Death and rebirth on the Don River   (Page 1 of 4)

After a decades-long campaign, Canada’s most urban river is nursed back to health

By Ray Ford with photography by Lorne Bridgman

At least 20 wetlands around the Don River have been restored organizations have planted more than half a million trees, shrubs and wildflowers. (Photo: Lorne Bridgman)

LOST RIVERS URBAN H2O FEATURE STORY AND EXTRAS Death and rebirth on the Don Timeline An abridged history of the Don Sidebar Draw me a river Field Report See photos of the Don in four seasons

Even in those flower-child days of 1969, it was a funeral like none Toronto had ever seen. True, there were dozens of cars driving slowly along College Street, a cortège that included a tearful woman in black and a top-hatted man in a Cadillac. But diners behind the plate-glass window of Fran’s Restaurant must have paused, vinegar cruets above their fries, when two placard-carrying girls pedalled by on a tandem bicycle. Instead of a hearse, the procession was led by University of Toronto student Peter Love’s green station wagon — best known among his friends for the amount of beer it could carry. (Around 70 cases, Love confirms with a tinge of undergrad pride.)

Locate the Don River Watershed (Map: Steven Fick/Canadian Geographic)

Love went on to a respectable career, becoming Ontario’s first Chief Energy Conservation Officer, but on that November Sunday, he had swapped the wagon’s usual cargo for pails of water from Toronto’s fetid Don River. The event was the Funeral for the Don, staged by a fledgling environmental group called Pollution Probe. Love, in his best suit, was chauffeuring the dearly departed to its final resting place.

If you were sitting in Fran’s that day, you might have shrugged. For more than a century, the Don had been realigned and sullied, engineered and “improved” until its southern reaches were lined with factories, its broad valley a conduit for cars and trains, its waters fouled by sewage. Mourning a river so obviously past redemption seemed, in the words of a letter writer to The Globe and Mail, “nothing more than grim humour.”

As The Toronto Telegram put it: “They finally had a funeral for the Don River yesterday. Judging from the smell of the ‘deceased,’ it was long overdue.

Yet they say you never really know who your friends are until you’re gone, and that’s certainly true of the Don. By forcing Torontonians to confront their own reflection in the murky waters of Canada’s most urbanized watershed, the mourners helped resurrect the Don and its valley.

Since the funeral, more than 600 hectares of valley land have come under public ownership, at least 20 wetlands have been restored and conservation agencies, municipalities and volunteers have planted more than half a million trees, shrubs and wildflowers. Love now numbers among the thousands who regularly walk, cycle or jog along the river. “I can see an improvement,” he says. “I’m proud of what that Don event did to bring the issue to people’s attention.”

The funeral proved that even at its nadir, the Don still had friends. And without friends, no urban river can survive.

An abridged history of the Don

But surviving is one thing, thriving another. The Don’s health is affected not only by its industrial past — what one waterfront planner calls “the sins of our fathers” — but also by the water-fouling transgressions of everyday life.

Seen from above, the river and its tributaries appear to branch north like an unruly shrub. Its headwaters bubble from the gravel left by retreating glaciers on the Oak Ridges Moraine. Dozens of small rivulets link springs and marshes with larger watercourses, such as Patterson, German Mills and Fisherville creeks. Eventually, they join the east and west branches of the Don or link up near the Forks of the Don. Thirty-eight kilometres from the moraine, the Don makes a sluggish exit into Lake Ontario through the graffiti-scrawled concrete of the Keating Channel.

At the time of the Funeral for the Don, the river’s 36,000- hectare watershed was easy to divide into three regions. The foulest area was near the river’s southern terminus. Rebuilt in Victorian days as an industrial artery for a restless Dominion, the lower Don was a font of goods, everything from flour, lumber, paper, wool and brick to Coleman lanterns, Sunlight soap, Woods tents and sleeping bags, Gooderham’s Bonded Stock whisky and probably even the metal pails Love used to carry the deceased to the funeral. (The Don’s industrial role was no accident. Upper Canada’s first Lieutenant-Governor, John Graves Simcoe, decided to build the new capital of York — now Toronto — east of the river to take advantage of its timber and the sheltered waterfront created by a large peninsula and marsh. As a result, the Don was close to shipping and eventually became a railway corridor, while the larger Humber River, to the west, was surrounded first by farms and later housing.)

The Don’s second region lay to the north, in Toronto’s growing suburbs, where the river and its tributaries functioned as a glorified storm sewer. Beyond the city’s margins, plowed fields turned the water brown in the spring. Still, the upper watershed was clean enough to harbour sensitive brook trout until at least the mid-1940s. Even today, the endangered redside dace, a rainbow-striped minnow, leaps out of the water to snatch insects on the wing. At the same time, the area is reaching what planners call full “build-out.” With a watershed population of 1.2 million and counting, urban intensification and suburban sprawl are increasing the strain on the Don’s waters.

It was the lower river that drew Pollution Probe’s attention. “From the 1960s on, the Don really served as an icon of pollution,” says historian Jennifer Bonnell, who is writing a book about the Don. “It was a problem that was right here. You could see it, smell it.”

The Funeral for the Don set about reframing the public view. Chief among the mourners was arts student Meredith Ware, dressed as Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of the Lieutenant-Governor. Ware read sections of Simcoe’s diary from the 1790s, when waters of Toronto’s inner harbour were “beautifully clear and transparent,” loons swam along the waterfront, the Don abounded with salmon and wolves tracked deer beside the frozen river. On an expedition to gather gooseberries along the river, Simcoe saw “millions of the yellow and black butterflies.”

This elegiac tone was disrupted by a sputtering top-hatted figure played by commerce major Tony Barrett. “He was the cigar-smoking capitalist who snarled: ‘That’s the smell of money. What’s wrong with you people?’” recalls Monte Hummel, then a Pollution Probe organizer and now president emeritus of World Wildlife Fund Canada. Barrett was in mid-screed when medical student John Coombs shoved a pie in his face.

The funeral had the air of kids concocting theatre on a rainy afternoon, yet it worked. Photos of Ware’s keening ran in newspapers across the country (“When I got out of the car and saw the reporters,” she recalls, “right away I started weeping”).

What the mourners couldn’t have known is that the industrial Don was on the verge of a dramatic transformation (see timeline above). When James Onyschuk worked at a riverside warehouse in the 1960s, he’d occasionally check to see what colour the river was: pink, maybe, or bright blue, courtesy of the dyes from an upstream paper mill. Today, former factories have become trendy lofts and upscale car dealerships. North of the funeral site, the plant that provided the material for much of Toronto’s stolid Victorian architecture has been rebranded as the Evergreen Brick Works. It’s an environmental community centre and tourist draw, complete with a farmers’ market and workshops on water conservation, bicycle repairs and home canning.

Peter Hopperton remembers paddling the Don in 1971. “It smelled pretty high by the time you got to the waterfront,” he says. “We were paddling through sewage and condoms and all kinds of stuff.” Now he canoes the river during the annual Paddle the Don spring fundraiser. “You see swans and geese and ducks and snapping turtles,” says Hopperton. On the upper part of the river, he adds, “you really would have no idea you’re in a major metropolitan centre.”

Unless, of course, you test the water.