Have you heard about the time when a family on Springbank sat down for a meal, heard a loud noise and then discovered that the back of their house had slid down the Scarborough Bluffs?
It’s every bluff-dweller’s nightmare.
On this day 20 years ago, the Toronto Star reported that the house at 41 Springbank Ave. would need to be torn down along with the house next door.
This is what those two properties look like today.
The former site of 41 and 39 Springbank Ave., at the end of the street just next to Harrison Estates and the path to Rosetta McLain park.
House teetering on bluffs to be raised
By Nicolaas van Rijn
A Scarborough bungalow with all of Lake Ontario for a basement will fall to the wrecker’s ball under a plan by conservation officials to beat Mother Nature to the punch.
The house, and another one beside it on Springbank Ave., a quiet residential street built decades ago parallel to the Scarborough Bluffs, are literally teetering on the edge.
The Metro Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, which has set aside $500,000 to buy the two houses and turn the lots into a neighbourhood parkette, hopes to get the job done within a year – before Lake Ontario takes care of the problem itself, said Brian Denney, the authority’s manager of engineering and development.
“There isn’t much time to do this,” Denney said yesterday. “We’d like to get it done before the houses end up on the beach.”
Rafael Nebres, who owns 41 Springbank, in the Birchmount and Kingston Rds. area, got the fright of his life in the spring of 1995 when, while he and his family were eating breakfast a loud “whumph” came from outside.
Rushing outside to check, they found a large chunk of their backyard had slipped some 46 meters – 15 stores – down the face of the bluffs to the beach below.
Efforts to move the bungalow, which suddenly had nothing below its sun room and back deck but bluffs and beach and lake, came to nothing – and the family was forced to move out of the unstable dwelling last September.
Violet Robinson, next door at 39 Springbank Ave., is afraid she’s next.
but before that happens, Denney said, the conservation authority plans to get into the act.
“We hope to demolish 41 Springbank as soon as we can acquire it – September or October at the latest – and the one beside it will take a little longer,” Denney said.
Viola Dickinson, who from the her house on the other side of the street has watched the bluffs erode for the past 40 years, said Mother Nature’s holding a winning hand.
“When we moved in more than 40 years ago the bluffs were far and away,” she aid. “But since then they’ve approached, steadily, and it’s enough to make one wonder if the entire street is slated to disappear.
The problem, Denney said, is the flow of groundwater through a sub-surface layer of sand.
“The water exits on the face of the bluff, and when it flows out it carries a lot of the sand with it. That creates caverns which eventually collapse, and then the cycle starts all over again.”
Four decades of that process slowly reduced a property that once measured 113 meters from the street to a mere 35 meters from it.
“If this keeps on going the way it has, Springbank could eventually disappear completely,” Dickinson said. “It’s not a very pleasant idea to contemplate.”
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Thankfully, Dickinson’s prediction that Springbank might disappear forever was wrong, no doubt due to anti-erosion measures over the last two decades.
Here’s another article from the fall of 1995 when the homeowner was still hoping that his house could be saved.
This is article is part of a community “Today in History” series commemorating the upcoming 100th anniversary celebration of Birch Cliff Public School taking place on Sept. 23/24, 2016. To see other articles click here: 1927, 1929, 1935, 1935, 1951, 1993, 1796, 1991, 1983, 1988, 1985, 1930.