page_title: Toronto waterfront
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Toronto waterfront / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Cannon emplacement at Fort York, originally located on the waterfront to defend against attacking American ships, now located inland due to infilling into the lake
context_page_description: The Toronto waterfront is the lakeshore of Lake Ontario in the City of Toronto, Ontario in Canada. It spans 46 kilometres between the mouth of Etobicoke Creek in the west, and the Rouge River in the East.
context_section_description: Lake Ontario is a recent lake. As the last glaciation, the Laurentian glaciation receded, a number of proglacial lakes filled in basins adjacent to the glacier. One of those proglacial lakes was Lake Iroquois. Lake Iroquois was considerably deeper than Lake Ontario, as a lobe of the Laurentian glacier still filled the valley of what is now the St. Lawrence River. The southern boundary of Lake Iroquois was the Niagara escarpment. The lake flowed over the Niagara Escarpment east of Rochester, and flowed to the Atlantic Ocean down what is now the Mohawk River, to the Hudson River. The shoreline of Lake Iroquois can be observed in steep hills, such as that on the north side of Davenport Road. Casa Loma has a good view of the harbour, four kilometres away, as it is on the height of the old shoreline.
  When the glacier retreated from the St Lawrence Valley the shoreline receded to a much shallower level than today's lake, as it takes time for land that had been under a heavy glacier to rebound. This lake was call Admiralty Lake.
  Some sources suggest the drainage of the lake triggered the Upper Dryas climatic change. Some sources suggest the lake drained all the way to sea level and the lake became brackish.
  Since the last ice age, silt deposits, borne mostly from the erosion of the Scarborough Bluffs and the eluvial rivers to the east were swept by strong, natural Lake Ontario currents creating prominent fingers of land away from the lakeshore in the current central waterfront area, including the Toronto Islands.
  The shore of Lake Ontario (at least within present-day Toronto Harbour) is mostly landfill, extending a kilometre or more from the natural shoreline.
  Adding to the existing silt deposits, Ashbridges Bay was filled in and the Port Lands area (Cherry Street to Leslie Street) was created in the early 1900s. The bay was filled in partly due to concerns about public health – locals had disposed of sewage, farm animal carcasses and household waste in the bay for years. During this period the Don River, which used to flow into the bay to the south-west, was diverted (straightened) toward the harbour, first directly southward and later westward through the current configuration of the Keating Channel. Currently there are proposals to restore the original natural watercourse of the Don, which would bring it closer to the downtown core. The modern harbour area was mostly formed through landfill in the years around the First World War, to allow for deeper container vessel wharf access. The central waterfront functioned as an important industrial area for many years, providing shipping access to communities from Port Union in the east to Mimico in the west.
  To the east and west, Toronto expanded along the waterfront with new residential suburbs. West of the Humber River, outside the city limits, the waterfront has been mainly private lands fronting on the lake. East of the Humber River, within the city limits, the waterfront has been under the control of the government. The Sunnyside lakefront from the Humber east to Jameson was filled in, creating new lands for recreational and park land uses. To the east of Sunnyside the lands were originally military grounds, centred on Fort York. The Garrison lands became the Exhibition grounds and have been public ever since. To the east of the harbour area, parklands were built along the waterfront from Ashbridges Bay east to the eastern city border at Victoria Park. Further east, the Scarborough lands have been dominated by the Scarborough Bluffs and development could not proceed to the waterfront.
  In the 1950s, the Gardiner Expressway project, connecting suburbs to the west, substantially changed the western waterfront. As the Toronto area prospered and the downtown lands became more developed, industry began to move out of the central area seeking cheaper land in the suburbs. This left behind many heavily polluted sites (some of the main uses of the waterfront were oil and coal storage, waste disposal and incineration, and heavy manufacturing especially in Toronto harbour). The railway la
caption: Cannon emplacement at Fort York, located close to where Toronto's original shoreline was. Due to land reclamation projects in the late-19th to early-20th century, the original shoreline is now located inland.
exif: {"Image Tag 0x000B": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "96", "Image YResolution": "96", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image DateTime": "2017:10:31 13:54:32", "Image ExifOffset": "2294", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "96", "Thumbnail YResolution": "96", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4568", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "12882", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2017:10:31 13:53:54", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2017:10:31 13:53:54", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}