Dupont Street was once the backbone — and graveyard — of industrial Toronto. Now it’s a hostile highway in need of a serious safety fix

In Dionne Brand’s 2014 novel, “Love Enough,” she writes of a beautiful sunset glimpsed in a rear-view mirror on Dupont Street: “Because it’s such an ugly street, in some regards the sunset is even more magnificent,” explained Brand, in an interview when the book was published.

Dupont was always a working street, the backbone of the city but also a back route for drivers avoiding the main streets. Twenty-two years ago, digging deep into the street’s industrial history in an essay titled “Dupont at Zenith,” journalist Alfred Holden laid out a post-industrial tale that firmly placed Toronto among other rust belt cities.

“Enterprises, as great as Eastern Airlines or as lowly as a corner store, will often die pathetically, with no ceremony or celebration of their achievements,” he wrote. “Dupont St. in Toronto at the close of the twentieth century is an open graveyard of such industries, most of which collapsed without so much as a pauper’s funeral. Their skeletons lie exposed.”

The graveyard is coming back to life with new restaurants, shops and residential buildings. The biggest cluster is set to replace the Galleria Mall at Dufferin Street. Though not a skeleton by any means, a developer-sponsored art project there by artist Thrush Holmes includes a giant red neon heart on an 18-metre high signage pylon that has created a new, terminating view seen when coming from the east due to the jog at Dufferin, an electric echo of Brand’s sunset.

There were always people living on and near Dupont, but we’ve tended to overlook these kinds of areas. Out of sight, out of mind — unless a short cut is needed or there’s time to idle in line at that gas station with slightly cheaper gas. Affordability isn’t much of a priority now, but this kind of place once was just that.

When I lived on Dupont a few years after Holden wrote his essay, the street was already changing as fancier bits of the Annex to the south and Forest Hill to the north (the area in between is possibly called “South Hill,” a name straight out of a realtor’s fever dream) started appearing. The trains in the rail corridor would shunt at all hours, shaking our apartment in Richter-measurable magnitudes.

Never wholly a graveyard beyond the de-industrialization, the auto body shops and warehouses were all useful, and many are still there, though in diminished numbers as they’re replaced. It’s probably still ugly to those who don’t find the Toronto jumble of architectural styles beautiful in its heterogeneity. The trains still shunt and Dupont is always interesting to walk along.

The walking, though, is fraught. So is the cycling. So is the driving. It can often feel like a lawless speedway. Two weekends ago 73-year-old Jill Le Clair was killed while on the sidewalk outside a coffee shop at Christie Street when she was hit by a minivan driver who jumped the curb. Not far from where Le Clair was killed, a 71-year-old cyclist was killed while riding on Dupont in 2016.

If you talk to people who use Dupont they’ll tell you it’s dangerous. A friend who lives a half block from it told his teenage girls not to walk along it. Imagine feeling like the main street in your neighbourhood is too dangerous for your kids. Maybe you don’t have to imagine.

Comprehensive statistics on Dupont’s dangers are hard to come by. The Toronto Police does maintain an online “KSI” (Killed or Seriously Injured) data map of automobile collisions between 2006-2019. Dozens fan out from the Christie and Dupont intersection.

In 2018, the city conducted a study to determine if a west-bound turn signal was needed at Christie, but concluded the “signal is technically not warranted.” Two months ago, Coun. Mike Layton requested another study to look into safer turn signals at Christie and also Ossington. The city will be conducting a “Vulnerable Road Safety Fatal Review” of the Dupont and Christie intersection too. New traffic signals were also installed at Huron Street and just west of Bathurst Street.

Council and its infrastructure and environment committee are discussing the MoveTO Traffic Congestion Plan. For some councillors, keeping traffic moving is the only priority. It should be a priority, of course, but at what cost? Dupont, as designed decades ago, is a hostile highway running through multiple neighbourhoods where people live. It’s not just a place to pass through.

All those new housing projects will bring more people into Dupont’s neighbourhoods. Not much changes in this town until things get really bad or there’s a critical mass of folks demanding it.

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Like the King Street transit priority project that only came about when buildings full of people sprang up in Liberty Village and elsewhere along that corridor making it a necessity, perhaps all the new people coming to Dupont will not just be the catalyst of change, but change the threshold of where safer road design becomes “technically warranted.”

Dupont is no longer a back route, but its second zenith will require work.