Cedarvale Park

Cedarvale Park occupies a ravine corridor in midtown Toronto that was, for a period in the 1960s, slated to carry a southern extension of the Spadina Expressway directly through it, part of the same highway project that would have run through the Annex further south. The ravine's natural, tree-filled valley made it an obvious corridor for highway planners looking for a route that avoided demolishing existing buildings.

Preserved by the expressway's cancellation

When the Ontario government cancelled the Spadina Expressway extension in 1971 following sustained community opposition, Cedarvale's ravine was preserved as parkland rather than paved over, and it now connects into the city's broader Beltline Trail system, a former railway right-of-way converted into a walking and cycling path. The park's survival as green space rather than highway infrastructure remains one of the more direct physical legacies of the expressway fight that also helped define Jane Jacobs's Toronto years.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Spadina Expressway
• Wikipedia — Cedarvale, Toronto

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