Yonge Street

Regional Road 51 is the original route of the main section. Yonge Street branches off Regional Road 1 at the foot of the bypass to continue north through Holland Landing. This short section, known locally as the Yonge Street Extension, is co-signed with Regional Road 13. At Queensville Side Road, the road breaks, and resumes again slightly to the west for 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) before it ends in the upper Holland Marsh with an unopened road clearance signed with trees next to the Silver Lakes Golf and Country Club.

The intersection of Yonge Street Shore Acres Drive in Innisfil.

Yonge resumes to the northwest in Bradford (reached via Regional Road 1), at a right turn at an intersection in downtown Bradford, where it is initially named Barrie Street before the name Yonge resumes, roughly paralleling Lake Simcoe's western shore through rural countryside, traversing the rolling hills of southeast Simcoe County, and is signed Simcoe Road 4. The street officially ends in Barrie at a rail spur, where its name changes to Burton Avenue at Garden Drive, which itself ends less than a kilometre from Kempenfelt Bay, at a T-intersection with Essa Road.

With the outbreak of hostilities between France and Great Britain in 1793, part of the War of the First Coalition, the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (now Ontario), John Graves Simcoe, was concerned about the possibility of the United States entering British North America in support of their French allies. In particular, the location of Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake), the first and former capital of Upper Canada, was in danger of being attacked by the Americans from the nearby border. Additionally, US forces could easily sever British access to the upper lakes at Lake St. Clair or the Detroit River, cutting the colony off from the important trading post at Michilimackinac.

John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, created the roadway that later became Yonge Street.

Simcoe planned to move the capital to a better-protected location and build overland routes to the upper lakes as soon as possible. Simcoe established York, as Toronto was originally called, with its naturally enclosed harbour, as a defensible site for a new capital. To provide communications between the site and the upper lakes, he planned two connected roads, the first running north from York to Lake Simcoe, (then named Lake aux Claies), the second joining Lake Simcoe with Georgian Bay. This would allow overland transport to the upper lakes, bypassing U.S. strongholds. The route from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe is still known as Yonge Street, and the second leg to Georgian Bay was long known as the Penetanguishene Road.

Before the construction of Yonge Street, a portage route, the Toronto Carrying-Place Trail, had already linked Lakes Ontario and Simcoe. On September 25, 1793, Simcoe and a small party of soldiers and native guides started northward along the trail, establishing the Pine Fort on the western branch of the Holland River, near the modern location of Bradford. Stopping only to rename Lake aux Claies to "Lake Simcoe" in memory of his father, the party continued north to Lake Couchiching, and then down the Severn River to Georgian Bay. Here he selected the site of Penetanguishene as the location for a new naval base and port.

On his return, he met with an Ojibway named 'Old Sail' and was shown a new route along another arm of the trail, this one starting on the eastern branch of the Holland River and thereby avoiding the marshes of the western branch (today's Holland Marsh). They left Pine Fort on October 11 and reached York on the 15th. Simcoe selected this eastern route for his new road, moving the southern end from the Rouge River to the western outskirts of the settled area in York, and the northern end to a proposed new town on the Holland River, St. Albans.[7]

The road was actually called Concession 1 at first with Concessions 2 etc. on either side. For instance Concession 1 Whitchurch Township faces Yonge St. and goes east to Concession 2, which starts at Bayview Ave. Concession 1 King Township faces Yonge St. and goes west to Concession 2, which starts at Bathurst St. There are 10 concessions in York County going east and west from Concession 1, Yonge St. The east side ending at then Ontario County, now Durham Region, and the west side ending at Peel County (now Peel Region).

The following spring, Simcoe instructed Deputy Surveyor General Augustus Jones to blaze a small trail marking the route.[8][9] Simcoe initiated construction of the road by granting land to settlers, who in exchange were required to clear 33 feet of frontage on the road passing their lot. Certain seasons saw the muddy sidewalks of York in deplorable condition, and Yonge Street was renowned as being particularly bad, making it difficult to transport loads along it. The first Toronto resident known to have introduced sidewalks was Jesse Ketchum, who used tanned bark.[10]

In the summer of 1794, William Berczy was the first to take up the offer, leading a group of 64 families north-east of Toronto to found the town of German Mills, in modern Markham. By the end of 1794, Berczy's settlers had cleared the route around Thornhill. However, the settlement was hit by a series of setbacks and road construction stalled.

John Graves Simcoe supervising the Queen's York Rangers cutting trees during the construction of Yonge Street in 1795

Work on the road started again in 1795 when the Queen's Rangers took over. They began their work at Eglinton Avenue and proceeded north, reaching the site of St. Albans on 16 February 1796. Expansion of the trail into a road was a condition of settlement for farmers along the route, who were required to spend 12 days a year to clear the road of logs, subsequently removed by convicted drunks as part of their sentence. The southern end of the road was in use in the first decade of the 19th century, and became passable all the way to the northern end in 1816.[11]

The road was extended south from Eglinton to Bloor Street in 1796 by Berczy, who needed a route to his warehouse on the Toronto lakeshore. The area south of Bloor Street proved too swampy for a major road. A path did exist between Queen and Bloor Streets, but was called the "road to Yonge Street", rather than being considered part of the street itself due to its poor condition. Over time the creeks were rerouted and the swamps drained. In 1812 the route was extended from Queen Street to the harbour, and in 1828 the entire southern portion was solidified with gravel.[12]

St. Albans never developed as Simcoe had hoped, but the town of Holland Landing eventually grew up on the site, a somewhat more descriptive name. Holland Landing was settled by Quakers who moved into the area after having left the United States in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The settlers were branching out from their initial town of "Upper Yonge Street", which later became Newmarket.

The road almost served its original military purpose during the War of 1812, when construction of a new fleet of first-rate ships began on the Lakes, necessitating the shipment of a large anchor from England for use on a frigate under construction on Lake Huron. The war ended while the anchor was still being moved, and now lies just outside Holland Landing in a park named in its honour.

Bears were known to wander onto Yonge Street in the early days of Toronto. In 1809 Lieutenant Fawcett, of the 100th Regiment, came across a large bear on Yonge Street and cut its head open with his sword.[13]

A horse-drawn streetcar on Yonge Street, 1890. Horse-drawn streetcars operations on Yonge Street started in 1861.

In 1824, work began to extend Yonge Street to Kempenfelt Bay near Barrie. A north-western extension was branched off the original Yonge Street in Holland Landing and ran into the new settlement of Bradford before turning north towards Barrie. Work was completed by 1827, making connections with the Penetanguishene Road.

The decision was made to withdraw the military garrison in Penetanguishene in 1852. A year later, the Northern Railway of Canada was built along this established route, between Toronto and Kempenfelt Bay and extended to Collingwood by 1855. Settlement along the Penetanguishene Road pre-dated the road itself. Subsequent extensions of Yonge Street (though never named as such) which later became the more northerly parts of Highway 11, built in the 1830s (some with military strategy in mind), pushed settlement northeast along the shores of Lake Simcoe. By 1860 the Muskoka Road penetrated the southern skirts of the Canadian Shield, advancing towards Lake Nipissing.

A horse-drawn streetcar line was completed on Yonge Street in Toronto in September 1861 and operated by the Toronto Street Railway.[14] The line went from Scollard Street to King Street.[15] Streetcar service would be electrified in Toronto by 1892.

Confederation and the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway further diminished the importance of Yonge Street, as the new Dominion of Canada heralded the construction of east–west trade routes spanning the continent. By the 1870s, Henry Scadding, author of Toronto of Old, declared that Penetanguishene did not have the importance to need an approach such as the "extension of the Yonge Street Road".

During the late 1800s, the Toronto and York Radial Railway used the Yonge Street right-of-way, originally to the town of North Toronto, but expanding over the years all the way to Sutton, on southern Lake Simcoe.[16] The Radial Railway ran along the eastern side of the street, allowing the prevailing westerly winds to remove snow from the slightly raised rails. The arrival of the Canadian Northern Railway in 1906 lessened traffic on the Radial, but it was not until Yonge became a major route for automobiles that the Radial truly fell into disuse. The last TYRR train north from Toronto ran on March 16, 1930. The line was then purchased by the townships north of the city and re-incorporated as North Yonge Railways, running service for another eighteen years before operations ended, along with service on numerous other portions of the Radial lines, in 1948. The space it formerly occupied was used to expand the road between Aurora and Newmarket.

Construction of the Yonge subway, 1949

From the early 1900s onwards, there were several proposals to build a subway for streetcars on Yonge Street, given the high demand for north–south travel within downtown Toronto.[17][18] Following World War 2, the Toronto Transit Commission proposed a north–south subway line along the Yonge Street corridor between Union Station and Eglinton Avenue.[19] Approved by voters in 1946, construction began in September 1949, with disruptive cut-and-cover construction on Yonge Street taking place between College Avenue and Front Street.[20][17] The Yonge Subway was opened in 1954 as Canada's first subway line at a cost of $59m.[21] The line has subsequently been extended several times, most recently to Vaughan, York Region in 2017.[22] The line – now Line 1 Yonge–University – is the busiest subway line in Canada, and one of the busiest in North America.[23]

Route of Yonge St. compared to Highway 11

Yonge Street was formerly a part of Highway 11, which led to claims that Yonge Street was the longest street in the world.[24] Running (mostly) concurrent with Yonge as far north as Barrie, then continuing beyond through central and northern Ontario to the Ontario-Minnesota border at Rainy River, the highway was over 1,896 kilometres (1,178 mi) long. But Yonge Street could only be called the longest street in the world if it were fully synonymous with Highway 11 over the highway's entire length, which has never been the case.[25]

The original historic alignment of Yonge Street diverges from Highway 11 at the Newmarket Inn in East Gwillimbury, one kilometre north of Green Lane; at this junction, the Highway 11 route begins to divert west, while Yonge Street turns right at the intersection and then loops back onto the historic alignment. It then continues along its original alignment, ending at Queensville Side Road in Holland Landing. Approximately 350 metres further west, a later extension travels north for about 1.8 kilometres, stopping at a dead end just past the Silver Lakes Golf and Country Club; further north, the name picks up again as an unpaved farm road which ends at Ravenshoe Road west of Keswick and just south of Lake Simcoe.[25] The diversion running from Holland Landing to Bradford does not carry the Yonge name but instead was named Bradford Street in Holland Landing, and Holland Landing Road in Bradford. The latter was later extended as a bypass was added, curving off the original alignment. A second bypass was later constructed, bypassing the entirety of Holland Landing Road and joining Bradford at Bridge Street. At its intersection with 8th Line in Bradford, the former Highway 11 route does pick up the Yonge Street name again, retaining it through Innisfil until transitioning into Burton Avenue in the Allandale neighbourhood of Barrie.

From that point, no other part of the highway any further north ever carried the Yonge Street name at all; at its terminus in Rainy River, Highway 11's street name is Atwood Avenue rather than Yonge Street.[26] When the final leg of Highway 11 between Atikokan and Rainy River was completed in 1965, the Rainy River Chamber of Commerce responded with a publicity stunt requesting that Toronto change the name of Yonge Street to Atwood Avenue so that the highway could have the same street name at both ends, but this did not occur.[27]

(Above) The "longest street in the world" inscription at Yonge and Dundas in front of the Toronto Eaton Centre in 2013; and after its removal, in 2017 (Below)

The claim was first added by the Guinness Book of Records in 1977 at the request of Toronto writer Jay Myers, supplanting Figueroa Street in Los Angeles.[28] Myers had sought the designation after writing and publishing a book about the history of the street.[28] Earlier claims that Yonge was the longest street in the world also existed, with The Globe asserting it about the original Toronto to Lake Simcoe alignment in 1895, at a time when the rest of Highway 11 did not even exist yet,[29] and later claiming in 1953 that Yonge was the longest street in the world because it purportedly extended to Cochrane, which was then and still is the point at which Highway 11 switches from a north–south alignment to an east–west alignment toward Nipigon.[30] It continued to be listed by Guinness until 1999, when it was dropped in favour of recognizing the Pan-American Highway as the world's longest motorable road.[24]

Provincial downloading separated Yonge Street from Highway 11 in the late 1990s.[31] As a result, Highway 11 does not start until Crown Hill just outside Barrie, several kilometres north of where the name Yonge Street ends.[25]

Although current tourist campaigns do not make much of Yonge Street's length, its status as an urban myth was bolstered by an art installation at the foot of Yonge Street and a map of its purported length laid out into the sidewalk in bronze at the southwest corner of Yonge and Dundas Streets.[25] However, possibly due to wider recognition of the street's actual length, the map inlay has now been removed.

In 2008, Toronto's first pedestrian scramble was opened at the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Streets.

On April 23, 2018, a driver intentionally struck numerous pedestrians, killing 11 and injuring 15 others. The attack started at the intersection of Yonge Street and Finch Avenue and proceeded south along the sidewalks of Yonge Street to near Sheppard Avenue.[32][33]

The early works of Canadian singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot were featured at the Yonge Street location of Sam the Record Man, just north of Dundas Street, at a time when records by Canadian musicians were not widely available. Lightfoot has a song about Yonge Street, titled "On Yonge Street", on his album A Painter Passing Through.

Yonge Street was also the subject or setting for an SCTV comedy sketch featuring John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin & Jayne Eastwood. The sketch, Garth & Gord & Fiona & Alice, was a parody of the Canadian film Goin' Down the Road, about young men from the provinces discovering the bright lights of Yonge Street.

The Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn makes this reference in his song "Coldest Night of the Year," from his 1981 album Mummy Dust: "I took in Yonge Street at a glance / Heard the punkers playing / Watched the bikers dance / Everybody wishing they could go to the south of France / And you're not here / On the coldest night of the year."

Singer and rapper K-os also references the street in the lyrics to his 2004 single "Crabbuckit": "Walking down Yonge Street on a Friday / Can't follow them, gotta do it my way / No fast lane, still on a highway".

(a) Berczy's Draft letter in the Public Archives of Canada. Among the William Berczy Papers (M.G.23, H ii, Vol.2, p. 419 and Vol. 3, p. 527). As well as agreement of the German Company reproduced in The Simcoe correspondence, I, p. 191, 192

(b) Baby collection, University of Montreal. Salso Berczy Papers National Archive.

(c) John Andre the Berczy Study Infant Toronto as Simcoe's Folly p. 137. Also see Table II that shows comparison by yearly averaged growth from 1802 to 1825 p. 138

(d) Firth, p. 10 p. 10 P.Russell to Elizabeth Russell, Sep. 1, 1793 Also in Eric ArthurToronto No Mean City" Toronto, 1964 p. 138