A ghostly reminder of things past
Have you ever taken a look at a map or an aerial photo of St. Catharines and seen there anything …funny? Puzzling?
Odd enough to catch your eye, make you look again, and wonder, “What’s that?”
The accompanying aerial photo shows the northwest quadrant of the city. Everything is laid out very nicely in a typical North American manner, with the major streets (Lake, Geneva, Vine) all running due north-south, and the old concession roads (Welland, Carlton, Scott, Linwell) running more or less east west (slightly skewed because they’re supposed to parallel the Lake Ontario shoreline).
And that’s clearly the QEW cutting across the bottom of the image,
But above the QEW there’s an odd strip of properties that cuts diagonally across north St. Catharines, pretty well ignoring what the streets around it are doing — an overlay on top of the otherwise pretty predictable grid pattern. That feature — highlighted in the accompanying aerial photo — begins at about Niagara Street and runs northwest from there all the way to Martindale Pond.
What’s up? What is that feature on the landscape?
What we’re seeing is a reflection of an important development in the history of this region.
The Welland Ship Canal opened to traffic for the first time late in 1930, and was officially dedicated in August of 1932. That rendered obsolete the third Welland Canal, which since the 1870s had cut across the countryside of the former Grantham Township all the way from the escarpment to Martindale Pond.
Now useless, it began to be erased — the “big ditch” itself and almost all the locks that punctuated it, from the new canal (starting near today’s St. Catharines museum) to Martindale Pond.
But once the big ditch was filled in, what do you do with that long strip of vacant land?
Different answers were found to that question.
Southeast of Niagara Street the old third canal land was pretty well seamlessly blended into the urban fabric, with the existing street grid extended across it, and various parking lots and buildings covering it.
But northwest of Niagara Street, which the attached aerial photo covers, things turned out differently. Several new streets — Doncaster, Sandown and Wood, and a little further west Nihan and Secord — were laid out along the path of the old canal, defying the existing street patterns around them.
In other areas the city allowed long, narrow strips of green space to remain, today’s Lancaster Park, John Page Park, Jaycee Garden Park, Royal Henley Park and the grounds of William Hamilton Merritt Public School.
At various points along that long stretch are remnants of the old canal: Lock 2 is all there, minus the lock gates, on the shore of Martindale Pond in Jaycee Park, while the tops of the walls of Lock 4 are still visible behind the seniors’ home on the opposite side of Ontario Street. The other locks all the way from there to today’s canal are buried.