Mayor John Tory wasted little time Wednesday morning before dismissing a modest plan to preserve the remarkable remnants of an 1831 drain, found earlier this year by archeologists excavating the North St. Lawrence Market site. The cost, he fumed, simply cannot be justified.

The $1.96 million project involved displaying a small portion of the massive stone structure behind a glass viewing “portal” that would have been installed inside the $91.5 million North Market building, to be completed by 2020. That solution, as the Star reported, was a significantly scaled down version of an earlier heritage preservation and interpretation plan considered by city staff but then dismissed as unworkable.

The mayor’s conspicuously political reaction — a showy response to Doug Ford’s presence in the mayoral race — is a choice example of how Toronto politicians have nickel-and-dimed, or erased, an historical record that is not theirs to remove.

The city’s heritage — in this case, a site that has operated continuously as a food market since 1803 — is a collective responsibility, and such gestures reflect a careless disregard for council’s duty to be stewards of that past.

But quite apart from the moral case for protecting this find, many other cities know that such archeological discoveries have proven to be hugely successful draws for tourists and residents alike.

Put another way, the amount spent preserving these sites represents an investment that will pay for itself many times over. It is not a cost, and I am shocked that the mayor, who describes himself as a supporter of Toronto’s heritage, doesn’t see the value that lies beneath one of the city’s pre-eminent tourist destinations.

Cities around the world have found innovative ways to surface these finds because they understand the economic potential of archeological tourism. We don’t do that in Toronto. Instead, we bury or bulldoze them in the name of some cost-cutting bogeyman. Penny wise, pound foolish as the saying goes.

There are numerous examples of how to do this kind of preservation well. One of the most interesting recent examples I’ve come across is a Metro station in Rome, a city where archeology is a fact of life for developers and municipal agencies.

Instead of mounting small-minded or excessively technical objections, city officials there act as responsible stewards while taking advantage of the opportunity that archeology affords.

With this Metro station, which opened in the spring, the artifacts from a site discovered during tunnelling have been put on display, offering commuters and visitors a multi-level museum-on-the-go experience that seamlessly connects the remote past to the daily here-and-now.

“As passengers descend the station’s stairways,” The Telegraph noted in its description of the station, “they will travel back in time, from the Middle Ages to Imperial Rome and right back to Republican Rome. The deeper they get, the further back in history they go.”

This is how smart place-making works.

The North Market, obviously, isn’t a two-millennium-year-old site, but the opportunity to create a compelling interpretive space that integrates these subsurface features with artifacts found at the dig and other objects connected to the Toronto’s rich food history seems like an absolute no-brainer.

The city, however, wants to build a revenue-generating parking garage under the North Market building, and I fear the cost and complexity of protecting the archeological heritage will get in the way of a facility whose role in life will be to add vehicle congestion to the downtown on Saturday mornings. Absurd.

The mayor, according to his press release, has punted this problem back to city staff and the councillor Paul Ainslie, the chair of the committee handling the file.

That 19th century drain is gold, not a money sink. My hope is that they will quickly turn their attention to identifying potential funding sources — e.g., the $11.8 million currently sitting in the reserve fund for Section 37 contributions in Ward 28, contributions from future developments in the St. Lawrence area, or a parking levy.

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I’m not especially optimistic, to be honest. Silly season is upon us, and so Mayor Tory seems more interested in neutralizing a zingy Doug Ford sound bite than securing an investment that tethers the city’s buried past to its booming future.

Toronto journalist John Lorinc is co-editor of The Ward Uncovered: The Archeology of Everyday Life, to be published next spring by Coach House Books.

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