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Remembering the Spadina Expressway
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Norman James
The highway project was cancelled in 1971 RAHUL GUPTA rgupta@insidetoronto.com Imagine a Toronto interlinked by a series of concrete expressways encircling the city and slicing through neighbourhoods from North York down to the Gar-
diner Expressway. That’s what could have happened had hundreds of protesters, from shaggy haired academics to suburban ratepayers, not engaged in a sustained campaign of opposition to the plan to expand the Spadina Expressway (now known as the Allen) south of Eglinton Avenue West. Like the Crosstown Expressway, which
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would have linked the Don Valley Parkway with Hwy. 400 and the Scarborough Expressway, the project was one of several highway expansion plans never completed. The Spadina project, as Mark Osbaldeston notes in his 2008 book Unbuilt Toronto (Volume 1), was intended to ease the transportation of motorists - at the cost
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of the destruction of entire neighbourhoods. But in 1971, premier Bill Davis, acknowledging its rampant unpopularity, cancelled the expressway. That decision spelled the end of expressway construction in Canada’s largest city, a decision which still reverberates to this day.
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