Artist: Daniel Rotsztain
Hydro Box Location: 62 Dan Leckie Way
Artist Instagram: @TheUrbanGeog

Artist Bio:
Daniel Rotsztain, the Urban Geographer, is an artist, writer, and cartographer based between Toronto/Tkaronto, Ontario, Canada and Ithaca, New York. His multidisciplinary work examines our relationships to the places we inhabit.

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Learn more from the maps! Legend:

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1. Land of the Two Row Wampum

Long before Fort York, this has been the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit and Haudenosaunee, When Europeans arrived to Turtle Island (North America), the Two Row Wampum was their first treaty, establishing the foundational principle that Indigenous and European peoples would travel side by side in the river of life, each in their own vessel (the two purple rows), neither steering the other in principles of peace, friendship, and respect (the 3 white rows). That spirit was largely ignored when the British "bought" this land from the Mississaugas in the 1787 Toronto Purchase, mistaking an agreement for ongoing relationships between nations with a one-and-done sale of land and dispossession. The Two Row endures as our guide back to good relations.

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2. The Gardiner Almost Destroyed Fort York

When an Expressway was planned in the mid-1950s, the original route would have put the westbound Bathurst on-ramp directly over Fort York, effectively demolishing it. Community groups and historical societies mounted fierce opposition throughout 1958, eventually forcing Metro chairman Frederick Gardiner to reroute the highway, but not without lending his name to the elevated highway that rushes past one of Toronto's foundational historical sites.

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3. The Bathurst Bridge Moved from the Humber

The steel truss bridge carrying Bathurst Street over the rail corridor was built in 1903 to span the Humber River. Disassembled in 1916, it was moved here piece by piece to connect Bathurst to Fort York and the Exhibition grounds. In 1931 it was shifted slightly southward to accommodate streetcar service, and it has been carrying traffic without major interruption ever since.

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4. Former Mouth of the Garrison Creek

The wide banks of Garrison Creek once flowed through the city from north of St. Clair, through Christie Pits and Trinity Bellwoods, to Lake Ontario right here, before landfill extended the shoreline over 500 meters south. The mouth of the creek is part of what gave Fort York its strategic value as a harbour defence. By 1920 the polluted creek had been pushed underground into the city's sewer system, but its memory lives in plaques and markers along its route, and the rushing of water in the sewer below the city streets after a heavy rain. 

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5. 1830s Schooner Discovered

In 2015, construction crews digging a CityPlace foundation struck the keel and lower hull of a wooden schooner six metres underground. Dating to the 1830s and likely deliberately sunk as scaffolding for workers building the nearby Queen's Wharf on what was then the waterfront, the vessel was excavated and relocated to Fort York, where it remains on display.

 

6. ​Before CityPlace there was a Golf Course

The land beneath CityPlace spent most of the 20th century as Canadian National Railway's Spadina rail yards, sitting vacant after CN relocated its operations in 1965. While Concord Adex finalized plans for what would become one of Toronto's densest neighbourhoods, the site briefly operated as a nine-hole golf course sandwiched between the GO corridor and the Gardiner, where office workers could get a quick 9 in at lunch before returning to their desks.