The work that goes into infrastructure projects like the Port Lands should be seen by the public

Globe and Mail

3 days ago

Vid Ingelevics is a visual artist, former educator and now professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he taught in undergraduate and graduate programs. His exhibitions, curatorial endeavours and writings on art and photography have appeared across Canada and in the United States, Europe and Australia.
My connection with Toronto's Port Lands began with a high school summer job at the Smith Transport offices on 150 Commissioners St., a company where my father worked. I remember the heady mix of fumes rising from the dozens of leaky gas and oil tanks and the sickly sweet odour of soap wafting from the nearby Lever Brothers plant just across the Don River.
The Port Lands industrial sector was created in the early 20th century by filling in Toronto's extensive marshlands that extended from the delta of the river. Years earlier, the Don's natural course was forced into a 90-degree turn westward through the concrete-lined Keating Channel.
In the decades since, the potential flood risk to hundreds of acres in this area adjacent to downtown Toronto has risen dramatically as climate change has increasingly become a driver of extreme weather.
Fifty-six years later, I returned as a photographer to begin work with my colleague, Ryan Walker, on a five-year commission to 'document and interpret' the Port Lands Flood Protection Project, one the most ambitious public infrastructure and climate-change adaptation plans in North America.
The overwhelming prospect of capturing such a mammoth undertaking led to the idea of collaborating with Ryan, a former student of mine in the Documentary Media program at Toronto Metropolitan University. Together we applied for the commission from Waterfront Toronto.
Today, 150 Commissioners St. no longer exists – the buildings and once-busy truck-loading docks were demolished back in the 1990s. The scruffy, once-toxic vacant land, home for a while to coyotes, is now lush, green and revitalized as part of the new Biidaasige Park, which opens to the public this month.
The Port Lands Flood Protection Project has corrected civic mistakes made over a hundred years ago, creating a new mouth for the Don River with reintroduced wetlands, all engineered completely from scratch.
Beginning in July, 2019, Ryan and I visited the site on a weekly basis and have hiked hundreds of kilometres around the area. Our presence there and relatively unrestricted access was seen, especially at first, as highly unusual. Resident photographers are a rarity on construction projects. Companies generally hire photographers temporarily for specific purposes, retaining control over the images and how they're used.
One has to go back just over a hundred years – yes, a hundred years – to a set of remarkable and often-cited photographs created by Toronto's first official photographer, Arthur Goss, of the construction of the Don Valley-spanning Prince Edward Viaduct – popularly known as the Bloor Viaduct.
The representation of labour and sites of labour has become increasingly restricted, tending more to reflect corporate publicity goals than quotidian life on construction sites. Our work, we hope, offers an antidote and a potential model for other such commissions.
Our unusual access has resulted in a large image archive spanning the gamut from the epic to the everyday – the surgical demolition of many industrial buildings, the takedown of the Gardiner Expressway off-ramp, the excavation of the new river course, heroic efforts to subdue pollutants found deep in the soil, and the arrival and installation of new bridges.
We have witnessed the stages of the project shift from heavy machinery and excavation to hand labour, planting and weeding. We've documented First Nations' ceremonial activities, returning wildlife and the emerging new ecosystem. All of this work has been carried out through ever-changing and sometimes challenging weather conditions on a site that, for the first few years, existed mainly as fields of mud and dust.
It is worth reflecting that the scarcity of comprehensive, long-term documentation of sites of labour and labour itself includes that of Toronto's own more ambitious civic infrastructure projects. Goss' set of remarkable and often-cited Bloor Viaduct photographs inspired Michael Ondaatje's celebrated novel In the Skin of a Lion. His work seems most aligned, at least in terms of historical value, with the visionary, multi-year Waterfront Toronto commission that Ryan and I have been privileged to work on. It would be gratifying to us if Toronto's photographers, and those who love the city's history, didn't have to wait another hundred years for the next one.
Ryan Walker is a lens-based artist exploring land, identity, and society's response to climate change. He is an Adjunct Professor in the BFA Photography programs at TMU and Sheridan College. His work has been exhibited in Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Australia, and the U.S.
The Port Lands Flood Protection Project is not just a story of infrastructure or flood mitigation. It's a story of time, of people, of history moving in cycles, of shifting social values, and of the evolution of land itself.
The site has always been in flux. Once a marshland, then an industrial hub, later a neglected brownfield, and now, it's returning to nature. Vid and I watched its current transformation unfold up close: from the flowing new river, where hundreds of machines and people worked along its bed and banks, to the edge of a newly established wetland, watching a great white egret fish in the exact spot where Cherry St. once ran.
This return to something natural carries the weight of countless hands: designers, engineers, tradespeople, labourers. But it is also a result of the passing of time that has led to a societal paradigm shift from conquering nature for the sake of industrialization, to respecting and cherishing natural ecosystems.
That cyclical nature of the Port Lands' history became all the more apparent through its soil. As crews dug deep into layers of the once-buried marsh, they unearthed dark, damp and ancient peat that's rich with memory. And from it, the past began to breathe.
Seeds, long dormant beneath the surface, were stirred. Bulrushes and cattails of the original wetland from the 1910s pushed slowly toward the light. At first mistaken for weeds, they were, in fact, time travelers – remnants of the Ashbridge's Bay marsh that rose over 100 years later to meet a world that had long forgotten them.
Some were carefully transplanted to Tommy Thompson Park, others studied, and some were replanted here, where the wetlands now return.
As time passed and the project progressed, the labour, too, has evolved. Early on, the work was dominated by machinery. Massive diggers carved out earth, while cranes and deep-drilling rigs created a makeshift skyline. But as the work progressed, it moved to a more human scale.
Now its masons hand-lay stone, carpenters build intricate playgrounds, artists sculpt subtle forms of concrete. We've watched the site become a canvas for humanity to imprint, where people poured themselves into this space, not just in sweat, but in craft and artistry.
Vid and I were embedded in the Port Lands, which enabled us to become part of the rhythm of the site.
In the beginning, we arrived with the intention of capturing everything, but it was the slow passing of time that revealed to us what truly matters: humanity and nature coexisting once more, thanks to the collaboration and camaraderie of those who spent the last six years bringing the land back to life.
Some stories aren't visible unless you wait. Small changes that eventually show up as big shifts require patience and persistence to document. It's this type of long-term work – which Waterfront Toronto had the rare foresight to invest in – that holds space for the invisible processes of time to become visible.
This project was never just about documenting what was built, but how it was built and what that incredible effort reveals. The tens of thousands of hours of labour and its results now hidden beneath the river and its lush banks may go unnoticed by future visitors, who will see only a thriving landscape. These images are our way of honouring the unseen: the moments, hands and histories buried in the earth, waiting for time to bring them to light.