A river runs through Danforth Village

[attach]5828[/attach]Paul Dowsett is a neighbourhood detective.

But rather than solve crime or find lost dogs in his slice of Danforth Village known as The Pocket, Dowsett is on the hunt for a long-forgotten waterway called Hastings Creek.

Dowsett has been tracking clues that indicate its presence beneath our feet ever since he moved into the neighbourhood in the mid-1990s — and he recently made a breakthrough discovery.

He first went in search of Hastings Creek years ago after hearing rushing water from a manhole cover at Danforth and Jones Avenue.
Odd, he thought at the time, because it wasn’t raining.

“Every time I cross there I listen for water, and all times of the year I hear water,” he said.

After speaking with neighbours, Dowsett started connecting the clues: a nearby laneway suggestively called Ravina Crescent; an old bridge over grassland in a dog park just north of the Greenwood TTC yards; an enormous hydrangea in his backyard on Queen Victoria Street that appears to be well-fed whether he waters it or not.

“I thought, I wonder if this is all Hastings Creek.”

After poring over topographical maps, Dowsett surmises that Hastings Creek starts just north of the Danforth near Langford Drive and then flows southeast to Phin Avenue Parkette, where a swampy area can be found at the southern end. A swath of grassland that is always lush even during a dry summer is another indication of a buried watershed.

Anecdotal evidence from neighbours suggest the creek in the parkette was filled in with garbage sometime in the 1930s, but that it was still present in the 1950s. One neighbour told Dowsett that in the spring, residents would bring out their rowboats.

“Pleasure boating, can you imagine such a thing?” Dowsett says with a laugh.

The parkland was likely filled in the 1960s, when excavation began for the Bloor-Danforth subway line.

“That fill was put on to give us the topography that we now know as Phin Park,” he said.

Homes in the area tell another story. His street just south of the park indicates that some housing development, like the two-storey brick homes on the south side, took place in the early 1910s and 1920s, while some homes on the north side appear to be much more modern.

“Developers, like creeks, take the line of least resistance and moving down toward that end of the street toward the north side it would have been more difficult to develop because they were getting into the ravine,” says Dowsett, who is an architect by trade.

[attach]5829[/attach]From what he can tell, the ravine route travels down to the Greenwood TTC yards, and re-emerges south of the GO rail line before it jogs west to Ivy Avenue, where unusually, several residential driveways also sport maintenance manhole covers.

Then in a small, sloped laneway at the top of Hastings Avenue is Dowsett’s recent “a-ha” find.

There, Dowsett and neighbour Dylan Reid discovered the weeping wall, where water flows continually out of a rock barrier behind Ivy Avenue homes.

“We could hear the water rushing in the maintenance hole that was right there, but there was also water leaking through the wall.”
Dowsett said at one time, builders likely cut into the hillside that would have been there. Now, a culvert is probably leaking the Hastings Creek.

Hanging over the laneway are water-loving trees like Cottonwoods and Weeping Willows, which grow along stream banks.
Despite a plethora of evidence, Dowsett is still on the case. He and Reid recently conducted a Jane’s Walk tour tracing the Hastings Creek clues, and Dowsett plans to do another one next year.

He wants to obtain more anecdotal evidence from an elderly woman who has lived in the area for years, and trace the creek further south.

“I’d like to try and figure out where it goes from Hastings Avenue and how it finds its way to Ashbridges Bay,” he said. ‘That’s ultimately where it’s going to end up.”

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