Dundas Street

A street sign for Dundas Street East in Mississauga.

Dundas Street showing a streetcar destined for High Park, with the Art Gallery of Ontario in the background. The tall buildings in the background are at the intersections with University Avenue and with Yonge Street, at Dundas Square.

Dundas Street in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, also known interchangeably as Highway 5 west of Toronto, is a major arterial street which forms a major intersection with Yonge Street where Dundas Square and the Toronto Eaton Centre are found. A second major intersection occurs at Spadina Avenue, where Toronto's downtown Chinatown is located.

Dundas Street is also one of the few east-west routes that has the distinction of being continuous from the Toronto/York Region to Peel Region (the others are Eglinton Avenue, Steeles Avenue, Highway 7, and Castlemore Road/Rutherford Road/Carrville Road/16th Avenue, The Queensway, Bloor Street, and Lake Shore Boulevard).

History

Dundas Street East in Mississauga.

Dundas Street was surveyed by Augustus Jones and constructed by the Queen's Rangers as a colonial road at the direction of John Graves Simcoe, first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. It connected Toronto (then known as York) to the town of Dundas, then to settlements west, and also around Lake Ontario to Niagara-on-the-Lake (Newark). Dundas Street is named after its onetime destination, the town of Dundas. The town itself was named for Henry Dundas - Viscount Melville, British Secretary of State for the Home Department from 1791 to 1801. In the early 19th century when Toronto's oldest streets were first named, Dundas was an important settlement in its own right, rather than simply a suburb of Hamilton, as it has since become.

Montgomery's Inn was built on Dundas Street in 1832 for travellers along this route, and became a center of neighborhood business as well. It stands today, operated as a museum by the City of Toronto.

In the 20th century, for purposes of efficiency, Highway 5 was redirected, just west of the former village of Waterdown, Ontario and no longer passes through the town of Dundas, which was also located on the lower side of the Niagara Escarpment.

Parts of the current day Dundas Street had different names (Arthur, Agnes, St Patrick, Crookshank, Wilton, and Beech), but they were amalgamated in the early 20th century to form the current road.

Immigrant communities have sprung up along its route within Toronto and some still exist today just to name a few; Kensington Market was home to Toronto's first Jewish community; vibrant Chinatown nearby (at Spadina Avenue) is still Toronto's largest downtown Asian ethnic enclave; Brockton Village (at Dovercourt Rd.) became a west end destination for the immigrant Irish community in the mid-19th century, later on and still today the same area was settled by Portuguese and Brazilians, so much so one stretch of Dundas is aptly named "Rua Açores"; The Junction area attracted many immigrant labourers from Ireland and Britain, Southern and Eastern Europe due to its proximity to railways, meat packing and other heavy industries which sprouted up there in the late 19th century.

Dundas Street's route through the city of Toronto is irregular, ignoring the general east-west axis of the city's streets once it is west of Dufferin Street. It meanders northwards towards Bloor Street, crossing it at Roncesvalles Avenue, heading north through The Junction neighbourhood (at Keele Street) until it reaches High Park Avenue, where it once again turns south to meet Bloor Street again at Kipling Avenue. However, this route allows the street to traverse the west end of the city while avoiding obstacles that would have been expensive to cross in the 18th century, such as Grenadier Pond in what is now High Park, and the highest point of the Humber River valley (Bloor Street to the south requires a high bridge to cross the river at that point).

Downtown centre

Dundas Street, at the intersection of Yonge Street. The entrance to Dundas station, Yonge-Dundas Square, the Toronto Eaton Centre, and the Cadillac Fairview Building are seen.

Dundas Street is centrally located in downtown Toronto, about midway between Front Street and Bloor Street. It serves as a major east-west thoroughfare for vehicular, transit, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic both downtown and beyond. The introduction of Dundas Square prompted the migration of some of the arts and culture that were traditionally on Queen Street West and on Bloor Street to a point between them, namely to Dundas.

What is considered the focal point of Toronto's large Chinatown is located at the corner of Dundas Street and Spadina Avenue, on the western side of downtown. To the east of downtown, Dundas St. courses past the large Regent Park Co-operative Housing Project.

The main entrance to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is on Dundas Street, where the front steps of the AGO extend almost along the entire city block, forming an important part of the street life on Dundas Street, where people often meet.

Art on Dundas Street

Dundas Street is the address of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which takes a full city block on the south side of the street, at the corner of McCaul Street, just west of University Avenue. The street is also home to many other art galleries, including Bau Xi Gallery and Art Square, near the adjacent Chinatown.

Highway 5

While this route alignment in Toronto was along Danforth Avenue and Bloor Street, Dundas Street became the former Highway 5 (Ontario) in Etobicoke, west of the former village of Islington, at Kipling Avenue, known as the Six Points. Westward this route passed through Mississauga, Oakville, Burlington, extending across Ontario through St. George, Ontario, and ending in Paris, Ontario, with the junction of the former Highway 2, that proceeds west through Woodstock, and London, Ontario. In London, the ends just east of the forks of the Thames River, before it crosses the Kensington Bridge to West London. Originally, this section was called "Dundas Street West" with the Eastern portion being "Dundas Street East". However, since construction in the mid-1980s, the entire western portion has been called "Riverside Drive". Some Londoners still refer to "Dundas Street East" though no part of the street retains that name.

In Toronto, Dundas Street is divided between Dundas Street East and Dundas Street West by Yonge Street, the east/west dividing line for all Toronto streets.

Transit connections

Yonge & Dundas Streets

Dundas Street is served by the following subway stations:

Bloor-Danforth Subway line:

• Dundas West station
• Kipling Station

Yonge-University-Spadina line:

• St. Patrick station
• Dundas station

It is also served by the following GO stops:

• Bloor
• Cooksville
• Dixie
• Kipling

It is also served by the following TTC surface routes:

• 505 Dundas between Bloor St. W. and Broadview Avenue
• 40 Junction between Bloor St. W. and Runnymede Road.
• 30 Lambton between High Park Avenue and Kipling Avenue.

References

• Dundas Street and Dundas, Ontario

• Queen Street