It’s been 20 years since Toronto City Council voted to take down the Gardiner Expressway East. It was the on-ramp to an expressway to Scarborough that was never built. Over the decades, the Gardiner Expressway East became too expensive to maintain and there was a growing belief that building more highways would not solve traffic congestion.
“It was a very contentious decision,” said Catherine Dean, public art officer for the City of Toronto.
In the end, demolition of the Gardiner Expressway East began in 2000 but not without a plan that would salvage some of the pillars and bents that supported the ill-fated expressway.
These pillars line the well-used bike and walking paths along Lake Shore Boulevard East that connect people to the Don Valley River and the Leslie Street Spit.
Artist John McKinnon was hired to decide on which pillars would be saved.
“The artist was actually part of the design team which was led by DTAH…to work on the overall concept for this project,” said Dean.
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As you move through the area, you will notice other components of the artwork: A series of 114 bronze mosaic tiles that involved community members, were laid down on the north-west corner of Leslie Street and Lake Shore Boulevard East.
Photos by Toronto photographer Peter MacCallum, which document the demolition of the Gardiner Expressway East as well as other demolitions of other places in the area – are affixed to the pillars and bents.
“It’s sort of an ongoing thing for him (MacCallum), to memorialize these previous infrastructural or industrial histories of the city,” said Dean.
There is also a circle of granite stone which has inscriptions from local writers and authors.
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Altogether, the unique stretch along Lake Shore Boulevard East, from Leslie Street to just before the DVP East, has become a popular breeze through for motorists, cyclists and pedestrians while preserving a small piece of Toronto history.
“I think it’s an interesting remnant of a time in the city when all of those expressways were being proposed and none of them were built so, it is a type of snap shot of a particular time in urban planning and things that the city could have been that it didn’t become,” said Dean.
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