A few of Toronto’s street names hint at the rapid outwards expansion that took place on the city’s waterfront over the past century, like the concentric rings in a tree trunk.

Street names such as Front, Harbour and the Esplanade.

At one time, the shoreline of Lake Ontario ran alongside each of these three urban thoroughfares, before infilling extended the city further into the harbour.

This week, a more tangible reminder of Toronto’s transient shoreline became visible in a construction pit at 90 Harbour St.: the west wall of what used to be Harbour Square wharf.

“People are shocked and amazed when they learn how far out the shoreline has been extended over the years,” says Gary Miedema, associate director at Heritage Toronto.

The agency, which is partially funded by the city, raises awareness about Toronto’s rich cultural and architectural heritage through a series of walking tours.

“However, it’s not just tourists, it’s also Torontonians that are confused as to why Front St. is called Front St.,” says Miedema.

But the shore of Lake Ontario today — now bordered in the downtown area by Queens Quay, is half a kilometre south of Front.

The partially buried remains of the wharf jut from a large mound of earth at the construction site where a new office and condominium complex is being built by development company Menkes.

“We stopped work in that area of the site and immediately called an archaeologist,” says Guy Belanger, who heads the project.

Belanger says the company has unearthed other wharves in previous excavations.

David Robertson, a senior archaeologist with Archaeological Services Inc. who inspected the wharf wall, says it’s not an unusual find.

“I’ve seriously lost count of how many of these we’ve uncovered,” says Robertson. “I’ve probably come across two to three of them a year over the last nine years.”

Robertson says he approved the removal of the wharf after examining the structure over the past couple of weeks.

“These things are a very basic piece of waterfront infrastructure,” he says. “They’re not very remarkable — they mark a period of development, but that’s about it.”

Robertson added that contamination from the old rail yard above is another reason these wharves aren’t preserved.

But just how did the wharf become landlocked in the first place?

Miedema says it wasn’t global warming or drought that initiated this change, but rather the infrastructure demands made by an increasingly industrialized city.

“It began with the railroads coming to town along the waterfront in the 1850s,” says Miedema. “And with rail comes industry, because of the ease of access it provides.”

By the beginning of the 20th century, with a burgeoning rail network itself built on infill, and a paucity of berths for large ships, there was a need to address the acute shortage of real estate along the city’s shoreline.

In May 1911 a federal law was passed that saw the creation of the Toronto Harbour Commission — a body that was charged with managing, controlling and developing the facilities of the harbour. A year later, the commission unveiled a $19-million dollar plan (equivalent to about$400 million today) that would transform the waterfront into a modern port.

According to Derek Hayes’ Historical Atlas of Toronto, changes to the harbour included reclaiming more than three square miles of new land, transforming Ashbridge’s Bay into an integral part of Toronto’s new port, and dredging the shallow harbour shoreline to a depth of more than seven metres to allow access to sea-going freighters.

“Creating new wharves and docks for the shipping made perfect sense,” says Miedema. “The water was the way in, and the easiest and cheapest way out of the city.”

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The Harbour Square wharf, completed in 1913, was one of the new permanent features designed to accommodate these larger ships. The submerged foundations of the wharf consisted of a series of cribs — each a structure composed of a series of logs laid perpendicular to one another, as in a game of Jenga. Each crib was filled with rock to add ballast to the structure.

It is these cribs that are currently visible at 90 Harbour St.

The Toronto Harbour Commission building — today the offices of the Toronto Port Authority at 60 Harbour St. — was built on this wharf four years later.

But further land reclamation efforts affected Harbour Square wharf, and between 1926 and 1928 the structure was subsumed by lake fill.

Miedema says it’s ironic that the area, which for much of its history was a working harbour, has now become a recreational district lined with condominiums.

“But it does say something about the incredible ingenuity of human beings and their ability to entirely change the environment in which they live and work, for good and bad,” says Miedema.

“And the discovery of this old wharf wall is a nice reminder of the incredible story behind the changing shoreline of the city.”

U-boat comes to Toronto

On June 10, 1919, German U-boat UC-97 pulled up alongside Harbour Square wharf in Toronto’s harbour.

This was not part of a Teutonic invasion, but rather one stop on the submarine’s tour en route to the Great Lakes Training Centre in Chicago.

The U-boat was part of a fleet that had surrendered to the British navy at the end of the First World War. It was one of five submarines given to the U.S. Navy by the British Admiralty.

Torontonians flocked to Harbour Square wharf to inspect the submarine.

The 491-ton vessel now sits on the bottom of Lake Michigan in 300 feet of water, having been scuttled by the U.S. Navy in 1921.

The wreckage of UC-97 was located in 1992 by the Chicago-based company A&T Recovery.