When fresh air was rare in the city
Outdoor groups are finding young people’s great escape can happen where they live
If we could only lift a child from the hazy, soot-stained streets of Victorian Toronto, transport them through time and set them back down in the city today, the difference might just take their breath away.
Odds are excellent he or she would look up in wonder at crisper, cleaner skies than Toronto has known since before the mid-1800s, when our then wood-fired hamlet entered its industrial adolescence with a sky-blackening vengeance.
For kids living beneath the worst of coal-fired Toronto 115 years ago, when The Star’s Fresh Air Fund was born, you could almost cut the pollution with a knife. Their congested, low-visibility world was one of belching smokestacks, outdoor privies and horse poop underfoot. And as coal gave way to oil, the resulting cocktail was sometimes worse. There are documented accounts from the 1950s and ’60s of Toronto’s smoggy, sulfuric downtown air actually eating through the nylons of working women.
The plan back then for the Fresh Air Fund was simple: to arrange an escape. And thanks to the generosity of Star readers, many tens of thousands of Toronto kids at risk did just that, packing into steamships and trains and later, buses, fleeing the smog for a summer-camp adventure of a lifetime they otherwise would not have.
The great escape — connecting kids with the best outdoor experiences Ontario has to offer — is still a key part of what the Fresh Air Fund is about. But as times change, and Toronto’s air quality improves, some of The Star’s partner agencies are changing focus, learning that getting away from it all now can happen right here in the city.
Take, for example, Project Canoe, which has led more than 3,000 Toronto kids on outdoor challenges including wilderness canoeing since the 1970s. The group was based in Temagami, until last year when it quietly moved to a permanent base camp in the city with the goal of better serving Toronto youth where they live.
“It’s no longer a question of simply whisking young people away anymore. We are very focused on bringing that back to our urban environment and engaging youth with the green spaces here in their own backyard,” Project Canoe director Tim Richardson told The Star.
Project Canoe still leads wilderness trips, including one last week in Algonquin Park. But you are just as likely to find them at, say, the Brickworks in the Don Valley, where it offers sessions in food, nutrition and plant awareness. Or, say, leading a group of first-time kayakers on a journey around the Toronto Islands.
“Parts of the island feel so remote as you paddle around the far side — and then you come around the corner and, wow, you are just struck by the cityscape. The looks on the faces of the young people we take out there are powerful, you see them connecting in a new way with their own city. It’s just the kind of thing you want more people to see.”
Toronto City Mission, with roots reaching back to the 1870s, for many decades gave Fresh Air Fund beneficiaries — primarily mothers and children — a home away from home at its former retreat in Bronte, now part of Oakville. Today, the mission is focused almost exclusively inside the city.
“Pretty much all of our programs and day-camps are in Toronto now,” said TCM spokeswoman Grace Poon.
“We have a pretty interesting archive from those earlier years, when we basically used to take mothers and children out of a black cloud. It’s hard to imagine today, but we have pictures that tell that story.”
Mapping the history of air pollution in Toronto is far from an exact science. But York University researcher Richard Anderson, now years-deep into a book project on the subject, pegs the absolute worst somewhere around the mid-1920s, when almost everyone – railways, steamships, industry, the waterworks, Eatons, private citizens on tight budgets — powered their furnaces not just with coal but the cheapest, softest, dirtiest kind of coal.
Applying new digital tools to old photographs of Toronto, together with other sources including bronchitis and pneumonia death rates, Anderson has made significant headway geo-locating Toronto’s air quality in time and space. His research shows a Toronto pollution transformation through a variety of smogs — from the intense Edwardian blanket of coal smog that hung seasonally over the inner-city core, worst in spring and fall, to the broader, region-wide, commuter-fired photochemical smogs that continued into the automobile age, peaking in the hazy, horrible summer of 2005.
For a time, in the 1950s and ’60s, when coal was “on its last legs as a routine fuel in Toronto,” the city had both kinds of smog. “Remember the 1950s fog-bowl Grey Cup game played on two days because smog stopped play?” Anderson wrote in an email to The Star. “The sulfur dioxide content of Toronto’s air that day was probably sufficient to give us an Air Quality Index above 200.”
We don’t see those sorts of numbers anymore. Not even close. In part because of tighter tailpipe emissions standards on both sides of the border, in part because of the industrial decline along “smog alley,” the corridor of prevailing winds that runs along Lake Erie with Toronto in the crosshairs. And not least because of the Ontario government’s phase-out of coal-fired power plants like Nanticoke — North America’s largest — which went dark in December, 2013. All of the above bodes well for clearer Toronto skies to come.
“Nanticoke still stands like a ghost, reminding us of what was,” said Jack Gibbons, of the Toronto Clean Air Alliance, which led the 17-year battle to end the burning of coal for electricity in the province.
“When we started, Toronto had 60 smog-alert days a year and now we’re down to one or two or some years, even zero. The result is a huge im- provement in air quality. The key to everything was when the Ontario Medical Association stepped forward and identified smog as a health crisis. The government could ignore environmentalists, but they could not ignore Ontario’s doctors. It was a turning point.”
What you cannot see, of course, still can hurt you. Modern pollution research now is looking more closely than ever at ultrafine particles, including black carbon 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, among other unregulated pollutants. Better than before doesn’t yet mean best.
And as the Fresh Air Fund’s many partner organizations observe, clearer skies are all well and good — but do not in any way diminish the goals of helping enliven the ever-growing number of young Torontonians on the disadvantaged end of the city’s widening wealth gap.
Tim Richardson of Project Canoe said: “Being able to concentrate more of our work inside the city is great and it’s no longer a story about young people needing an escape. But we’re still all about offering a spark in their lives. And for a great many young people, that is needed now more than ever.”
Recreation agencies now take advantage of the city’s waterways and woods to give children a taste of nature in the summer