Former residential building on Codlin Crescent, possibly an old toll house on the old Albion Plank Road. Today it serves as the office of a truck yard. Located in the northwest corner of the City of Toronto sits the all-but- forgotten hamlet of Claireville. Surrounded by busy highways, a major freight railway and conservation lands, it is the most isolated of Toronto's lost villages. At the farthest northwest corner of the city, the only regular transit service through here is provided by Brampton Transit; the TTC's buses stop just short of this historical community. Settled in the 1830s, the settlement was formed at the corner of three townships: Etobicoke, Vaughan and Toronto Gore. It is one of several settlements along Albion Road, just a few kilometres from Thistletown. Albion Road was one of the first settlement roads surveyed outward from the old Town of York dating back as early as 1799.  It remained a very important farm-to-market route, especially before the railways were built in the area in the mid- and late-19th century. In the late-1840s, the Albion Road Company was formed by several local businessmen, the road was planked from Weston to Bolton, and tolls instituted. Toll houses lined the route in each settlement, charging for each traveler, horse, and head of livestock passing through. The location, at the corner of the three townships, was first known simply as Humber (being adjacent to the West Humber River). A tavern was opened in 1832. But in the 1850s, a local landowner, Jean du Petitpont De La Haye, created a town plan and renamed the settlement for his eldest daughter, Claire.  De La Haye was an immigrant from France and was a faculty member at Upper Canada College. He was one of the Albion Road Company backers so it was hoped that the improved road would promote the establishment of a sizable community (and those residents, naturally, would make use of the road).

TTC work crews laying new tracks on Dundas Street Diversion east of Yonge Street in 1923, linking former Agnes and Wilton Streets, and in the process, creating the triangular parcel that later became Dundas Square. Image: Toronto Archives Fonds 16, Series 71, Item 2190. Dundas Street is one of Toronto's most fascinating roadways. While it runs uninterrupted for 23 kilometres between the Mississauga border at Etobicoke Creek and Kingston Road towards Scarborough, it meanders, crossing Bloor Street twice. Even in the downtown area, it makes subtle jogs near major intersections. As mentioned earlier, Dundas was built as  a military road, Dundas Street kept a fair distance from the lake to be an effective alternative route in the case of war. Dundas is not a solid commercial throughfare, despite the traffic and frequent streetcar service, unlike parallel streets such as Bloor, Queen, College, Danforth, and Gerrard East. Except in Chinatown, the only major strips of retail are west of Ossington in neighbourhoods such as Brockton, the Junction and Islington Village. East of Broadview, Dundas Street appears somewhat run-down and lifeless. The Town of York was founded in 1793 with a perfect grid of rectangular streets. Yonge Street — with only a slight corrective angle north of St. Clair — is the origin of Toronto's rectangular concession system and runs in a straight line from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe. Queen Street, originally named Lot Street, also runs in a perfect line between Humber Bay and the RC Harris Filtration Plant, forming the base line for the east-west side roads. As the town expanded, the grid of streets was extended outwards, particularly to the west (the swampy mouth of the Don River precluded development to the east), and as the old Park Lots — the large parcels of land north of Lot Street were developed — long north-south roads, instead of the east-west street orientation to the south, were laid out parcel-by-parcel as they were sold off or developed by the lots' owners, generally gentry and clergy. Today, the old Park Lot system has left its legacy in the jogs of Dundas Street, which has incorporated more vanished streets than any other in Toronto.

Image from Toronto Archives, Fonds 16, Series 71, Item 3363. Single-horse Seaton Village car, 1890. Ten days ago, on September 1,  the Toronto Transit Commission quietly marked its 90th anniversary. Apart from a press release and a specially designed Metropass, the milestone passed without much notice. But this year has another significance. One hundred and fifty years ago today, Toronto's first streetcar began operation. The Toronto Street Railway was formed in May of 1861 by a group of local businessmen, organized by an Alexander Easton, an American from Philadelphia with some street railway expertise. The TSR was granted a 30 year franchise for the operation of a street railway in the City of Toronto two months later. City Bylaw 353 was enacted on 22 July 1861, with specific conditions for the fledgling new enterprise. The fare could not exceed 5 cents (but without transfer privileges), cars could not operated on Sundays, and the track gauge was to  be 4 feet, 10 7/8 inches to accommodate the standard English wagon gauge in use by private carriages. The TSR was Canada's first street railway, though the Montreal City Passenger Railway Company followed several months later. Interestingly, the TSR was not the first operator of public transportation system in the city. Yorkville cabinet and casket maker H.B. Williams operated a regularly scheduled fleet of omnibuses (horse-drawn coaches) between Yorkville and the market starting in 1849. However, rail transport, even horse-drawn cars, offered smoother and faster rides and were more efficient than road-running coaches. Mr. Williams was forced out of business soon after the TSR began operations. The first TSR line, Yonge, ran on the same route as Williams' pioneering service, from the Yorkville Town Hall (Yorkville was then a separate village) down Yonge to King Street, then east to the St. Lawrence Market at Jarvis Street. The inaugural run took place on 10 September 1861, the full day of service was on the 11th. On 2 December 1861, the second route, Queen, was inaugurated, starting from the St. Lawrence Market terminus and then west from Yonge on Queen to the corner of Dundas Street at the provincial asylum (now the CAMH Queen Street campus at Ossington). More routes followed, covering the entire city and the villages of Yorkville, Parkdale, and Brockton. Horse drawn sleighs were substituted for rail cars when snow made the street railways impassable.

Grange Homestead, Erindale, Mississauga The latest installment in the intermittent "Lost Villages" series takes us west on Dundas Street from Cooksville to the next historic community, Erindale. Smaller than once-thriving Cooksville, Erindale boasts a greater collection of heritage buildings than that of Mississauga's former civic core. The unincorporated village of Erindale, located in western Mississauga, is nearly lost in Toronto's suburban sprawl, and is easy to miss driving along today's busy Dundas Street. Even so, the name is well known, but this is thanks to a nearby GO Station and the University of Toronto satellite campus in Mississauga located just north of the original townsite. Erindale also gave part of its name to Erin Mills, a large, satellite suburban development immediately to the west, built in the 1970s and 1980s. Erindale was founded soon after the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation ceded their lands surrounding the Credit River in 1820. The townsite was well located, where Dundas Street crossed the Credit River. But the original settlement was named Toronto. After being renamed Springfield several years later (the name Erindale wasn't used until 1890) the townsite boomed. With a reliable source of water power, it was well suited for the construction of grist mills serving nearby farms. As with any roadside village, churches, taverns and shops lined Dundas. Several streets were laid out, and filled with houses. Happily, today many of those older structures remain.

Modern condo towers in Mississauga City Centre and traffic on Hurontario Street overwhelm old Cooksville In 1794, one year after the founding of York, Governor John Graves Simcoe ordered the construction of two military roads: Yonge Street, heading north to Lake Simcoe, and Dundas Street, heading west from Cootes Paradise (at what was later the town of Dundas, since absorbed into the City of Hamilton). Both streets were named for prominent British figures; Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, then British Home Secretary (George Yonge, a friend of Simcoe's was Secretary of War). The original purpose of Dundas Street was to link Lake Ontario with Simcoe's preferred location for the capital of Upper Canada, on the Thames River at London. However, plans for that townsite were soon dropped and with York as the new capital and commercial centre of the new colony, the road was extended east to the new city. (Dundas Street was planned to extend as far east as Kingston, but this was eventually built as Danforth Road/Kingston Road, though in some places, such as Belleville, the Dundas Street name prevails.) As a military road, Dundas Street kept a fair distance from the lake to be an effective alternative route in the case of war. It took a while for the Dundas-London part of the road to see much settlement, but farms and villages quickly developed near Toronto. Communities included Brockton (an incorporated village for three years before annexation by Toronto in 1884), Lambton Mills, Islington, and Cooksville. Cooksville, the subject of today's post in this intermittent series, is not totally "lost". But it suffers from benign neglect, even though it remained an important local centre up to the early 1960s, long after many other "lost villages" declined. In this case, municipal amalgamation and rush to build a new city centre to the north helped cause Cooksville to languish. At the corner of two early, important roads, Dundas Street and Hurontario Street (so named as it connected Lake Ontario with Port Credit with Collingwood on Georgian Bay, part of Lake Huron), Cooksville thrived. It became the seat of government for prosperous Toronto Township, yet never incorporated as nearby Port Credit and Streetsville did. While the Great Western Railway's Hamilton-Toronto branch, opened in 1853, ran well to the south at Port Credit, the Credit Valley Railway's line to Orangeville (later part of the CP empire) opened in 1871, with a station right in town. In 1917, the Toronto Suburban's Guelph Interurban began serving Cooksville. A large brickyard just to the west (near present-day Mavis Road) provided a further economic base.

TTC car stop, College Street and Spadina (from the City of Toronto Archives) Quick. What's red and white and found all over Toronto? It's Canada Day, so perhaps our national flag, introduced in 1965, comes immediately to mind. But the lowly TTC streetcar/bus stop sign, the simplest and cheapest piece of transit infrastructure, is about as common — and has had the same colour scheme since 1933, 32 years before our flag. Yet despite its humble nature, the TTC stop sign has a surprisingly interesting history. The first streetcar stops were marked, usually at street corners, between 1891 and 1921. These were the early days of the electric Toronto Railway Company, the principal transit company (three other companies operated streetcars on the fringes of Toronto's city limits until the creation of the public TTC in 1921) . Previously, horse-powered cars could be boarded anywhere, so stop signs were not required, but faster electric vehicles necessitated defined stops. In Toronto, the first car stops were long bands of white paint on adjacent metal or wooden poles with the text "CARS STOP HERE" (see above).

TTC streetcars bunched at Spadina northbound at Queen There is a problem of intentional bunching of streetcars and buses by a small few, but a very obvious few, TTC employees. In TTC-speak, this is called "soaking" — where one driver intentionally follows another vehicle closely in order to "soak" the lead bus or streetcar of passengers while having a very easy, passenger-free run. After a very blatant display of soaking last week (for which, to its credit, the TTC has promised to look into), I finally found the impetus to bring this little-known, yet infuriating, practice out into the open.

The end of Yonge Street north of Queensville Sideroad One of Toronto's greatest debates concerns Yonge Street's controversial claim as "the World's Longest Street". Indeed, the Guinness Book of World Records published Yonge Street's status as the true record until 1999; a bronze art installation in front of the Eaton Centre at Yonge and Dundas has a map of Yonge Street extending to Rainy River. This claim rests on the rather tenuous claim that that the 1,896 kilometre length of Yonge Street from Queen's Quay on Toronto's Harbourfront to Rainy River via Highway 11, at the Minnesota-Ontario border is in fact, the longest continuous "street." While a popular claim, I've been a skeptic of this local legend. Highway 11 and Yonge Street have never been one and the same, especially after the downloading of Highway 11 south of Barrie by the Harris government in the late 1990s. In 1920, Yonge Street was added to the Ontario provincial highway systemas Highway 11, which extended from Downtown Toronto as far as the end of Simcoe County, at the Severn River north of Orillia, where an unnumbered highway continued through the unincorporated Districts of Muskoka, Parry Sound and Nipissing to North Bay. In 1937, Highway 11 assumed the Severn River-North Bay portion and the newly-completed North Bay-Hearst section.

Lakeshore Road, Oakville The Town of Oakville just completed the reconstruction of Lakeshore Road between Mississaga Road (near the old village of Bronte) and the western municipal boundary at Burloak Avenue. This project included the construction of left-turn and bicycle lanes while maintaining one through lane in each direction. The bicycle lanes on this stretch of Lakeshore Road help to integrate it with the Waterfront Trail, which follows Lake Ontario from Niagara-on-the-Lake to Trenton. But one of the most interesting aspects of this otherwise routine road reconstruction has been the installation of white LED streetlighting, the first large installation that I know of in the Greater Toronto Area. LED lighting, which offers energy and maintenance savings,  has been used in parking lots and some gas stations, but have not been used widely in streetlighting applications. Toronto Hydro has been testing a few LED lights as part of its ongoing ALAMP light testing program, launched on city streets in 2009. One of these installations is at Hepbourne and Delaware Avenues , in west end Toronto. I have also spotted new installations elsewhere in Halton Region, such as on Bronte Road in Oakville and Tremaine Road in Milton. (Dave Leblanc wrote a good article about the ALAMP program in the Globe and Mail last December) While the suburban municipalities surrounding Toronto installed mercury vapour lights in the 1960s through the 1980s (in housings known as "cobra heads"),  Toronto chose to maintain bright incandescant lamps within the classic "acorn head" housing affixed to a pole by an elegant two-piece curved bracket. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the bluish-white-burning mercury vapour bulbs were replaced by high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps while the old City of Toronto preferred white lighting over the beige-orange glow of HPS lamps, replacing its inefficient incandescent lights with metal halide lamps. One of the challenges of LED lighting is that unlike curved lenses, like the classic acorn heads or modern HPS "cobra heads", LED panels are flat, making light dispersion more difficult. This is an important to the safety of street users, particularly pedestrians. The pure white light is also brigher and harsher than older sources of streetlighting. However, the ALAMP installation seems to mitigate these drawbacks somewhat. Night at the corner of Hepbourne and Delaware

Three weeks ago, Torontonians learned of a proposed TTC fare increase and a series of service cuts to bus routes across the city. The fare increase proposal was quickly quashed, but the service cuts were still on the table, but their implementation delayed from March 27 to a later date. In a press release sent out this afternoon, the TTC has announced a revised list of proposed route cuts. These changes were in response to a large public and media outcry and a hastily-arranged series of public consultations. Most of the 48 affected routes had service times restored and seven routes have escaped the axe altogether. The service cuts are now planned for implementation on May 8, 2011. While this is a partial victory for transit riders, the news that some transit users will be without service during some off-peak periods is still disappointing. The aim of the Ridership Growth Strategy was to ensure that all regular, non-industrial routes, offered 30 minute service at all regular service hours, making the service more attractive at off-peak times. (Originally, the plan was for 20-minute service for all routes.) With the revised proposal for service cuts, the TTC aims to save $4 million instead of $7 million based on the original list. The new list is below the fold, I have marked the revisions to the original list.