The Natural Setting Of Toronto

One of the memories of Toronto that had fashioned an overly-romantic vision of my great Canadian city was that of the physical setting in which she has grown.  Unlike the pancake landscapes of Detroit or Chicago, Toronto was born on some more realistic, diverse ground.  Unlike Manhattan, she has since not paved it over in order to create the illusion of flatness.  In general, Toronto is like the other Great Lakes cities in that she is dominated by her most prominent feature, the water.

Yes, that is open water even in frigid February 2014.  Lake Ontario is the most protected of the Great Lakes, at least from the cold north-western winter winds.  It also gets sloshed around quite a bit by the inflow from the mighty Niagara.  This obviously has a heavy effect on the surrounding climate, both good and ill.

Lake Ontario is the reason why Toronto is here, really.  The city was founded on one of the great portage places between portions of the Great Lakes, specifically Huron and Ontario, a route that had to wait for the dropping of Iroquois hostility to become viable (hence Toronto had never been a French city, even though a fort had been established here in 1750).  Near the lake, the land is level and the shoreline is relatively protected by the offshore islands, making the site attractive to settlement once English Canada became a going concern.  The climate was also a nice, inviting feature.  Further east, the winter gets a bit snowier from lake effect squalls, and the growing season grows just a little bit shorter. 

Toronto, in fact, is noted for being one of the northernmost places in Eastern North America where the eastern deciduous forest (known in Ontario as the Carolinian Forest) exists in the same recognizable form before giving way to the north woods.  As part of this package deal, Toronto gets Atlantic coastal flora, some boreal elements, and even the easternmost extension of the great Prairie Peninsula which is an extension of the central grasslands well into Ontario and even parts of western New York and interior Virginia.  In Toronto, the best place to see surviving grasslands is in High Park, where some oak savanna remnants can be found.

Indeed, in comparison to the mysterious transitional forests and rolling terrain further inland and to the east, the oak openings and level shoreline must have seemed very inviting to settlement.  Early English speaking Canadians were very eager to find land comparable to what they might have had further west along the Lakes or in the Midwest and Ohio Valley, and it helped that Toronto had just this available to them, all at a comfortable (but not ultimately safe) distance from the American border.  That said, again, the place is hardly a level grassland in it's entirety.  Things get very steep, very fast.

Much of Toronto is within a few minute's travel (by any means) of deep ravines and even minor cliffs.  This affords for a very dramatic cityscape, at least as far as eastern urban North America goes.  The other Great Lakes cities, with the exception of Hamilton, really do not offer much in the way of relief, and the end result is that Toronto features some pretty natural park spaces right beside high rise buildings, and not merely because someone thought a park would look nice there.  Back in 1954, in fact, there were actually buildings going up in the ravines.  Then came Hurricane Hazel, the first time in modern history when the Great Lakes got to remind us that they are really little freshwater oceans; the ravines flooded in rages that put an end to both people and urban planning alike.  After the floods had reminded Torontonians just how fragile their up and down rolling city landscape could be, the city started building around, rather than on top of or through, it's topography. 

Most other major cities in eastern North America simply can't say the same.  No defensible ridge of land remains where Detroit was once founded atop the rise where Woodward avenue now runs atop.  Manhattan is relatively flattened in comparison to what it once was and even now is surrounded by.  Our ancestral city of ancient urban concept, London across the sea, has long since fooled people into thinking it was always solid ground devoid of water in all but the Thames.  Boston certainly has done a good job of containing the aquatic geography of its foundations!  Miami looks nothing like the combination of barrier islands, mangrove swamps, and limestone pine ridges that it once was.  Toronto, on the other hand, is a nice lake plain, set of islands, one river valley after another, and even has, well, sea cliffs.  These are better known as the Scarborough Bluffs, one of the coolest and most under-appreciated features of the city.  Sadly, I took no pictures to truly do them justice, but the ones below can decently illustrate how interesting they are. 

So what sort of city has since been built around and on top of these features?  That's in our next post.