How one storm reshaped Toronto
Ever wonder why Island Road isn’t on an island? The answer lies with Hurricane Hazel
Island Road in Marie Curtis Park is one of the oddest roads in the city. It undulates like an asphalt roller-coaster as it meanders south from Lakeshore Road, along the west side of Etobicoke Creek. The road, you see, is sinking in places. Somewhat fun to ride on a mountain bike, less so in a car.
A gently sinking road is one sign that a landscape might be holding secrets. In this case, so does the road’s name as there’s no island here today, nor is there a view of an island where the road terminates at a parking lot by the beach. This mystery was “solved” by looking at the digitized aerial photograph collection online at the Toronto Archives, a stockpile of photos from 1947 to 1992 that often tells this city’s stories visually.
This week marks the 67th anniversary of Hurricane Hazel, the rainfall disaster that saw creeks in the GTA rise over their banks, washing away houses and costing 81 lives. The most well-known location of Hazel’s destruction is the subdivision that was along Raymore Drive near Lawrence Avenue and Scarlett Road, where 38 people died when their houses, built in the Humber River floodplain, were swept away.
Today, Raymore Park marks the area, as does a plaque on the ruins of a footbridge over the Humber River that was also destroyed.
The geography of the other areas in the GTA tragically affected by Hazel is sometimes less clear, including the area around the mouth of Etobicoke Creek where seven people were killed when three streets in the Long Branch neighbourhood were flooded by Hazel. Several homes here were also destroyed, some even pushed into Lake Ontario along with some trailers in the Pleasant Valley Trailer Park, once located on the Mississauga side of creek, between Lakeshore Road and the railway corridor that today carries GO trains. The aerial photos taken in the years before that event reveal a dramatically different landscape.
Today the numbered northsouth streets of Long Branch end at Forty Second at the east side of Marie Curtis Park, but before Hazel there were two more streets where the park is now, and in the 1947 photo, the earliest on the archives site, Lake Promenade, the street parallel to the lake, extended west, across what is now the park and current mouth of Etobicoke Creek, on a long spit of sand crowded with cottages.
Most intriguing is that south of the railway line Etobicoke Creek split into two branches, creating an island with yet more houses and cottages on it, eventually flowing into Lake Ontario at the end of the sand spit. The mystery of Island Road was “solved” (for me, anyway) as was the reason for the roller-coaster road: it’s built on unstable landfill that has settled over time.
It also explains the curious fact that the small chunk of land on the west side of the creek today, all part of Marie Curtis Park, belongs to Toronto, not Mississauga: the city limit border follows the old, western branch of the creek that was filled in after Hazel.
At some point before Hazel, as the 1953 photo reveals, a channel was created in the sand spit, establishing the current mouth of the creek. After Hazel, the streets and homes in the floodplain were razed, and by the mid-1970s, the trailer park gave way to apartment buildings.
Unless a witness to the actual change, landscapes give the impression of being permanent; there since time began. The photos quickly dispel that, and show how radically the area has changed relatively recently, and why flood-prone land was protected from development afterward. Since these initial discoveries, I’ve since come across the work of local historians who have documented more of the changes.
The power of water is always working on the land, gnawing at it, even if less dramatic and tragic than Hurricane Hazel. Follow the Etobicoke Creek paved trail north of the tracks, through the thick ravine forest in the aptly named Alderwood neighbourhood. In 2019, the Toronto Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) completed work on a retaining wall and rock buttresses here to strengthen the creek bank that had suffered from erosion and encroached on the path.
Currently, that path ends south of the Queen Elizabeth Way in Etobicoke Valley Park, but as the Ministry of Transportation is rehabilitating the QEW bridge over Etobicoke Creek, the City of Toronto and TRCA are working on a trail extension that will continue north under the highway and connect to the ever-growing Sherway Gardens neighbourhood on the Toronto side and, using the old Middle Road Bridge built in 1909, connect these trails to Mississauga too. Though the trails don’t extend north of The Queensway, they will provide easy and car-free ravine and lake access for thousands more residents.