There’s a ghost at 543 Arlington Ave.

It’s a narrow, empty lot with a chain-link fence and a wooden gate on a street that’s a mishmash of architectural styles, typical of the Toronto neighbourhoods where homes were built by working-class individuals rather than by a large developer all at once.

The lot, its grass trim and litter free, is an undeveloped vestige of the Spadina Expressway that had been planned to cut through Cedarvale Park and ravine running behind Arlington. More than 45 years since it was cancelled, this lot and other ghosts of the expressway exist among us in the form of properties that were expropriated for it.

Last month, the City of Toronto issued a report titled “Disposition of Spadina Expressway Properties — Memorandum of Understanding with Infrastructure Ontario.” The report reads like a map to lost graves of old political battles and was issued “for the efficient and effective management and disposition” of the remaining 58 Spadina Expressway Properties.

In previous years, more than $27 million worth of Spadina properties were sold off. That there are still 58 left is a testament to how deeply a freeway can affect a city, even if only a stub of it was actually built — today’s Allen Rd. that runs from Highway 401 to Eglinton Ave. W.

There is no political fight more storied in Toronto’s recent history than the one over the Spadina Expressway. The anti-amalgamation battle in the mid-1990s was perhaps bigger, but they lost the fight. With Spadina, the right side won, or at least that’s how history has viewed June 3, 1971, when then-premier Bill Davis spoke out in the Ontario Legislature against a plan to drive more freeways through the city that would destroy neighbourhoods along the way.

“If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start,” said Davis. “But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.”

The words sound like they could be spoken today by an urban activist, a time when we’re still widening roads, contemplating expressways through the Greenbelt, rebuilding the Gardiner, and maintaining highway-like roads through dense urban areas.

It’s good to be on the right side of history, and the Spadina Expressway is famous not just because it was stopped along with a number of other freeways planned for the city, but because of the grassroots citizen opposition that rose up and fought the bulldozers.

The amount of land a freeway needs is staggering. Look at the massive, complicated interchange of Highways 427 and 401. If you lay its footprint over the downtown core it would cover the entire financial district and stretch from Spadina Ave. to Church St.

The Spadina Expressway would have been a little defter at carving a path through the central city, following Cedarvale and Nordheimer ravines, much the same way the DVP follows the Don Valley, before tunnelling under Casa Loma and continuing down Spadina, through the Annex and towards U of T and Chinatown.

Today, on the southeast corner of Spadina and Bloor, there are three Heritage Toronto plaques telling the story, but other traces of the plan’s effect on the shape of Toronto today can be found nearby. South of Bloor, a few U of T structures, including New College’s 1967 building, are set back from Spadina and architecturally turn their backs towards it as they anticipated the noisy and dirty expressway when they were designed.

North of Bloor, on Spadina Rd., more than 20 properties are still part of the expressway land holdings and are “saleable” as per this new report. Further north of Dupont, the Toronto Archives and a stretch of Neo-Edwardian town homes are all set back from Spadina Rd. behind “nominal” expressway properties in the form of a linear parkette and the Archive’s parking lot, both of which are not intended for sale but rather recommended for transfer from provincial ownership to the City of Toronto.

Following the freeway’s erstwhile path north into Nordheimer and Cedarvale ravines, traces of the expressway-to-be are harder to spot. Instead, various emergency exits for the Spadina subway extension, which opened in 1978, can be seen in the ravines, with hot air and subway sounds regularly emanating from the door vents. Between the north end of Cedarvale Park and Eglinton West Subway station another cluster of properties, mostly parcels of land in backyards along Strathearn Rd. and a few other properties, remain as the last vestiges of the expressway. The city recommends most of these properties be offered to adjacent homeowners at market prices.

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Walking the two residential blocks between Cedarvale and Eglinton, it’s easy to visualize how much of the city the expressway would have taken out and to get an idea of what was bulldozed to the north. The Toronto Archives has a rather amazing online collection of aerial photos of the city of most years between 1947 and 1992 and looking through them is a way to see how the city changed over time.

On some of the older aerial photos from the 1960s there are hand-drawn lines over the houses south and north of Eglinton where the expressway was to be. North of Eglinton, where the Allen is today, was thick with houses for two decades. The earliest 1947 photos show streets of new homes with open fields further north and other streets without houses: this post-war neighbourhood was being invented quickly. By 1969, though a strip had been clear-cut north of Eglinton for the expressway, and, had Davis not stopped it, the same would have happened to the south.

Einstürzende Neubauten is a German experimental industrial band formed in West Berlin in 1980. Their name translates to “collapsing new buildings” and was a comment on the absurd disposability of cheap post-war buildings that went up in war-devastated Germany.

They could have been from Toronto though. We built the city, not always cheaply even, and then devoured it soon after, here for the expressway, or downtown for parking lots. Perhaps we should keep 543 Arlington Ave. and install a plaque there too to remember what almost was.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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