Tour Toronto along artistic Pan Am Path
Legacy project from the Games links 80 km of paths across city with large-scale artwork events
Here’s a Toronto challenge: try cycling the city’s entire off-street trail network. Think of it as a Tour de Toronto, but one that might take a lifetime to do, longer if you’re walking.
Calling it a “network” is a bit of a stretch, because the city’s trails don’t all connect and there are little bits and pieces all over the city, and even more around the GTA. Years after starting a never-ending tour, I’m still discovering parts I didn’t know about. Most but not all trails run through the ravines and most are paved, although some are gravel.
A good place to start is the Pan Am Path, one of the legacy projects of the Pan Am Games. The Path charts a course through some of that network, zigzagging 80 km across the city from its northwest to southeast corners. You could cycle it all in one day if ambitious, but taken in shorter chunks, it’s a way to tackle the sprawling geography of this city while avoiding riding on busy roads as much as possible.
One of the challenges of ravine riding, Pan Am Path or otherwise, is trying to stay in the ravine as much as possible without having to take surface streets, but they are necessary at times. Golf courses are often the villains, blocking ravine-path connectivity, but sometimes the ravine itself is too narrow to accommodate a path. I think of it as “bicycle portaging” and sometimes I use my smartphone to find the next connection. Other times, I just see where the streets will lead me.
With the Pan Am Path, somebody else plotted the route and the red squiggly logo marks the way at trail intersections, with more extensive signage and arrows painted on surface streets. There’s even an app you can download with a map to follow.
Along the way, the trail passes nearly every kind of topography and urban and suburban form Toronto has. Taken in sum, the variety is stunning. Marshes, thick forests, downtown skyscrapers, bungalows on cul-de-sacs: it’s all here. Scarborough, because of its sheer size, has some of the longest continuous routes in ravines but also the longest street portages in between, so there’s as much city to see as nature.
The Pan Am Path Art Relay has been making its way along the length of the trail since May, with events each week at a different stop, leaving behind largescale public artworks.
One of those artworks, a colourful mosaic called “Album” under the Dundas St. bridge by the Humber River, celebrates all forms of families, including LGBT ones, and has been defaced at least four times with homophobic slurs. Police investigated the incidents as hate crimes. Other places have been trouble-free. Underneath Don Mills Rd. by the Don River, a series of canoes by Toronto arts collective Labspace Studio are seemingly embedded in concrete. And north of Pottery Rd., the Don trail has been painted by Montreal artist Roadsworth with text from playwrights at Native Earth Performing Arts.
Three weeks ago, “Corridor Connections,” a massive mural by Toronto artist Sean Martindale, was unveiled on the side of Centennial College in Scarborough. The corridor here is the Gatineau Hydro Corridor, a prairie-like swath of land that runs diagonally through Scarborough. The Pan Am Path uses the trails in the corridor to connect the Don River and Highland Creek trail systems, although both require extensive street portaging, too. Toronto’s hydro corridors are like surface-level ravines and there’s potential to make more path connections through them.
The Art Relay ends Saturday with a grand finale at Rouge Park Beach on the Pickering border, with day and evening performances called Maadaadizi / Summer Journeys”. Maadaadizi is Ojibwe for “begin a journey” and the Pan Am Path is a civic unity project: a journey to understand more about our city. Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.