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In 1889, a group of businessmen founded the Toronto Belt Land Corporation to develop large parcels of land on the outskirts of the city. They envisioned a large boom that would swiftly cause these areas to grow into bustling suburbs. As these areas to the north and west of the city were out of range of the city's streetcar lines, they formulated a plan for a railway to connect them to downtown Toronto.
While the railway was initially proposed as a simple connector, it soon evolved into two separate loops of track, one north, the other west. The north track circled through the Don Valley and Mt. Pleasant Cemetery before linking up with the Grand Trunk Railway tracks near where Caledonia Road is today. The western Humber Loop followed Grand Trunk tracks west out of Union Station as far as Swansea, where it turned north through Parkdale before circling back around to return to Union Station.
Construction began on the rail in 1890, only about a year after the company's founding. While the early years of construction were fuelled by optimism, the anticipated land boom was halted by a depression midway through the railway's construction. The demand for suburban real estate crashed along with the company's fortunes. The Toronto Belt Line Corporation went bankrupt in early 1892, leaving the project to be completed by the Grand Trunk Railway with a final bill of $462,000 or roughly $11,750,200 today.¹ While a project such as this was inevitably going to be expensive, the bill was inflated by lavish promotional expenses incurred by the Toronto Belt Line Corporation.²
One brochure marketing the new railway extolled the virtues of the lands that would be made accessible by the line, "... the Toronto Belt Line Railway makes its advent. Its mission is to economize time by rapid transit, and to carry men, women and children with comfort, safety and speed beyond the cramped and crowded city to the airy uplands; whence, having enjoyed the rest and refreshment of commodious homes and spacious grounds, they can return on the morrow to renew, with quickened energies, the task of life. It will also disclose some of the beauties which nature has lavished around Toronto which too long have remained unknown...”³
The first train on the new line left Union station at 2:40 pm on June 30, 1892. The locomotive pulled three passenger cars, each filled with seats made of cane and polished wood. According to the Globe, the cars were "perhaps the prettiest and brightest to be found on any [rail] road running into the city."⁴
For the first few months, the new line was very busy. "Each train is filled with hundreds availing themselves of the opportunity to inspect the much talked of route."⁵ However, the excitement soon wore off, and the ridership dwindled. After only two years, service on the line decreased from six cars a day, to only three, before closing completely in November 1894.
The decline of the Toronto Belt Line was due, in part, to the depression and the unrealised land boom. However, the fare was around 25 cents ($5.00 today) depending on the length of ride, which was considerably higher than the fare charged by the city's streetcars.⁶ This was too much for most people for a daily service.
Years after service on the Belt Line ended, Toronto's economy recovered and construction began on the subdivisions the Toronto Belt Line Corporation dreamed of decades earlier. These new neighbourhoods required fuel and building supplies as they grew and people moved in. In 1910, the Grand Trunk Railway rebuilt the northern portion of the Yonge St. loop so trains could freight materials to the new suburbs. Some tracks remained in the abandoned parts of the route until World War I, when they were deconstructed and shipped to France as part of the war effort.
Trains continued to run along parts of the Belt Line until the 1970s when increased road infrastructure eliminated the need for rail service. In 1988, the city acquired the land and began converting the railway corridor into a recreational path. The resulting trail was completed in 1993 and named the Kay Gardner Belt Line after a city councillor who had spearheaded the project.

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While industry was the early Esplanade's fate, it wasn't, at first, the vision that Toronto residents held for the new street. Original plans for the Esplanade hoped to clean Toronto's waterfront up and provide clearer access to a shoreline that had become cluttered with wharves and warehouses. In the early 1800s, the young city was pressed up against the shores of Lake Ontario, and the harbour was crowded. The Esplanade was originally slated to be a 30-meter wide road that would be built on in-filled land, extending the city farther into the lake. This vision was not to be, however. It, like so many things in the early history of Canada, would be forever changed by the railways.
The timing lined up. While plans for the Esplanade were being drawn up, railway giants were searching for a way into the city. With real estate already in short supply, the prospect of securing a route for tracks all the way through the city was daunting. The alternative however⁠—bypassing the city entirely⁠—would force railway companies to lose out on Toronto's valuable economic prospects. By 1856, the Grand Trunk railway had already built railway track on both sides of the city and were using horse-drawn omnibuses to ferry passengers across Toronto. The company needed new land, and the Esplanade would make it for them, transforming lake into solid earth. They struck a deal with local politicians: in return for a 12-meter-wide stretch of the Esplanade, the company would underwrite the cost of infilling the harbour.
This, on top of the economic promise posed by the railway, was enough to secure the deal, and once the Grand Trunk Railway set up shop along the Esplanade, other railways soon followed. In 1858, the first Union Station opened along the Esplanade, completing the railway connection across the city. It was the first of many stations that would open in the area, and it, like those to come, quickly became overcrowded. Among the railway companies which would come and go throughout the years along the Esplanade were the Grand Trunk, the Ontario, Simcoe & Huron Railway, the Great Western, the Toronto & Nipissing Railway, the Credit Valley Railway, the Canadian Northern Railway, and, of course, the famous Canadian Pacific Railway. At one point, all train traffic which entered or left Toronto from the east travelled along the Esplanade.
While not all of these railways required either their own tracks or their own stations, the Esplanade soon became crowded. The tracks which crisscrossed the road posed a real danger to pedestrians and other road users, since there were neither underpasses nor bridges built to separate trains and foot traffic. By 1866, for instance, no fewer than seven tracks crossed the nearby Yonge Street.¹ Traffic control, once it was established, was minimal: manual gates were operated by a railway employee perched in a short tower with a view of the oncoming tracks.
By the time the 20th century dawned, it was clear that a solution needed to be found soon for the overcrowding issue. Unfortunately, neither the city nor the railway companies could agree on who, exactly, was responsible for finding (and funding) this solution. The construction of over- or underpasses would be expensive and time consuming, and it wasn't a burden anyone wanted to take on. Then, in 1904, a surprising solution was born from tragedy—The Great Fire of Toronto. The fire raged through the city east of the original Union Station. It destroyed more than 100 buildings, and, in consequence, created a whole lot of empty land on which to start fresh. A new Union Station was built on this land in 1914, and within a decade, a new railway corridor was being created away from the Esplanade, complete with grade separation that would protect pedestrians. It was completed in 1930, and gradually, the Esplanade became far quieter.
Other changes had taken place for the Esplanade too. In the 1920s, the harbour was filled in farther, and the Esplanade had its shoreline taken from it as the waterfront moved farther south. For several decades, the neighbourhood fell into decay. Almost all of the railway traffic moved away, and the warehouses gradually closed. Vast areas fell into disuse, becoming seas of empty parking lots.
Then, in the 1970s, the city breathed new life into the Esplanade through a project of urban renewal. The so-called St. Lawrence Neighbourhood was planned and built in the area. Empty railway yards were converted into parks, and brick row houses, townhouses, and eight- and ten- storey apartment buildings were built to provide more accessible and affordable housing. A community grew up where industry had once thrived. Today, some of the last traces of the Esplanade's history exist towards its eastern end, in the Distillery District, a national historic site that boasts the largest collection of Victorian-era industrial buildings in North America. Here still, if you look closely, you can catch glimpses of the Esplanade's rich railway history.
This Story Location brought to you by the Toronto Railway Museum. Discover Toronto's rich and fascinating railway history at the museum, located at the John Street Roundhouse in downtown Toronto. You can also take a virtual tour and two audio guided tours of the museum and its exhibits in the On This Spot app. For more information visit TorontoRailwayMuseum.com

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In the early years of the town of York, during the beginning of the nineteenth century, transport to and from the town consisted largely of boats. There were few roads during that time, and the ones that had been built were rough and difficult to travel. The lake provided York with easy access to the rest of Canada, and its waterfront therefore became busy. Industry and manufacturing crowded along the lakefront, fighting for access to the water. By the 1830s and 1840s, there was little space for any more growth. Then, in the early 1850s, the railway came to Toronto, bringing with it an increase in industry to the young city. Yet if the city was to expand any further, it needed to solve its real estate problem—it needed to create more waterfront.
The first expansion of the downtown core took place in the 1850s, with the reclamation of land south of Esplanade. This infilling of the harbour was only the first of many that would reshape Toronto's downtown. And while the waters of Lake Ontario were being reclaimed for real estate, something else was happening to the city's marshes. When York was still a young town, the area around the mouth of the Don River was known as "The Ashbridges Bay Marsh", and was described in 1794 as "low lands covered with rushes, abounding with wild ducks and swamp blackbirds.”¹
Within a century, however, the marsh habitat would be devastated by pollution and sewage from York, and from the many mills built along the waterway. Then, in the 1870s, the inhabitants of the area built breakwaters throughout the river, and in the 1890s, the Keating Channel entirely redirected the Don River. The death knell of the marshes officially sounded in 1912, when the Toronto Harbour Commission moved forward on a plan to transform the Ashbridge Bay Marshes into a massive industrial area. Within a decade, 500 acres of the marsh had been filled in, and there were plans to fill in another 500 acres. Industry grew over the marshlands until they had been all but forgotten.
Meanwhile, the expansion of the waterfront continued. The city continued to grow. The railway was soon built on the first section of infilled harbour, and still, the shortage of real estate continued. Along with the transformation of the Ashbridges Bay Marsh into a new industrial port, the harbour was dredged to accommodate sea-going vessels, and more wharves were constructed. In the 1920s, another wave of land reclamation took place, continuing the expansion of the harbour lands.
Then, in the 1950s, the city of Toronto underwent the process of suburbanization. Those who could afford to do so moved away from the downtown core and into the wealthier suburbs. Yet they still needed to commute to work downtown, and so a new wave of development overtook Toronto: the building of roads. The Gardiner Express was constructed along the waterfront in 1958, cutting the lakefront off from the rest of the city. The Don River was even further lost to the city, its shores crowded with off-ramps and bridges. For decades, the waterfront remained an industrial port zone, and for Toronto's citizens, there was little chance to access the shore.
In more recent decades, however, there has been a movement by Toronto to revitalize its waterfront. In 1999, as part of a bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, a task force was created to look into the redevelopment of the waterfront, and while the Olympic bid failed, the taskforce did not. It concluded that redevelopment of the waterfront would create "a major, positive economic impact on the City, the region and the country.”² The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, now simply known as Waterfront Toronot, was founded in 2001, and in the last two decades, the character of Toronto's waterfront has gradually shifted. Today, the harbour has become a recreational district filled with condominiums and new parks. The redevelopment efforts continue into the present, proving that there is no limit to the amount of times humans can redefine the spaces they inhabit.
This Story Location brought to you by the Toronto Railway Museum. Discover Toronto's rich and fascinating railway history at the museum, located at the John Street Roundhouse in downtown Toronto. You can also take a virtual tour and two audio guided tours of the museum and its exhibits in the On This Spot app. For more information visit TorontoRailwayMuseum.com

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By 1911 the station was receiving 130 trains everyday and upwards of 40,000 passengers! It was decided that a larger station was needed to accommodate the volume of passengers and trains to growing Toronto.²
Construction began on the new station in 1913 but was stagnated by the first world war. Though it took longer than expected to finish, Union Station was eventually the largest urban station to be built in the 20th century and was designated as a protected heritage resource by Parks Canada in 1975.³
Despite competition for freight and passengers, [rival railroads] found reasons from time to time to cooperate, as in their joint use of Totonto's monumental Union Station. A legacy of the Grand Trunk and twelve years in the building, it remained unfinished until the [Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway] completed the work and the Prince of Wales presided over the opening ceremony on Canada's birthday in 1927.⁴
The Union Station was designed in Paris by G.A. Ross, R.H. MacDonald, and Hugh Jones of the Canadian Pacific Railway as well as John M. Lyle of Toronto. It was built in the Beaux-Arts style with barrel vaulted ceilings and large tall windows on the east and west walls. The north and south walls were engraved with the names of the cities serviced by the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railways as an impressive show of the span of Canada and grandeur of the rail. The interior was made with stone from Missouri and floors of Tennessee marble with Indiana Limestone making up the exterior of the building.⁵
The train sheds from the original 1895 station were torn down in 1927 and 1928 with the station itself removed in 1931. However the impressive Union Station as it has been rebuilt still stands resolute and as a symbol of transition and transportation across Canada.⁶
Union Station has seen millions of immigrants and travelers over more than a century of operations. One of the unique features of a central train station is that nearly every newcomer has stood on those floors, especially during the interwar years and after the second world war. Newcomers to Canada would travel across the Atlantic to Pier 21 and board a train to take them across Canada to their destinations. For those destined for Toronto it was Union Station that was a symbol of relief, the end of a long journey to a new home.
War brides were one of the immigrant groups that arrived in large numbers after the second world war. When Canadian soldiers were overseas they found wives and started families. After the war ended in 1945 soldiers came home and their wives and children soon followed. Between 1942 and 1947 47,783 war brides and 21,950 children arrived in Canada from all across the world.⁷
One of these war brides was Matsuko Creagen and her son Michael. Matsuko had married Harry Creagen in Japan after the second world war. Harry was a combat engineer during the Korean war, when he fell in love with Matsuko the army did not approve of their relationship and advised Harry against marrying her. Despite their prejudiced advice, Harry and Matsuko were married and had a son in Japan.⁸