Built as landfill for a harbour that was never needed

Tommy Thompson Park

The Leslie Street Spit was never meant to be a nature reserve — it was lakefill for a shipping expansion that container ships made obsolete. Nobody planted what grew there instead, and it's now a globally significant bird sanctuary.

The downtown Toronto skyline seen from the Leslie Street Spit — Leslie Street Spit, Toronto — Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons licensed

Tommy Thompson Park sits on the Leslie Street Spit, a roughly 5-kilometre peninsula jutting into Lake Ontario that was never designed as parkland at all.

A breakwater nobody needed

Beginning in the 1950s and '60s, the Toronto Harbour Commission began depositing lakefill — first dredged material, later construction debris from downtown Toronto's building boom — to create a breakwater intended to shelter an expanded shipping harbour. By the early 1970s, container shipping had made the planned port expansion unnecessary, and in August 1973 the province assigned the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority responsibility for planning the site as a public park, later named for Tommy Thompson, Metropolitan Toronto's first Commissioner of Parks.

An accidental nature reserve

What makes the Spit unusual is that nobody planted it — colonizing plants, birds and fish arrived and established themselves on the bare fill largely on their own, giving rise to what TRCA calls an "urban wilderness." In 2000, BirdLife International designated the Leslie Street Spit a globally significant Important Bird Area, citing the continent's largest breeding colony of Double-crested Cormorants and major overwintering waterfowl concentrations; more than 300 bird species have been recorded on site.

Sources

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