Commissioners Street Bridge

Transcript:

As my time and your time intersect imagine all the other tendrils of time that water connects us to. In the Pleistocene Epoch, also known as the "Ice Age,” the place where we stand was covered by the Laurentide Glacier which rose over a kilometre above us. Sheets of ice shifted and thawed over millennia becoming the prehistoric proglacial Lake Iroquois whose shores touched what is today known as Davenport Road. More recently, this place was marshland, known as Ashbridges Marsh. Settlers believed the marsh was an impediment to progress.

Not every place needs to be understood or accessed by humans. A colonial worldview saw the marsh as wasted land, when in fact it was rich with more-than-human life.

Look north to where the river intersects with multiple roadways. It may be hard to see but this is where the Don River splits in two. The 1886 ‘Don Improvement Project’ saw the Don River straightened and channelized, an attempt to harness the river’s utility and prevent flooding. It failed. In the early 1910s the Keating Channel diverted the heavily polluted Don River 90 degrees into Lake Ontario while the meandering mouth of the Don River was filled in along with the heavily polluted Ashbridges Bay Marsh where we stand.