This website has been launched as part of a campaign to restore the Vale of Avoca ravine to the state it was many years ago, when it was a destination nature park in what was to become midtown Toronto. The recent pace of City investment in maintaining this resource has been inadequate. The result has been years of cumulative damage from erosion due to stormwater runoff, deterioration of park infrastructure, and rapid proliferation of invasive plant monocultures.
Please use the contact form on this website to let us know of your interest. Also, sign-up for our newsletter providing updates on key developments. Let your friends and neighbours know too. You can also participate in ravine events – a ravine walk, a public meeting, or a mail-in campaign. Send a message to your member of City Council that you would like to see concerted actions taken to restore the Vale of Avoca.
The ravine
The Vale of Avoca is a ravine just east of Yonge Street that runs south from Mount Pleasant Cemetery under the St. Clair E. bridge to where it meets Mount Pleasant Road at its intersection with Roxborough Drive. The same ravine continues to the southeast, through the so-called Park Drive Reservation Lands, which ultimately connect to the Don Valley. To view legend for map, click on sidebar icon in black bar at top left of map. Vale of Avoca is marked in slightly darker green.
The Vale of Avoca ravine makes up most of the David Balfour Park. The other major component of Balfour Park is the Rosehill Reservoir, which is situated on the table land to the west of the ravine. The Balfour Park has an area of 20.5 hectares (50 acres). The reservoir section of the park has an area of about 5.5 hectares, and the ravine parkland is about 15 hectares.
The Vale of Avoca ravine contains the only above-ground section of Yellow Creek, which originates near Downsview and drains storm runoff from a watershed of over 10 square kilometers. In normal conditions, the Creek is a pleasant stream. But in a heavy rainstorm – like the three ‘once in a century’ storms Toronto has experienced in the past 17 years – Yellow Creek becomes a raging torrent, eroding the banks of the ravine.
Back in the early 1900s, Yellow Creek was an open stream from Downsview to the Don River. Over the years, it has mostly been put underground in concrete storm sewers. The open creek through the cemetery was filled in when the Yonge Street subway was built, back in the early 1950s. From the Vale of Avoca south to the Don, the stream was put underground in the late 1940s, running in an underground pipe alongside the stream that is now above ground through Park Drive Reservation.
The open stream was built in the early 1960s to drain the stream in the Nordheimer ravine to make room for the Spadina subway. Yellow Creek was put underground in the 1940s in the expectation that the ravine could be developed as a residential subdivision, thankfully a plan that was reversed after the destructive Hurricane Hazel that killed over 80 persons in 1954).
No. Some areas of the Avoca ravine are privately owned residential and apartment lots that back onto the ravine. The northern-most section of the ravine trail, from the St. Clair bridge to the cemetery, is on land that is part of private lots.
The time has come for a long-term fix for ravine problems! If we put this off, or drag it out, restoration will be even more costly, and disruptive to ravine users and habitats.
There are a number of reasons why the time for concerted action has arrived:
- Degradation is getting worse with each extreme weather event. We are already seeing major sinkholes and bank erosion. Without adequate protection, we could see a significant future slope collapse, endangering visitors to the ravine, the useability of trails, and the integrity of the ravine itself.
- City departments have many competing needs to address. The fallback approach has been to delay fixes as long as possible, and to fix only the most immediate problems. This has meant piecemeal repairs that ignore the need for comprehensive restoration.
- The long-awaited Geomorphic Systems engineering study of the ravine (made public in March 2025) provides critical input to detailed design work to stabilize the Yellow Creek channel and ravine slopes.
- The growing midtown population – another 100,000 residents just in projects now in the development pipeline – creates an even greater need for the recreational resource and access to nature the ravine can provide.
- The ecology of the ravine is being threatened. Invasive plants are steadily outcompeting native varieties, taking over large sections of the ravine. The resultant monocultures undermine the ravine as a habitat for pollinators, birds, and ravine biodiversity.
The only sensible way to proceed is to address individual problems as part of an integrated master plan and design for the ravine, and that is what the Midtown Ravines Group has been advocating. This same coordinated vision is precisely what has been contemplated in the City’s ravine strategy, with its emphasis on management plans for Environmentally Significant Areas and on proactive coordination of capital projects upgrading ravine infrastructure and restoring ecosystems. But the Strategy has to date has been words, not action. So let’s get on with it!
The ravine was named the Vale of Avoca in the 1800s, evoking a popular poem by Thomas Moore about the Avoca River in Ireland, which flows through a vale known for its natural beauty. A ‘vale’ is a poetic word for a valley. The poem “The Meeting of the Waters” was published in 1808.
Sweet vale of Avoca! how calm could I rest
In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best,
Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease,
And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace.
The poem is also sung to a traditional Irish tune: The Meeting of the Waters, sung by Paddy Kelly.