Saturday, 12 April 2008 12:00

Note: The Leslie Street Spit is another name for Tommy Thompson Park, where our spectacular May 10th Spring Bird Festival Walk takes place.

Toronto's Accidental Treasure

The Leslie Spit is nature at its rejuvenating best. The debate now is over how much to 'parkify'

Christopher Hume, The Toronto Star

It is a dump gone wild, an accidental nature preserve, partly industrial, partly natural, but above all, a huge civic asset.

Welcome to the Leslie Street Spit, also known as Tommy Thompson Park, soon to be incorporated into Lake Ontario Park.

Though it was never planned to be anything more than a breakwater, a place to put the vast amounts of rubble created by a city busy destroying itself, the Spit has become an unlikely habitat for hundreds of plant and animal species, many of them rare in these parts.

More than anything, it is a testament to the enduring power of the natural world. It never misses an opportunity when one arises. But then nature, they say, abhors a vacuum, which is what this was meant to be. The original idea was simply to build a breakwater that would allow the construction of a larger harbour in Toronto. The problem was that Great Lakes shipping didn't grow as expected in the early 1960s, when dumping started.

By the 1970s, however, the Spit had become a five-kilometre-long peninsula, with no apparent purpose. Responsibility for the city's newest landform was then handed over to the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, whose job was to find new uses for the place. The process took so long the Spit was left alone for another couple of decades.

In the meantime, the ownership of the land had evolved into a patchwork of civic, provincial and federal agencies that in addition to the TRCA includes the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Toronto Economic Development Corp (TEDCO) and the Toronto Port Authority. Its annual management budget is paltry, under $200,000.

Perhaps because of this administrative confusion, and continuing neglect, the Spit was free of the kind of human intervention that has altered the landscape everywhere else. By the time the city started to get serious about reclaiming and revitalizing the waterfront, the Spit was an established part of life in Toronto. Though only open on weekends and holidays, it had become a magnet for birders, bikers, hikers and joggers. Indeed, it has achieved storied status, attracting 250,000 visitors annually. We see it now as a shining example, a desperately needed ray of hope in a world fast destroying itself.

Click here to read the rest of the article - and to view video and PDF documents - on The Star's website.