The (Buried) Crawford Street Bridge
City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1231, item 1615
It's considered by some as one of the seven lost wonders of Toronto.
The wooden bridge originally built in 1915, spanned a ravine of Garrison Creek
According to a new Heritage Toronto plaque to be unveiled on Tuesday May 13, 2008: “...by the 1880s, the creek was so polluted that it was gradually channeled underground into a brick sewer, built through here in 1885.”
City Officials bricked in the creek while leaving the ravine.
In 1915, Roland Caldwell Harris, the city's Commissioner of Works, cut his teeth at this very spot, engineering a triple-span bridge to get Crawford Street up to Dundas Street.
The bridge, though, got a quiet burial only 45 years later, when excavators digging out the Bloor Street subway line just filled the ravine up with dirt. Gary Miedema, who heads the plaque project at Heritage Toronto, notes, “Trinity-Bellwoods was an immigrant community that would have been relatively voiceless.”
Lately, the area has been finding its voice.
Ed Dosman, a professor of international studies at York University, has in his spare time been working with the Garrison Creek Linkage Project, which has already done marvelous work using copper letters sunk in cement to label Garrison Creek along much of its length. 
Heritage Toronto's Heritage Plaques and Markers Program members standing in front of the new plaque minutes after its unveiling. At the Crawford Bridge, they’ve stuck plaques in cement depicting the fish who once swam here: northern pike, bowfin, white sucker, largemouth bass, brown bullhead, pumpkinseed and rock bass.
But Mr. Dosman won’t be content until backhoes undo the mistakes of the past, and unearth the bridge.
“I have no doubt that in the next generation the bridge will be dug out,” he says. “We could have potentially a water feature in Trinity-Bellwoods park along the lines of Lafontaine Park in Montreal. In Chicago or Seattle this would have been done a long time ago, but we’re broke.”
He dreams of a one kilometre stretch of restored creek flowing from Dundas Street to Queen Street, passing under the Crwaford Bridge and through the remaining ravine in Trinity Bellwoods park, which today is a popular Tobogganing and Sledding spot in winter.
Ward 19 City Councillor Joe Pantalone, Toronto’s “tree advocate,” says, however, that it’s not just about the money.
“We’d have to kill I don’t know how many trees to ressurect the old bridge,” he said. “Future generations may deem that a project worth doing.” Indeed, I’m fascinated walking here to see the dozens of 40-year-old maple and ash trees thriving in the 1960s fill around the bridge. You can see the former line of the ravine from the much older trees at the edges of the park.
