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Lost road: Sheppard Avenue through Etobicoke

Transportfan

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A cool thing I notice is that a road that corresponds to Sheppard Ave once ran through Etobicoke (with a break). The westernmost part of today's Rexdale Blvd. was part of it:

View attachment 185894

Another section of it still exists as present Barker Ave. It lines up perfectly with Sheppard (when the northward shift across the Humber. common to almost all streets that cross the river is taken into account):

View attachment 185895
 
You have to beware the merits of the maps they put out, right up to the 1960s, in my experience. A lot of those promised streets are vapourware. While you can unquestionably see the division of properties you'd expect to see along a range or concession line, I don't think they ever actually built anything we'd recognize as a through, public street along most of it. It's too chopped up by the Humber to be useful for getting anywhere without a lot of major bridges they just didn't have the need (or likely the money) to build in the 19th century. Once it's clear of the river in the west, though, they do seem to have used the last leg of it before the county line to build what's now Rexdale Blvd (here). The earliest aerial photos of the general area you can find are from 1947 (here and here), and they don't show the kind of evidence I'm used to seeing of once-used-but-now-abandoned country roads... those tend to persist for generations. You can see a place or two where the line was used by someone to build a private avenue to their home, but that seems to be the extent of it. It's likely all that the map shows is the right-of-ways between the lots where roads could be built, but not necessarily that the county ever got around to actually making them passable for traffic.
 
It also may be stretching things to call Barker an "extension" of Sheppard, as it involves a considerable jog--then again, there were even more "considerable jogs" along Victoria Park. (And if so, I think that further north, Stevenson Road probably served a similar "extension" role relative to Finch.)
 

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