Colourful new bridges open in Toronto's Port Lands

Two important pieces of infrastructure opened today for the first time in Toronto’s Port Lands.

On Wednesday afternoon, Waterfront Toronto invited the public to join them in making history by crossing the brand new Cherry Street North and Commissioners Street bridges for the first time ever in the “most imaginative way possible.” People were invited to dress up and break out their most creative moves for the special occasion.

The new Cherry Street North bridge, which is red and white, crosses the Keating Channel south of Lake Shore Boulevard at the location of new Cherry Street, which will be built about 100 metres west of the one that currently exists. The old Cherry Street will eventually be permanently closed and the existing bridge that crosses the Keating Channel will be removed.

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The Cherry Street North crossing, which weighs 450 tonnes, opened today to pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers.

A second narrower bridge that also crosses the north end of Cherry Street is dedicated to a future transit line and will be fully activated at a later date, Waterfront Toronto told CP24.com. That bridge weighs 340 tonnes.

Both bridges, which connect the future Villers Island to downtown Toronto, are 57 metres in length.

The first of the two Cherry North bridges left Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, for Toronto on Oct. 29, 2020 and arrived in the city 10 days later on Nov. 7, 2020. The second made it here in July 2022.

The orange-and-white Commissioners Street bridge was shipped to Toronto in two parts in 2021. The first half, which weighs 650 tonnes and is 83 metres long, arrived in May, while the 560-tonne, 69-metre-long second section made it to the city at the end of August 2021. It connects the new Villiers Island to the rest of the Port Lands.

The new bridges that opened today are part of a family of four new bridges that have been installed as part of the $1.25-billion Port Lands Flood Protection project, which will take roughly 715 acres out of the city’s floodplain through the re-naturalization of the mouth of the Don River between the Ship and Keating channels.

Designed and engineered by Entuitive, Grimshaw and Schlaich Bergermann and fabricated by Halifax-based Cherubini Metal Works, the crossings were all assembled in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and shipped to Toronto on barges through the St. Lawrence Seaway. In total, the bridges cost $100 million.

The fourth bridge, which is yellow-and-white and weighs 830 tonnes and measures 110 metres long, crosses a newly created river at the south end of Cherry Street. This bridge arrived in Toronto in December 2021 and has been open since the fall of 2022.

“(These new bridges) going to have a massive impact. (They) are part of a larger construction project, a huge project the aim of which is primarily to protect a massive part of the eastern waterfront from flooding from the Don River in the event of a major storm,” Mira Shenker, Waterfront Toronto’s director of communications, told CP24.

“So these bridges will now connect folks from downtown to the future Villiers Island, which is a future community that is created by the extension of the Don River through the Port Lands and the naturalization of the river mouth, which is all part of this same project.”

Shenker went on to say that protecting the eastern portion of downtown Toronto from significant flooding, like what Hurricane Hazel caused in 1954 at the Humber and Don rivers, is part of creating a more resilient city and is critical to the growth of Toronto’s eastern waterfront.

In tandem with the opening of the new bridges, Waterfront Toronto also marked the opening of two new roadways today: the new alignment of Cherry Street between Lake Shore Boulevard and Commissioners Street, and the rebuilt Commissioners Street between Cherry and Saulter Streets.