Coatsworth Cut
The Coatsworth Cut is a man-made break in what was originally the foot of the long sandspit that formed the original Toronto Islands, and that enclosed Ashbridges March and Toronto Bay.[1] When York, Upper Canada, the settlement that later became Toronto, Ontario, was first settled, in the late eighteenth Century, the Don River drained into a large marsh, that extended south of what is now Eastern Avenue from approximately Parliament Street to near Coxwell Avenue. Disastrous 19th Century industrial waste management practices poisoned the marsh with foul smelling toxic waste.
City authorities decided to fill in most of the marsh with landfill, and to devote the new real estate to port facilities and industrial enterprises. Three portions of the marsh were dredged, for navigation. A new, canalized mouth to the Don River, the Keating Channel, marked the north edge of the former marsh. A channel, known as the turning basin, allowed ships to moor in the middle of the new portlands. And a lagoon was dredged at the eastern apex of the marsh, taking a name that used to apply to the whole marsh -- Ashbridges' Bay.
The Coatsworth Cut was a breach made in the sandbar that had marked the edge of the marsh, that allowed navigation from the lake into the bay. Unlike the Keating Channel and the Turning Basin, the cut is only maintained deep enough for private sailboats and other pleasure craft.
References
- ↑ "Toronto Ornithological Club: Ashbridges' Bay" (in English). Toronto Ornithological Club. http://www.torontobirding.ca/hotspots/descriptions.php. Retrieved 2012-11-. "Coatsworth Cut was cut through the bar in the 1920s, creating Fisherman’s Island, and remains as the passage between the lake and Ashbridge’s Bay."
