Ontario’s first roads were trade routes established by First Nations, including the Toronto Carrying Place, which linked Lake Ontario, Lake Simcoe, and Lake Huron. These routes followed the topology and existing water courses, making navigation simple and avoiding steep hills. Many modern streets, such as Toronto’s Davenport Road, follow these old trails. With the establishment […]
Category: History
In the 1950s, the TTC numbered its bus and trolley coach routes in a systematic fashion. But with rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s, that scheme came to an end.
Union Station’s Great Hall is one of Toronto’s great indoor spaces. The station was constructed during Toronto’s first great building boom, in an era that began with E.J. Lennox’s Old City Hall (completed in 1899), and concluded with the completion of the Bank of Commerce Building, opened in 1931. Work on Union Station, built for […]
An interactive map depicting intercity rail services in Ontario and Quebec in 1955
It’s worth wondering why Toronto has a street named after a Scottish politician who had nothing to do with its history.
Ontario’s other Union Station is a charming reminder of a once-proud electric railway in Southwestern Ontario
Kingston Road is one of Toronto’s oldest and most important thoroughfares. Sections of the road were first laid out by Asa Danforth in 1799, though a straighter, more direct route was established by the early 1800s. By the 1830s, it was a busy stagecoach route, connecting Toronto with Cobourg, Belleville, and Kingston. As Toronto grew […]
On February 26, 1920, Ontario’s provincial highway network was born. That year, 16 highways were established across southern Ontario, between the Ottawa and Detroit Rivers. These highways, previously maintained by townships and counties, connected the province’s largest cities and provided important links to Quebec and the United States. In 1925, these highways were assigned numbers […]
A few weeks ago, I went for another long-distance bus trip. I started my journey in Downtown Toronto, and continued on to Peterborough and Pembroke, before arriving in Ottawa late in the evening. Apart from the Toronto-Peterborough leg aboard a packed, delayed bus, this was the most pleasant of all my long-distance bus trips. Greyhound’s […]
Stop 17 shelter in Thornhill On Yonge Street in Thornhill, a small green hut sits beside the busy roadway at the entrance to Cricklewood Park. On the side of the small building, a wood sign says “Stop 17.” Hundreds of buses and thousands of cars pass by this hut daily, yet few may know about […]
Sean Marshall 