Along The Shore: Rediscovering Toronto's Waterfront Heritage
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by M. Jane Fairburn
ECW Press, Toronto, 2013 440 pp., illus., $21.95 paperback
Toronto area residents and visitors who are curious about the history of some of the city’s outstanding waterfront features will like M. Jane Fairburn’s Along the Shore. The book offers a trove of historical information about four areas of this urban metropolis that have retained their natural beauty, including the Scarborough Shore, the Beach, the Island, and the Lakeshore.
Outsiders might think of Toronto as Hogtown (a name that goes back to its nineteenthcentury role as a pork-processing centre), but artists, writers, and anyone with a love for nature have always appreciated the city’s proximity to the vastness of Lake Ontario. Fairburn’s own epiphany came when, while alone and waiting for help after falling and injuring herself at the Scarborough Bluffs, she discovered on the edge of Canada’s most densely populated city a “wilderness that remained raw and uncivilized.”
Her book looks at each area from a historical perspective, moving from the ice ages, to pre-contact times when various indigenous peoples lived or passed through, to early settlement by Europeans, to the industrial era when the city’s lakefront functioned as a getaway and a place for picnics, dance halls, and hunting clubs. After that came the pressure of modern development, followed by destruction and loss, and finally efforts at renewal.
Along the Shore is richly illustrated with beautiful photos, watercolours, and some historical maps. What I would have liked is
a contemporary map that clearly locates the areas being described. Frustrated, I had to look them up on Google. The book is otherwise well done.
— Nelle Oosterom (Read bio)
Nelle Oosterom is the Senior Editor of Canada's History magazine.