Buried localities: archaeological exploration of a Toronto dump and wilderness refuge Heidy Schopf a∗ and Jennifer Foster b a Cultural Heritage Specialist, Archaeological Services Inc., Toronto, ON, Canada; b Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada (Received 14 February 2013; accepted 31 August 2013) The Leslie Street Spit is best known as an urban wilderness refuge but it has a fascinating, although obscure, social history. Archaeological methods are used here to uncover the material associations between the Leslie Street Spit and the City of Toronto. This approach reveals that the Spit reflects the past planning practice and creative destruction of the city. The Spit is found to contain artifacts of the past such as domestic items and rubble that resulted from slum clearing practices of the 1960s and development-driven planning practice of the 1980s. In its present state, the Leslie Street Spit acts as the romanticised ruins of the City of Toronto, composed of the material elements of the city that were discarded so that new and “up-to-date” forms of architecture could take their place. Keywords: Toronto; creative destruction; planning; archaeology; ruins The Leslie Street Spit is a 5-km manufactured peninsula that extends from Toronto’s old industrial lands into Lake Ontario. It is composed of construction debris, and is a world- class birding site that hosts rare and endangered species. This paper examines the discarded and buried artifacts that underlie this celebrated post-industrial landscape and discovers that these artifacts, when contextualised through archaeological research methods, tell a story that previously had been obscured. It is a story about urban development processes, the destruction of the built heritage of Toronto, displacement of poor communities that got in the way of modernist ideals, and the ability of nature to transform industrial space into romanticised ruins. In this case, the act of memory suppression is performed in two specific ways: by omission and misrepresentation of the contents of refuse transported to the Spit from policy and planning records, and by the power of nature to distract civic atten- tion from critical awareness of what has actually been destroyed. The Toronto Harbour Commissioners (now the Toronto Port Authority) began dumping construction rubble and lake dredgeate on the edge of Lake Ontario in 1959. The dumping continues today, and the Leslie Street Spit is now over 500 hectares in size (Toronto Region and Conservation Authority 2010). Over time, this landmass has been gradually colonised by seeds and plant matter dispersed by wind, birds, water, and deposited material. Through # 2013 Taylor & Francis ∗ Corresponding author. Email: heidy.schopf@gmail.com Local Environment, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2013.841660 Downloaded by [Heidy Schopf] at 06:56 02 October 2013