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Crosstown Community Progressing at Don Mills and Eglinton
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Leaside and its Aerodrome

I'm sure the aircraft scrap yard would have been closed shortly after 1947 but the site may contain evidence under the surface - unless it's been built upon..
 
brewster said:
1920 Leaside and C.N.E. Video

http://www.criticalpast.com/video/6...ics_Curtiss-JN-4_Canadian-National-Exhibition
Click to expand...

That newsreel clip located by brewster is a wonderful find!
Here are some frames from the film.
(I'm assuming that images from 1920 are now in the 'public domain.'

LillianBoyerfliesfromLeaside1920smaller.jpg
 
I've always been sorry that when Metro built the Eglinton Extension in the 1950s that they built Leslie down from York Mills only that far, and didn't do the work to link it up across the river. It's hard to imagine that being done now.
 
Lone Primate said:
It's hard to imagine that being done now.
Click to expand...

what, and dump all that traffic at the wicksteed level crossing? ;)

not to mention the destruction of significant amounts of park land (although that's never stood in the way of "progress" for car worshippers)

building more expressways into the city is a non-starter anyway, the new mantra for the 21st century is more subways

and speaking of subways, irony of ironies, that very same park land is going to get raped and pilloried when the new viaduct over the don is built parallel to eglinton for the eglinton subway, because tunnelling from brentcliffe to don mills under the river is just not gonna happen
 
r937 said:
what, and dump all that traffic at the wicksteed level crossing? ;)

not to mention the destruction of significant amounts of park land (although that's never stood in the way of "progress" for car worshippers)

building more expressways into the city is a non-starter anyway, the new mantra for the 21st century is more subways

and speaking of subways, irony of ironies, that very same park land is going to get raped and pilloried when the new viaduct over the don is built parallel to eglinton for the eglinton subway, because tunnelling from brentcliffe to don mills under the river is just not gonna happen
Click to expand...

Jesus, do we have to wade into all the kneejerk, NIMBY reactionism whenever you say something like this? It really gets tiresome. No one ever seems to have a problem with the roads that exist... oh, they're always useful; couldn't live without them; thank heavens we have them. No, it's only if you ever propose a change that some folks leap onto the chair, flap their skirts and start screaming. How much parkland did we lose extending Leslie? How much negative impact does the Eglinton Avenue bridge over the Don have on your life? Does it prevent anyone from getting from Serena Gundy Park to Ernest Thompson Seaton Park? It never stopped me. How many nights sleep have you lost seeing the subway over the Humber at Old Mill? I've kayaked under it and actually videoed a doe in the trees just metres away from it, so what's the problem? Would Toronto be better served if there were no subway west of Jane at all? Is the word "raped' justified? Really?

It simply seems to me that roads that go someplace are the most useful ones. Maybe it was budgetary considerations at the time, or infrastructure limitations of the day, that made Leslie stop at Eglinton. It just seems to me, given the amount of people who use it and get tied up there every day, that letting them move along to Overland or even Don Mills Road would have been useful, and easy to do at the same time.

It's important to have parkland--I wholeheartedly agree. But it's also important to recognize that not everything can, or should, be parkland... not if you want a society that has things like the internet, food in stores, and vaccinations so you don't die of smallpox at 23. There's a balance to be struck. It's not all black and white. Maybe Leslie south of there was a bad idea... but I'd like to be able to discuss the merits of such ideas, or even mention them, once in a while without be pilloried.
 
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gee, sorry, lone primate, i guess i forgot to take the necessary steps to make it clear that i wasn't reacting to ~you~ personally, but rather to expressway builders in general ... maybe i didn't use enough smileys

nor did i suggest that "everything" be parkland

your point about food in stores is bang on, though... this city would collapse inside a week if there wasn't a constant stream of tractor trailer trucks servicing all our loblaws, sobeys, metros, et cetera
 
Sure, I just find it frustrating when you can't moot an idea without someone trying to insist you have horns and cackle while you feast on roast kitten, and unfortunately your comment had some of those earmarks... smilies notwithstanding.

I really do not want to put expressways everywhere. The Crosstown Expressway strikes me as a colossally bad idea... the Spadina, frankly, not so much. We do depend on our grid system to get the things that we make and the things that we need where they're going, and it only seems logical that the fewer gaps there are in that system and the fewer tie-ups, the less expensive, less wasteful, and less polluting the process is. It really comes down to what's justifiable.

I like to talk about things like that. The DVP... maybe it could have been further east, for example. Would it have been preferable to demolish a couple of hundred homes (that probably no one would miss by now) to spare the valley? Maybe. It's academic now, but I wouldn't mind discussing things like that. What would it be like to still have Woodbine Avenue in Toronto instead of the DVP/404, but maybe Victoria Park Avenue or Markham Road would be a thing of the past. I'd just like to be able to talk about stuff like this without the spectre of Mc"Car"thyistm instantly rearing its head.
 
Lone Primate said:
I've always been sorry that when Metro built the Eglinton Extension in the 1950s that they built Leslie down from York Mills only that far, and didn't do the work to link it up across the river. It's hard to imagine that being done now.
Click to expand...

Old maps indicate that leslie St. was intended to continue directly south until it met the old section in the east end of Toronto (between Gerrard and Eastern Ave.).
Donlands Ave. was on that proposed route and was once identified on early maps as 'Leslie'.
 
Goldie said:
Old maps indicate that leslie St. was intended to continue directly south until it met the old section in the east end of Toronto (between Gerrard and Eastern Ave.).
Donlands Ave. was on that proposed route and was once identified on early maps as 'Leslie'.
Click to expand...

I've noticed on maps the line-up of Donlands with other stretches of Leslie and always wondered how it dodged the name. It's clear Toronto has no problem with naming discontinuous streets (or suddenly changing the names of through streets, either). Like St. Clair, though, it's hard to imagine them bridging the gap between Donlands and the (proposed) stretch in Leaside.
 
Mustapha said:
Not even a hint of a runway here, simply a grass field. I wonder what they did if they took off from Montreal to come here and bad weather rolled in in the meantime..
Click to expand...

That's the way it was in those days. Paved runways were just a few years away though.

They'd just land anyway as long as they could see. All those WW1 military aircraft had to do the same thing.

It seems that the first paved runways started appearing around 1927/1928.

http://www.pprune.org/aviation-history-nostalgia/67784-re-first-hard-runway-airfield-aerodrome.html
 
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