The East Toronto and Midway Sewer System

Up until 1908, Toronto's city limit ended just east of Greenwood Ave., on the western shoulder of the Ashbridges Creek ravine, save for a narrow strip the city had already claimed along the lakeshore as far as Balmy Beach. The area east of Woodbine Ave., spurred by the Grand Trunk Railway's freight yard north of Gerrard St., was beginning to develop into an industrial community and suburb then known as East Toronto, while the land in between Toronto and East Toronto had only been sparsely settled (the largest community the unincorporated Village of Norway) and was known somewhat appropriately as Midway. However, though development came relatively late, residential pressures quickly had an impact on the area's delicate watershed.

The system that was put in place for East Toronto and Midway comprises two wholly separate combined sewers, with the Midway sewer running north-south just east of Greenwood Ave. on roughly the former alignment of the lost Ashbridges Creek, and the East Toronto sewer begins as separate arms coming down Woodbine and Main St. before turning west beneath the curving, western end of the Kingston Road. Each is intercepted north of Dundas Street -- the Midway sewer is diverted into both the High-Level Interceptor and the Mid-Toronto Interceptor (added in the 1970s), while the sewer for East Toronto is sent along with some other local sewers into a small pipe that leads directly to the Main Treatment Plant. The treatment plant has now been moved to the west side of Ashbridges Bay, south of Lakeshore Blvd, but flow from these sewers still passes through the interceptors to the old Wet Well at Eastern Ave., from which it is pumped south to the contemporary Ashbridges treatment facility.

These diversion structures were never intended to be sufficient to handle the wet-weather loads on these combined sewers, and so when it rains they overflow into a pair of tunnels that join at Dundas and Coxwell to extend these sewers to Ashbridges Bay. This overflow system is best known as the East Toronto and Midway Overflow Sewer, though photos at the Toronto Archives refer to it as the 'East Toronto and Midway Storm Sewer'. A large concrete arch with multiple junctions, this is the section of the sewer that initially sparked our interest in the system.

read more at The Vanishing Point....here