Celebrating Jane
This weekend 148 public walks honour the wisdom of Jane Jacobs. In a preview stroll in Scarborough, Shawn Micallef found buffalo roaming and strange relics in the woods
There’s a bus stop at the corner of Old Finch Ave. and Morningview Trail that feels like the last stop in Toronto. On one side of the street there are matching homes with garages out front, on the other side fields and trees, even a barn — a rare and dramatic instant transition from urban to rural.
Head northeast from here and the next bit of substantial civilization is the town of Port Perry.
This frontier edge of Toronto is also part of Malvern, where a Jane’s Walk called Wild Scarborough will happen this Sunday that will change the way participants think of this neighbourhood while also seeing some incredible bits of Toronto along the way.
“I hope residents from the local neighbourhood get to learn a bit about parts that they don’t know,” explains walk leader Alex Dow.
“I want people from outside the area to see there’s a lot of different stories in the community, a history earlier than the first houses that were built here, and interesting things going on around urban food production. There’s more to Malvern than guns and gangs.”
Dow has lived in Malvern since 1989 and manages the local office of Action for Neighbourhood Change (ANC), a community development initiative funded by the United Way. Dow’s walk, like so many Jane’s Walks, is a tour of what’s great in the neighbourhood, and what can make it better.
Jane’s Walks began in Toronto in 2007 and are now annual events held the first weekend of May.
Named after the late urban thinker and Toronto resident Jane Jacobs, the walks have spread across Canada and to 18 countries and 90 cities, with 550 walks happening worldwide, including 148 in Toronto alone (with more in some GTA cities).
Volunteers design their own routes, so it’s a personal rather than touriststyle tour.
This weekend’s walks include historical tours of Yorkville or Long Branch; an accessibility walk around Yonge and Eglinton looking at what people in wheelchairs face each day; a poor people’s history of downtown east; a Glenn Gould walk; a sound walk; an anti-casino walk — the diversity of walks reflects the city itself.
Back in Malvern, Dow has been leading small groups of people on test runs of his Wild Scarborough walk over the last few weekends. I tagged along on one, meeting at that bus stop before venturing into the Toronto backcountry.
We moved along the backyards of houses adjacent to Rouge Park that have slowly crept out into the wilderness — as our species is wont to do — with tidy little gardens, compost piles, and less tidy things like an old bathtub junked under a tree.
These homes run adjacent to an overgrown apple orchard once owned by famed Canadian explorer and geologist, Joseph Burr Tyrrell. The un-pruned trees have gone feral, but the symmetrical pattern of the orchard can be seen via Google satellite view, like the spectral-work of a long gone gentleman farmer.
For a city slicker who came through kilometres of urban landscape to get here, it feels like the set of Little House on the Prairie, with rolling hills and long grass.
Along the way, Dow tells us about the ANC’s work in sustainable food production around Malvern and the plans to turn this orchard into an urban farm. We head west into a forest and find the rusting hulk of an old van with its doors half ajar and wheels removed. It’s been here a while, as the forest is far too thick to drive anything in here now.
A little further along, on a ridge high above the Rouge watershed valley, we have a panoramic view of a herd of buffalo on the horizon.
Moving down into the forested valley, we find the Wild Scarborough Holy Grail: the ruins of the old Toronto Zoo monorail.
While not technically a monorail, it’s a much beloved and missed piece of 1976 futurism that once took zoo visitors on a loop around the surrounding valley before closing after a 1994 accident.
Though filled with leaves, the track is an impressive piece of construction and a bit of curved-concretecool reminiscent of some of the Montreal Olympic venues of the same year.
Should we be here? We follow the track in each direction for the next hour or so to see the buffalos up close and follow the track as it climbs the ravine wall near the zoo parking lot. It’s a shame it closed, as zoo visitors saw much more of the Rouge Valley and its impressive, Scarborough Bluff-like ravine walls. It makes a great walking trail today.
Three hours later, we’re back at our starting point that no longer seems like the edge of something but rather the beginning.
That’s what Jane’s Walks do: new places get discovered and old ones are flipped inside out. Go take a few walks this weekend and see for yourself.
Go to janeswalk.net to find walk locations and times for walks in Toronto and around the world. Wander the streets with Shawn Micallef on Twitter@ shawnmicallef