How do cities achieve closure through acts of burial and commemoration?

By reflecting on buried and submerged layers of urban Toronto we aim to better understand how cities remain tethered to what lies beneath. We will explore how memorialization both uncovers and unravels the layered city through a walk along the now buried Garrison Creek, its proximate commemorative burial grounds of 18th c. victims of outbreaks as well as sites of the infamous Fever Sheds where they were treated. Named after the Fort York garrison near which it flowed, Garrison Creek served first as a pristine water and food source but by the end of the eighteenth century its contamination led to its burial and conversion into a sewer. Implicated in its burial were the ravaging effects of cholera and typhus outbreaks on the city’s inhabitants, exacerbated by poor infrastructure and the arrival of immigrants subjected to horrific and unhygienic transatlantic passage.

Our sites are intimately linked not only through their shared memorialization but their evocations of contagion and public health. By examining the memorialization of these burial modalities, the creek and the epidemic victims, we reconstitute a narrative for the cataclysmic impact of historical infrastructural failure. Nullified as a source of contagion by its burial, Garrison Creek is a reminder of how burial may act as a form of healing and restitution when burial is conceived as cleansing, hygienic and the only way for a city to move forward. Most of all, the burial of Garrison Creek and the victims of its contamination tells a nuanced history of a quintessential city of immigrants and stands as a testament to its inhabitants valiant response in the face of tragedy.