In the News

They built Old City Hall, Queen's Park and Massey Hall. They built homes in Riverdale, Rosedale and the Annex.

They're the red and yellow bricks made at Toronto's historic Don Valley Brick Works — a site, largely in ruins, soon to be restored and revitalized as an educational, geological and ecological playground.

Evergreen, a non-profit environmental organization committed to keeping nature alive inside cities, hopes to breathe new life into the ruined brick kilns housed at the front of the 116-year-old quarry.

Plans for the site, to be renamed Evergreen Commons at the Brick Works, feature a 115,000-square-foot demonstration garden and garden retail centre, a woodworking studio and an organic farmer's market. A winter skating rink will wind through the gardens.

Renowned Toronto restaurateur Jamie Kennedy is getting in on the action, with plans for a café serving food grown on site.

Yesterday, Ontario Culture Minister Madeleine Meilleur pledged $10 million toward the $40 million project, which Evergreen hopes to finish by 2007.

Meilleur told the Star it's money well spent. "It's good for the economy, it's good for tourism, it's good for health. It's a win-win situation."

As planned, the site will also provide office space for not-for-profit organizations. Evergreen intends to reach out to agencies, to help at-risk youth pick up skills by working in the garden centre.

Evergreen estimates gross revenues of $4 million a year, with expected operating costs of $2.85 million. The provincial grant brings the total raised to $16 million in public and private funds.

Open from 1889 to 1984, the Brick Works, on the Bayview Extension, made up to 43 million bricks a year. Workers dug enough clay and shale out of the valley to fill the Rogers Centre.

"The red (and) yellow ... brick that defines Toronto's streetscape is largely a result of the soil dug from the quarry in the back of this property," said Evergreen executive director Geoff Cape.

In 1987, Toronto and Region Conservation bought the property and turned it into parkland. In 2004, Evergreen got city council's approval to create a plan for integrating the site's historic appeal with its outstanding natural legacy.

Its original owner was long in the tooth 115,000 years before the first brick was baked there: a giant beaver who lived, died, and left an incisor the length of your arm buried in the soil.

"It's estimated that the beaver weighed up to 200 kilos. That would be the equivalent of a small bear," said Cape. "Imagine that in your back yard."

Woods still embrace the site on two sides. The quarry's north wall is all exposed rock, inviting geologists and students to read glacial history in its strata.

Most of the cash will go into sprucing up historic buildings on the property's 2-hectare industrial footprint.

The ruins housing the kilns still have metal tracks running along the floor, intersecting with pieces of machinery unrecognizable to modern eyes. It's Willy Wonka-style factory design, all pulleys, gears and chains. The metal has rusted badly, but the kiln's red brick walls, slightly worn, still look good.

Out behind the kiln is the Weston Quarry Garden, about 14 hectares of meadows, ponds and pathways where the mighty beaver once roamed.

"This won't be touched, other than to bring back its natural elements," said Chris Carradine, Evergreen's communications director.

Croaking frogs compete with traffic noise as you walk deeper into the meadowland. Nature, in its best imitation of a Monet painting, has scattered lily pads across the ponds.

Geologist Ed Freeman, who has studied the site for 30 years, said the area went from cold to hot to cold to hot again during the ice ages.

He's also an authority on the kilns, which he described as, "Darn hot."

They're long brick tunnels that look like something out of a horror movie. When the ovens were stoked a piston would very slowly move bricks through them. During the two-day trip, bricks were exposed to temperatures as high as 1027 Celsius, before forced drafts cooled them farther down the line.

Kiln workers drank vast quantities of water and swallowed salt tablets to replenish the steady flow they sweated out, Freeman said. Shirts, by day's end, were crusty white with salt deposits.

It wasn't just water that passed through the kiln doors. During Prohibition, Cape said, they were used to burn up Toronto's illegal booze.

A dam on the property houses a beaver, or possibly a muskrat. Carradine said there are no plans to evict him: "Oh, gosh no. That's the whole point of maintaining that quarry, the wonderful wildlife species we have there."

If the ghost of the big, bad prehistoric beaver still stalks the Brick Works grounds, this might keep him happy.