Amy Lavender Harris wrote a great little piece on Toronto laneways on the Reading Toronto blog.
When it rains, I think of the laneway behind our Junction area home as a creek, flowing intermittently like those sunken runnels at the edge of rural cow pastures, shaded and stagnant in the midsummer heat but swelling to gurgling fullness after a rain. Alive with frogs, whose deep grunting utterances are low echoes of the high trilling voices of peepers in the spring.
It isn’t like this in reality, of course. The laneway is poured concrete and slopes between storm sewer gratings designed to catch runoff before it can muddy and undermine the sills of the wooden garages lining the alley like so many weathered boathouses. But when it rains, the alley flows, briefly, like a creek, and eddies at the detritus left along its banks: beer bottles, shopping carts, bike tires, and (by rumour) the occasional syringe. And if it does not teem with frogs and minnows, our alley does produce its share of wildlife….
Read all of it here.
photograph by Erin Pryde
One comment
When Toronto’s commercial strips are cracked and broken and plastered in ads, and the street trees are dying and the size of the signs are truly odious we can always retreat to our back lanes. They are a forgotten part of our city and obviously meant to be utilitarian, but never has utility looked so pretty.
Some of them have become streets in their own right: Croft street, Fitroy terrace, parts of Brockton. I always wind my way through them wherever I can.