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Fort York isn’t normally associated with victory–having been captured and burned by the Americans during the Battle of York in 1813. But a little over fifty years ago, the fort emerged victorious in a battle of a different kind, when three levels of politicians tried (and failed) to push the new Gardiner Expressway through the birthplace of modern Toronto. Foreshadowing future expressway battles, it was local activists, in this case largely forgotten, who rallied to fight the destruction.
Although construction had started on the eastern and western sections of the expressway in 1955, it wasn’t until 1958–the year after the expressway had been named after sitting Metro Chairman Frederick Gardiner–that Torontonians learned that Metro intended to build the central portion over Fort York. In January of that year, Metro Parks Commissioner George Bell told the Metro parks committee that an on-ramp from Bathurst would necessitate two piers being constructed in the fort’s southwestern wall. One hundred feet of elevated roadway would be constructed as much as fifty feet inside the walls of the fort itself. In other words, part of the fort would be under the Gardiner.
Despite the objections of the Toronto Civic Historical Committee, which had been created earlier in the decade to manage the fort (and had learned of the new expressway plans at the same time as the general public), the parks committee gave its approval to the scheme the following month. Key to their decision was Metro Roads Commissioner George Grant’s opinion that moving the expressway further south or having it curve was technically impossible. As Grant explained, the six-degree curve in the expressway necessary to avoid the fort would reduce speeds to 35 miles per hour. Moreover, it did not appear that more land could be acquired from the railways to allow the entire expressway to be moved south.
Within days of this decision, fifteen historical groups banded together to fight it. They organized themselves as the Associated Historical Societies’ Committee of Toronto. Gordon Clarry, president of the York Pioneer and Historical Society, was chair, and Helen Durie, second vice-president of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society, served as secretary. The AHSC had two factors potentially in its favour, but it had to act fast. First, the city still needed permission from the province to convey the necessary Fort York land to Metro. Second, when the federal government had transferred Garrison Common (which included Fort York and the CNE grounds) to the city in 1909, it was subject to two conditions: that the land would revert to the federal government unless the city restored the fort to its original condition (which it had more or less done between 1932 and 1934), and maintained it that way forever (which, absent any evidence of an expressway over the site in the early nineteenth century, the city was now manifestly not proposing to do).
The AHSC lost no time in publicizing the threat to the fort and the conditions under which the fort had been entrusted to the city. It lobbied all levels of government. Its representations to the municipal law committee of the provincial legislature in March resulted in what appeared to be total victory when the committee refused to endorse legislation that would have allowed the transfer of the Fort York lands from the city to Metro. But under pressure from Frederick Gardiner and Premier Leslie Frost, they reconsidered the issue after visiting the site, ultimately agreeing on a compromise suggested by Gardiner himself: Metro could build the expressway on the Garrison Common lands west of Strachan, but could not touch the military cemetery or the Fort.
Gardiner described his compromise as an honourable retreat on his part. Observers might well have wondered whether it was either when, less than three months later, he was urging a new approach: if the expressway wasn’t to touch the fort or cemetery, then perhaps it was the fort and cemetery that should be moved, “piece by piece, and brick by brick,” to a new location in Coronation Park, just outside the Princes’ Gates.
The Toronto dailies, which had generally been opposed to building the expressway over the fort, rallied around the much more drastic proposal of moving the fort entirely. The view was that years of fill had made the site of the fort a-historic, since it was no longer on the waterfront; moving the fort would actually be an act of restoration. And there was an exciting precedent. Just that year, the provincial government had started work on Upper Canada Village, an attraction consisting of pre-Confederation buildings moved out of historic settlements flooded by the St. Lawrence Seaway. In July, the AHSC organized a memorial service at the military cemetery in order to highlight that the fort was not only a collection of buildings, but a battlefield and burial ground as well. Members of the AHSC, and anyone else who wondered how you could move a national historic battle site to a more convenient spot, were painted as fussy, elitist members of “hysterical historical societies.”
By September, Metro engineers had finalized a new plan, using additional railway and hydro lands, to keep the expressway basically on course while avoiding the fort and cemetery. But if the Gardiner Expressway was for moving, Gardiner the man wasn’t. The Metro chair still planned to seek the province’s approval to move the fort. Meanwhile, the AHSC, sensing the battle might have to be won at the federal level, had sent out two thousand questionnaires to literary, historical, and archaeological authorities across the continent, to all members of the federal parliament, and to members of all the provincial legislatures. The questionnaires asked respondents if they were in favour of the federal government approving Metro’s proposal to demolish Fort York and move the garrison cemetery. For its part, Metro was of the view that the feds had no jurisdiction. Although the federal government was not committing one way or another on whether the fort should be moved, the AHSC was encouraged when the Minister of National Defense warned in the House of Commons that any move would require federal approval.
In January 1959 the province and Metro agreed to split the cost of moving the fort. Metro’s engineers actually preferred the new route they had come up with to avoid the fort, but the idea of moving it had taken on a life of its own. Many politicians, from Premier Leslie Frost and Mayor Nathan Phillips among them, had come to believe that moving the fort to the waterfront was just the right thing to do, expressway or no expressway. But by now, Fred Gardiner, who had raised the idea of moving the fort in the first place, no longer supported it. He could see that the AHSC would not back down, and had begun to fear that the whole issue of the 1909 agreement would lead to litigation and delay. And even if the federal issue could be resolved, the physical act of moving the fort would cause delay by itself. In January, Metro’s executive committee proposed giving the city until March 31 to negotiate with the federal government for a release from the 1909 agreement, failing which Metro would proceed with the alignment that skirted the fort. At Gardiner’s urging, however, the committee’s recommendation wasn’t ratified by Metro council. Fort York would stay where it was, and the Gardiner would bend around it.
In 1970, Metro Chairman Albert Campbell and Metro Parks Commissioner Thomas Thompson again raised the idea of moving the fort to Coronation Park. The rationale now was that it would be closer to the crowds who would be thronging to the exciting new Ontario Place complex. W.J. Beaupre, vice-chair of the Toronto Historical Board, responded immediately, saying that the board would fight any move: “The ground itself is the historical site. If you move it away from that you will have destroyed its historical value.” At its meeting the next day, the Metro parks and recreation committee agreed to drop the idea. Fort York’s defenders had kept the invaders at bay once more.
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