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July 29, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the evolution of the 510 Spadina streetcar line, which has become one of the city’s busiest routes and one that traces its origins back to 1878. In anticipation of the arrival of Bombardier’s state-of-the-art Legacy model streetcar, this route is presently undergoing major upgrading with its reopening scheduled for mid-November of this year.

That story prompted a reader living in North Toronto to ask if I could provide some details about the streetcar she recalled taking from her house near the corner of Eglinton and Mount Pleasant to the new Yonge subway; from there she travelled downtown to Eaton’s main store. Known in its later days as the Mount Pleasant streetcar, like the Spadina route the line’s origins go back almost a century (heck, it will be exactly a century next year) when the city established a street railway service along St. Clair Avenue. That line opened on August 25, 1913, and initially operated between Yonge Street and Station Street (now Caledonia Road). It was a unique service, since at the time almost all the other streetcar lines in the city were privately owned. The St. Clair route was part of the new Civic Railway system that was set up by the City of Toronto when it was unable (even after going to the highest courts in England) to get the private company that operated almost all of the local streetcar routes to improve and expand their operations to satisfy the needs of the fast growing municipality. This untenable situation began to be corrected in the fall of 1921 when the new municipally controlled TTC came into being and eventually took over all of the privately owned systems.

After more than half a century the presence of streetcars on Mount Pleasant Road came to a sudden end on July 24, 1976. Here one of the TTC’s famed PCC vehicles on its way to the loop at Eglinton Avenue waits patiently at the Merton Street intersection. The Dominion Coal and Wood silos were neighbourhood landmarks for more than seven decades until being unceremoniously flattened in 2001.

One of the routes to come under the TTC’s umbrella was the St. Clair Civic Railway line. Interestingly, in its earliest form it operated on an exclusive centre of the street right-of-way, something that was removed between 1928 and 1935 (partly as one of many Depression make-work projects). History repeated itself when a new dedicated right-of-way was reinstated a couple of years ago. The eastern terminus of that early St. Clair route remained at Yonge Street until 1924, when track was laid on a new bridge built over the Vale of Avoca and then extended to a loop at Mount Pleasant Road, thereby serving the emerging Moore Park community. On August 15 of the following year, work began on extending track north on Mount Pleasant Road to a new loop laid out near the northeast corner of Eglinton Avenue.

In 1915, the City of Toronto paid the Toronto General Burying Grounds, trustees of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, nearly $100,000 to allow it to construct a roadway through the centre of the cemetery’s property. Originally a farm, the property stretched from Yonge Street to the First Concession East (Bayview Avenue) and had been purchased by the trustees forty years earlier. When that new road was finally opened through the cemetery in the early 1920s, wet weather often made it impassable.

Streetcars were a familiar sight on Mount Pleasant Road from November 3, 1925, the day the line opened, until the plug was pulled (figuratively and literally) fifty years later following the Municipality of Metro Toronto’s decision to rebuild the old bridge (opened in 1920 at a cost of $45,489) over the long abandoned Belt Line steam railway right-of-way south of Merton Street. Officials announced that streetcars were to be temporarily removed (or so the community was told) to allow work crews to build what was described as “a better bridge.” The streetcars ran as normal on July 24, 1976, few realizing that after that day they would never return. And many said that it just wasn’t the same when buses (electric trolley coaches, diesel powered, and hybrids) replaced them.