Who Got to Decide: Toronto's Waterfront and the Community That Refused to Leave

Stand on the front steps of Union Station, walk south through the rail viaduct, pass under the elevated deck of the Gardiner Expressway, and you arrive at Queens Quay. The street meets a wall of condo towers built between roughly 1985 and 2015. Beyond the condos, the harbour, the ferry terminal, and across the water the low green silhouette of the Toronto Islands. The geography is not strange because of how it looks. It is strange because of how recent all of it is. The shoreline you are standing on did not exist before 1850. The expressway above it opened in stages from 1955 to 1966. The condo wall was not begun until the 1970s. The Islands across the harbour stopped being a residential community for most of their residents in 1969 and almost stopped being one altogether in 1980. Every part of the waterfront the visitor sees today was decided by named actors in the last hundred and twenty years, and the decisions were contested at every turn.

This is the corridor of decisions. The thesis is one sentence. Toronto was built on Lake Ontario and spent a century pretending it was not, and the story of how the city looked back at the lake is the story of who got to decide what the waterfront was for.

The shoreline that moved

The original Lake Ontario shoreline at Toronto ran roughly along the line of what is now Front Street. The street is named for what it used to be at the front of. From the 1850s onward the Grand Trunk and Great Western railways laid track along the lake and filled in the shallows to lay more track. By 1912, when the Toronto Harbour Commission published its Waterfront Development for the City of Toronto plan, the shoreline had moved roughly three hundred metres south of its 1850 position. The strip between the original Front Street and the new lakefill harbour was railway corridor and industrial yards. The lake had been pushed away from the working city in the interest of moving goods.

The Toronto Harbour Commission itself is the institutional actor of this period. The THC was created by federal statute in 1911 and operated as a federally-chartered local board with extraordinary land-acquisition powers. The 1912 plan was a comprehensive lakefilling and industrialization scheme for the entire downtown waterfront. The THC was continuously controversial about whom it served (port industry, downtown developers, federal politics) and whom it did not (lakeside residents, public access advocates). Gene Desfor's academic work on the THC, particularly Reshaping Toronto's Waterfront (Desfor and Vesalon, eds., University of Toronto Press, 2011) is the canonical institutional history. The THC's institutional successor is PortsToronto, which retains the federal charter and continues to manage the harbour.

The expressway

The Gardiner Expressway opened in stages between 1955 and 1966. The elevated portion from Bay Street to the Don Valley walled the downtown off from the waterfront with concrete columns, ramps, and a continuous overhead deck. The expressway is named for Frederick Gardiner, the first Chairman of Metropolitan Toronto from 1953 to 1961. Gardiner is also the named actor for the 1956 Islands expropriation vote, and the coincidence of the name attaching to both the expressway and the Islands decision is not a coincidence: both decisions were made by the same Metro government in the same period under the same chairman. The Gardiner is not named for a Toronto mayor; Frederick Gardiner was a regional politician and never held the city mayoralty.

The Gardiner's effect was to physically sever the city from the lake for the next half century. The decision to build the expressway was made in the postwar consensus that car infrastructure was the priority for downtown investment, the same consensus that produced the Spadina Expressway plan (later defeated by a coalition including Jane Jacobs in 1971) and that produced similar elevated highways in Boston (the Central Artery, later torn down), Seattle (the Alaskan Way Viaduct, later replaced with a tunnel), and most other major North American cities. The Gardiner has been the subject of teardown proposals for two decades. The eastern stub from Jarvis to the Don River came down between 2001 and 2003. The central elevated portion, between Spadina and Jarvis, has been studied repeatedly and remains standing as of 2026.

The honest framing is that the expressway is the literal answer to the question of why the city turned its back on the lake. The city did not turn. It was walled off, by a regional council, in the interest of a planning consensus that prioritized arterial automobile movement over waterfront access.

The Islands and the eviction

The Toronto Islands have been part of the city's geography since before there were any non-Indigenous Torontonians. The Islands were Mississauga seasonal and spiritual territory, especially the western tip at Hanlan's Point, which the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation document in their published history (The Toronto Purchase, 1805, mncfn.ca). The Toronto Purchase, the disputed treaty under which the land was transferred, was originally signed in 1787, found to be blank when examined later, and redone in 1805. The Mississaugas of the Credit settled the resulting land claim with the federal government in 2010 for $145 million, more than two centuries after the disputed transaction.

The Islands also remained a peninsula attached to the eastern mainland until a storm on 13 April 1858 cut the Eastern Gap, the channel where ships now enter Toronto Harbour. From that date forward the Islands were islands. By the late nineteenth century there were summer cottages on the western tip at Hanlan's Point, the central island, and the eastern islands (Ward's and Algonquin), and by the early twentieth century the cottages had become year-round residences for a small permanent community.

In 1956 the Council of Metropolitan Toronto, under Chairman Frederick Gardiner, voted to expropriate the entire Islands residential community and convert the Islands to parkland. The argument was that the public should have full access to the waterfront. The mechanism was eviction. Between 1956 and 1969, the city demolished roughly six hundred cottages on Centre Island and Hanlan's Point. The residents were given notice and removed. Most went. Some did not.

The community that did not go was concentrated on Ward's Island and Algonquin Island, the eastern islands. Through the 1960s the Ward's and Algonquin residents organized through the Toronto Island Residential Community (TIRC). They sued. They occupied. They survived the Centre Island demolitions of the 1960s. They survived a 1980 sheriff's confrontation when Metro Toronto tried to enforce eviction notices and the residents physically blocked the path. They built a coalition that included artists, environmentalists, and provincial politicians. After roughly three decades of fighting, in 1993, the Ontario Legislature passed the Toronto Islands Residential Community Stewardship Act, S.O. 1993, c. 15, granting the surviving households 99-year land leases administered by the Toronto Island Community Trust. The 252 households currently on Ward's and Algonquin Islands are the survivors of the only major Canadian residential community that fought a municipal expropriation and won.

Sally Gibson's More Than an Island: A History of the Toronto Island (Irwin, 1984) is the canonical community history and the source for the cottage-demolition count and the timeline of the 1956 to 1969 expropriations. The Toronto Island Community Trust maintains the eviction archive and the contemporary household records.

The geographic consequence is what the visitor sees today. Centre Island is roughly 230 acres of public parkland, free to all visitors, no admission for the gardens, beaches, or paths. It is the largest piece of free public waterfront in any major Canadian city. The park exists because between 1956 and 1969 the city evicted the residents who lived on the land. The Ward's Island village exists because the residents of that smaller community refused to be evicted. Both facts are true. Both are visible if you walk slowly. The trade is the part the brochure does not name.

Harbourfront, the federal compromise

The waterfront's federal re-engagement with the public began in 1972, when Pierre Trudeau's federal government announced "Harbourfront," a ninety-two-acre downtown waterfront site to be redeveloped from industrial to mixed-use public. The Harbourfront Corporation was the developer. The original promise was a public waterfront, including arts and recreation programming that became the modern Harbourfront Centre.

The execution was condo-heavy. The federal corporation sold most of the lakefront parcels to private developers between the 1970s and the 2000s to subsidize the public programming, producing the present condo wall on either side of the central Harbourfront Centre plaza. What survives of the original promise is approximately ten acres of public-realm programming inside a ninety-two-acre primarily-private redevelopment. The Harbourfront Centre is the survivor of the public waterfront the federal government promised, not the realization of it.

The 1990 to 1992 Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront, chaired by former Toronto mayor David Crombie, issued its interim report Watershed in 1990 and its final report Regeneration: Toronto's Waterfront and the Sustainable City in 1992. The Royal Commission was specifically critical of the Harbourfront privatization and recommended a unified planning authority to control future waterfront redevelopment. The Crombie Commission report is one of the more substantive Canadian urban-policy documents of the period. It is also the document that produced Waterfront Toronto.

Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs

Waterfront Toronto was founded in 2001 as a tri-government corporation (federal, Ontario, City of Toronto). It inherited the eastern waterfront, the area east of Yonge Street, which had not been included in the 1972 Harbourfront redevelopment. Waterfront Toronto's projects include the Lower Don Lands flood-protection landform (which produced Corktown Common in 2013), the Port Lands renaturalization (continuing), and the master plan for Quayside, a twelve-acre parcel at the eastern end of Queens Quay.

In 2017 Waterfront Toronto announced a partnership with Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary, for a smart-city development at Quayside. The proposal involved sensor-instrumented public space, autonomous transportation, and a data-governance framework that was the focus of public criticism from 2018 onward. Bianca Wylie, a Toronto-based open-government advocate, was the most visible critic. The #BlockSidewalk coalition organized opposition through 2019. Sidewalk Labs withdrew its Quayside proposal in May 2020. The company cited "unprecedented economic uncertainty" from the COVID-19 pandemic in its press release. Josh O'Kane's reported book Sideways: The City Google Couldn't Buy (Random House Canada, 2022) is the canonical account of the episode and is explicit that the pandemic was the cover story; the actual cause was sustained public criticism over data governance and democratic accountability, which had eroded political support throughout 2018 and 2019. The Sidewalk Labs episode is the latest answer to the same question the Toronto Harbour Commission asked in 1911: who got to decide what the waterfront was for?

What the corridor adds up to

Walk the eight stops of the Harbourfront and the Islands tour and the question gets named at each stage. Under the Gardiner Expressway at Lower Simcoe and Queens Quay is the literal answer to why the city turned its back on the lake. Harbourfront Centre is the federal compromise: the public plaza paid for by the surrounding condos. The Toronto Music Garden by Yo-Yo Ma and Julie Moir Messervy (opened 1999) is 1.6 acres of public waterfront that worked, next to ninety acres of private waterfront that did not. The Jack Layton Ferry Terminal at Stop 4 is where the listener boards for Centre Island. The midcrossing stop names the 1858 storm that made the Islands islands and the Toronto Purchase that the Mississaugas of the Credit settled in 2010. Centre Island is the public parkland that exists because 600 cottages were demolished. The Ward's Island village is the community that refused to be evicted and won the 1993 Stewardship Act. The return ferry is the resolution: the listener looks back at the skyline and answers the question with a sequence of named actors.

The thesis is not resolvable into a single name. The waterfront was decided by the Toronto Harbour Commission, by Frederick Gardiner, by Pierre Trudeau, by Yo-Yo Ma and Julie Moir Messervy, by David Crombie, by Bianca Wylie, by the Ward's Island and Algonquin Island residents, and by the Mississaugas of the Credit. Each one had a specific decision at a specific moment. None of them had the final word. The waterfront is the running argument among all of them, and the most public part of it exists because one community refused to be evicted.

Once you can read the corridor as a sequence of decisions with named actors, the waterfront stops looking like a place and starts looking like a record. The record is unfinished. The latest entry is whatever Waterfront Toronto and the City Council and the residents of the eastern waterfront decide about the Quayside parcel in the next decade. The question has not closed.