Serenity in Scarborough
Perched on the Bluffs, a wilderness at city’s doorstep. Micallef,
Recently, I spent a week living on the Scarborough Bluffs and it was wild.
I saw deer, foxes, geese, chipmunks, birds and a waddling groundhog while there. Yet just a short walk from the bluffs took me to busy strip malls and urban life. Toronto is ahead of most places in the way the ravines weave natural landscapes throughout the city, but Scarborough has the most wonderful and extreme blend of town and country to be found here.
I was lucky to get a short residency at Fool’s Paradise, the former home of artist Doris McCarthy set high atop a sheer section of the bluffs and along Gates Gully, a deep ravine at the foot of Bellamy Rd. McCarthy purchased the property when it was near-treeless farmland in 1939 for $1,250, a large sum for a single art teacher at the time. Her mom thought it was folly and referred to it as a “fool’s paradise,” a name McCarthy kept.
Soon after, she designed and built a small cabin on the site, which she later winterized and expanded over the decades into her home and studio. In one of her biographies, she boasted of getting her plans approved by then-Scarborough township’s council.
It’s a special place that couldn’t be replicated today and, in 1998, she willed the house, a portion of its contents, and five acres of property to the Ontario Heritage Trust. She continued to live there until 2010, when she passed away at age 100, and, afterwards, it was turned into a residency for artists, musicians and writers as per her
wishes. Her own $500,000 endowment maintains the property in perpetuity. In 1986, she had previously donated seven acres of the property to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.
The quirky house is preserved just about as McCarthy left it and is only open to the public on Doors Open weekend in May, a building worth visiting if you can make it.
I thought a lot about what it must have been like to be her, alone but resilient on the bluffs. I, a city person, got spooked at night by various animal sounds and the lack of other people around. A silly thing, but it takes a bit of time to get used to being alone.
Over the years, she took advantage of the conservation authority’s program to plant trees to prevent erosion, and today the site is ringed by them, save for the expansive lake view. Adjacent farmland was also subdivided into lots and a residential neighbourhood now surrounds Fool’s Paradise.
I spent a lot of time looking at Lake Ontario while there. It has a real personality. On hot and humid days, when the air is heavy and still, the lake was so calm and tranquil, with large swirls in the turquoise water like the ones I’ve seen in the Mediterranean Sea on similar summer days. On an overcast day, grey waves crashed over erosion barriers, and it felt like Nova Scotia and the Bay of Fundy.
I frequented nearby spots such as Cudia Park, with its panoramic view of Bluffer’s Park and its deep, forested ravine, and the Doris McCarthy Trail that follows Gates Gully to the lake.
These places, along with nearby Sylvan Park, are publicly accessible and may give a sense of what the bluffs were like for McCarthy before the city built up around her.
What I also liked was the opportunity to explore the city from Fool’s Paradise.
Though I’ve been to Scarborough countless times, day tripping is different than staying put in a place for a spell. What struck me most when walking or biking up from Fool’s Paradise is how quickly the transition from “country” to “city” is. Kingston Rd. is wide and fast and when speeding along in a car it’s easy to miss the subtleties, such as the cosy bars tucked into strip malls, and busy multicultural bakeries and restaurants. There are also places like Stop 17 Variety at St. Clair Ave. and Stop 20 Plaza a little farther east, both ghosts of the old Kingston Rd. electric tram, which hasn’t run for decades.
Venturing farther north in the evenings to plazas on Eglinton and Lawrence Aves. revealed the urban oases I know mostly by day, but were often as busy as downtown streets in the evening, with people coming and going. Clusters of towers, as is the Toronto way, rained down the sounds of domestic life on warm evenings when balcony doors and windows are open, allowing the tinkling of utensils and the blare of TVs to escape.
Then there are abrupt shifts to quiet meandering streets of detached houses, or vast lightindustrial neighbourhoods where auto body shops bang late into the night, and the occasional creek-side paths that connects neighbourhoods safely.
It goes on and on and it was a treat to wander.
A week in Scarborough has me wanting to return soon and often. No foolin’.