Yonge Street

The Toronto Eaton Center on Yonge Street south of Dundas Street .

North York

Street sign in Toronto

The Yonge Street ( jʌŋ stɹit ) is a street in the Canadian province of Ontario . It begins as one of the main arteries of the largest Canadian city of Toronto and ends after 1,896 kilometers as a provincial road in northern Ontario. Its length has earned Yonge Street an entry in the Guinness Book of Records .

course

Yonge Street begins right on the shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto. From there it runs north to the town of Cochrane (the junction of the Ontario Northland and Polar Bear Express railroad lines) and from there gradually westwards towards Thunder Bay on Lake Superior . It then runs towards the city of Rainy River , where it ends on the border with the US state of Minnesota . As Highway 11 , Yonge Street officially extends over 1,896 km, but some changes in responsibility for the road in the 1990s meant that the actual Yonge Street is now financed locally and Highway 11 is under the administration of the province of Ontario. As a result, Yonge Street now ends in Barrie , with one exception in Bradford, where the street is known as Bridge Street . All of this has led to disputes over the title of “the longest street in the world” as Yonge Street is officially “only” about 99 km long. The length of Highway 11 is currently 1784 km. In addition, a large part (about 250 km) north of Barrie was expanded into an expressway with a slightly different route.

South of Lawrence Avenue, Yonge Street is a four-lane major Toronto artery that runs through residential and commercial areas with heavy pedestrian traffic. It runs north of Lawrence Avenue through less densely populated area. Between the highways Highway 401 and 407 , Yonge Street has even been expanded into a six-lane road.

history

George Yonge

Yonge Street's story began as the Wyandot Trail . As a result, numerous European explorers such as Samuel de Champlain used it . From 1793 John Graves Simcoe , the lieutenant governor of the British colony of Upper Canada , had the path expanded to a military road. He named it after George Yonge , the British Secretary of War at the time. British settlers were granted the right to settle if they agreed to work on it for twelve days a year and to clear the area around the street. A German settler group under the leadership of William Berczy was also temporarily involved in the road construction. In the area of what would later become the city of Toronto, Yonge Street reached to Bloor Street in 1796 , but was not extended to the shores of Lake Ontario until 1812 due to the swampy terrain.

In 1827 Yonge Street reached Kempenfelt Bay near Barrie in the north . When railway construction began in the 1850s, the importance of long interurban roads initially decreased. In 1919 the Ontario Department of Transportation took over Yonge Street and extended it by several hundred kilometers in the years that followed. However, the newly built section was named Highway 11. Since then, only the first 56 km of the route, which runs through Toronto and the York region, have been named Yonge Street.

Until it was destroyed in the anti-Greek riots in Toronto in 1918 , a section of Yonge Street was part of what was then the Greek quarter.

Rampage 2018

On April 23, 2018, a rampage with a van took place on this street , in which a 25-year-old, mentally impaired IT student of Armenian descent killed 10 people and injured 15 on the sidewalk. He asked the police to shoot him in the head before he was arrested. He has been charged with ten murders and thirteen attempted murders. His possible motive is supposed to have been misogyny and his role model for the act Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the killing spree in Isla Vista .

Attractions

Yonge Street as seen south from St. Clair Avenue

Yonge Street passes many Toronto attractions, including numerous street performances, the Eaton Center shopping mall , Dundas Square , the Hockey Hall of Fame , and at the very beginning of the street the Toronto Star Publishing House . The Bank of Toronto building , which has been protected under the Ontario Heritage Act since 1975, stands north of Queen Street West . The 1954 opened Yonge-University line of the Toronto Subway runs between the stations King and college below the Yonge Street and from there to the terminus Finch parallel to this road.

literature

Ralph Magel (Ed.): 200 Years Yonge: A History . Natural Heritage Books, Toronto 1998, ISBN 1-896219-49-7 .
Leonard Wise, Allan Gould: Toronto Street Names: An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins . Firefly Books, Toronto 2000, ISBN 1-55209-386-7 .