near Forest Hill Collegiate you encounter green street signs that indicate the legacy of a prior amalgamation, when Forest Hill was an independent municipality until 1967.

Today, along Eglinton, it is characterized for a stretch by the kinds of charming walk-up apartment buildings that have names (“Crofton,� “The Eglinton�) and then by one of the coziest retail strips in the city. On the side streets stretching to the north and south, you can see large family homes that characterize one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the city.

Forest Hill is also one of the city’s most prominent Jewish neighbourhoods, and in addition to synagogues and day schools, it features multiple Montreal-style wood-fired bagel shops (I stopped in for one).

The neighbourhood ends abruptly in a traffic jam: the Allen Road expressway stops suddenly at Eglinton, its on- and off-ramps snaking around Eglinton West subway station and cars lined up in either direction entering and exiting. The expressway was originally to have continued south through the Annex and Chinatown as the “Spadina Expressway,â€� but a movement that would become famous in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ history succeeded in stopping its construction in 1971.

Walking across Eglinton, you don’t just see the construction of the troubled transportation projects of the current day, but also the evidence of those of generations past. Both seem to create a lot of traffic. 

Good vibes and good patties

You notice the demographics abruptly shift again when, around Oakwood, you come to Little Jamaica. Murals alongside a parking lot and behind in “Reggae Lane� depict Jamaican musical stars, commemorating the musical legacy of one of the largest Jamaican expatriate communities in the world. It’s a legacy you can still see in the businesses on the street today.

Randy’s Patties is an institution for Jamaican beef patties on this stretch, having served the stuffed pastries since 1979 (with a brief pandemic-era interruption). The shop opens at 11 a.m., and by 11:10 there’s a line stretching out the door and a wait of 15 minutes for a couple of patties (those ahead in line are ordering by the dozen). My verdict: worth it.

Around Dufferin, the Jamaican character of the neighbourhood begins to share space with many businesses with a Latin American and Filipino flavour. 

There’s another industrial stretch of factories and car lots, and then towards Keele Street, you come into the heart of the old City of York, with the old York Civic Centre and York Memorial High School across from a dense retail strip that remains mostly ungentrified, home to independent businesses and a lively streetscape.

As you approach Black Creek and the terminus of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line, the retail activity fairly abruptly stops. There’s a wide swath of land given to baseball diamonds and a community centre and arena that were the recreational hub of the former municipality (some faded legacy signs posted at the sites still show the old York logo and seven-digit civic phone numbers).

Into the great wide open

At Jane Street, I come to Eglinton Flats, a massive expanse of parkland on all four corners of the street. There are soccer fields, cricket pitches — even a municipal golf course. But right now, there are construction hoardings — lots and lots of them. The Eglinton Crosstown may be almost ready to open, but construction on the Eglinton Crosstown West extension is well underway and will continue for years to come.

About that: walking along this Etobicoke stretch of Eglinton for hours, I had time to reflect on the decision to construct this stretch of the line underground. You could have fit the tracks aboveground without losing any lanes of traffic — you could have ²¹»å»å±ð»åÌýlanes of traffic if you wanted — and had lots and lots of room to spare.

See, the thing about this part of Eglinton is that it has next to no businesses, and next to no street life. This was once planned to be an expressway (part of the same plan as the Allen/Spadina Expressway) and so the roadway is lined on both sides with vast stretches of lawn for what must be the widest road right-of-way in the city. Though the wide highway road was never built, Eglinton remains essentially a parkway for most of its length out west here, with dedicated bike paths and football fields’ worth of greenspace on each side of the road between the sidewalk and the housing subdivisions behind.

It’s hard to emphasize just how long this Eglinton Parkway stretch goes on: past Scarlett Road and Royal York and Islington and Kipling and Martin Grove. There’s not a lot to look at as you’re walking. I know from my regular life that the surrounding subdivisions are filled with quite nice houses, and the main cross-streets are dotted with highrise apartment towers. Both homeowners and tenants around here — in the heart of “Ford Nation” — pretty much need to drive everywhere because that’s how the place was designed. But I can understand why they seem so politically grumpy. There is a lot of traffic, enough that it was named the worst traffic street in the city by the CAA recently.

In fact, when I told a friend who lives in the west end and spends a lot of time in various Etobicoke Parks that I was walking along Eglinton for a project, he said when he thought of Eglinton, he just thought of traffic. And that comment, I had time to reflect as I walked along the wide rolling green, shows just how much your view of the city is influenced by where you live and spend time. When I think of Eglinton, I think of strip malls. Someone in Forest Hill might think of charming boutiques. Those in Flemingdon Park will think of the Don Valley green space and the old Science Centre. A resident of Yonge and Eglinton will think of highrises and bustling nightlife. We all have our own private ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½, and if we’re talking about the same street, we might be picturing radically different things.

Which is a mirror of the larger city in many ways. We’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of decades talking about our city’s divided politics. It obviously comes from the very different lifestyles and views we experience depending on where we live. You can see most of them on Eglinton: adjacent solitudes. Different ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½s. 

How ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ ends

Speaking of how many in the GTA picture and experience ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½, I now come to the highways: beyond Martin Grove, Eglinton takes a sharp left turn — because straight ahead the road runs directly into the highways 401 and 427, with Pearson Airport on one side and a hydroelectric corridor on the other.

If you look at this area on Google Maps, the swooping tangle of highway ramp overpasses and flyovers looks like a kid has used a spirograph to go to town on the map. Walking through and beneath those overpasses, I can say, is significantly less fun and interesting than that implies. 

Finally, I emerged to an industrial park with a bar and restaurant in it that seemed like an oasis (I stopped in for lunch — it was the first opportunity in a long, long time). Across the street is a transit station that will be the end of the Crosstown West and is already a GO station serving Pearson Airport.

I started in nature along the water, and ended in nature along the water. At the extreme western border of ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ is Centennial Park, a sprawling site that includes a golf course, baseball diamonds, a BMX course, cricket pitches, an arena, pools and vast swaths of walking trails and conservation areas. The buses serving this stretch are Mississauga Transit.

The park ends at the Etobicoke Creek, where once again you find a place in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ that can make you forget you are in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½. It’s just forests and running water. Beautiful.

The park was built in 1967 on what had previously been dairy farmland.

Including my detours and doubling back, my fitness watch says I covered 65 kilometres, and took about 86,000 steps. I saw ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ from multiple angles: beautiful and sort of ugly, rich and poor, high and low, natural, industrial, sprawlingly suburban and intensely urban. I saw lots and lots of construction of housing and offices and transit lines and roads — a city still being reimagined and reinvented.

I wanted to see life in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½. For long stretches it was fascinating. Much of the end was a bit of a slog, with pockets of beauty tucked in among the traffic. Which, come to think of it, might just be a tidy summary of what life in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ looks like today.