The Eastern Avenue Bridge is one of the city’s last great ruins. Not in the league of the pyramids or Coliseum, of course, but a relic from another, more recent age evoking a Toronto that is nearly gone. It’s also a piece of public heritage in a city that often places greater value on private heritage.
Eastern Avenue and other places, like Dupont Street, the Junction or New Toronto in Etobicoke, conjure images of Toronto’s mighty industrial past, one that largely moved elsewhere by the 1990s, the devastating recession and free trade a final blow. The city changed, just as the route of Eastern Avenue did. Toronto’s voracious real estate machine tends not to let ruins survive long, so the old bridge was special.