Lone Primate
Active Member
Some of the posts here have prompted me to go back into some really old photographs I have and put them up here for your consideration. These will be of particular interest, I think, to you folks in northwest Mississauga.
In the winter of 1988-1989, my parents took a trip to the Caribbean, and they brought home to me a decent SLR camera and a couple of lenses. It was easily the best camera any of us had ever owned, and I made considerable use of it within the film-and-development budget I had. I got into B&W photography for a bit, which, to my consternation, turned out to be markedly more expensive than colour; so I didn't do as much of it as I would have liked. One roll I shot was simply me roaming around the area around home... Meadowvale and Erin Mills... sometime in late winter or early spring, 1989. These are some of the shots I took.
Let's start with the Second Line shots.
This shot (in fact, all of these shots) was taken on Second Line, the part that's now Terry Fox Way, in the immediate vicinity of where Dreamcrest Village Plaza is now; about a half a kilometre north of Eglinton Avenue. At the time, I was in the middle of farmland. The view looks across open field to the rather isolated and solitary view of City Hall, which was only a few years old at most at this point.
These following three shots show the view across the field through what's now Century City Park and subdivision toward where Mavis was about to push northward. At the time, Mavis had finally broken free of its bounds at the south side of Eglinton, but hadn't made it all the way north to Britannia quite yet. You can see subdivision filling in the area east of the northbound stub of Mavis.
These next couple of shots are essentially the same, except one is the zoom version of the other. They look southward from the same location as the other shots, down Second Line (Terry Fox Way) toward Eglinton.
Stepping away from Second Line now, here are a few shots of Erin Mills Town Centre, when it was still under construction. You can see the clock tower is still skeletal. I gather it's come and gone in the meantime, which I think is a pity. I lived in Mississauga another 11 years or so, and that tower was iconic and a beacon for orienting oneself.
This shot was taken on Tenth Line, looking easterly across open field toward the Town Centre. You can see there was pretty much nothing in between in those days. This part of Tenth Line doesn't exist anymore per se. By my reckoning, where I took this shot from in 1989, today, I'd be standing in somebody's living room in one of the houses just south of Erin Centre Blvd.
This shot was taken from the vicinity of the intersection of Tenth Line and Eglinton Avenue as it existed at the time. That would have been about half way between where Tenth Line meets Eglinton today to the west and Dubonet Drive to the east.
Finally, this shot of the Town Centre was taken looking across the intersection of Winston Churchill Blvd. with Eglinton Avenue, from Eglinton.
One last shot. It took me a while to figure out what this was, even though, ironically, it was practically shouting distance from where I lived. This is looking across Tenth Line from Trelawny Circle just east of Mockingbird Lanes at Plum Tree Public School, which had only recently been built then. I wish I'd swung the camera just a little to the south and captured the gasworks! They were fairly prominent when I lived in the area... you could hear them venting from time to time... but they're long gone now.
Now I know what James V. Salmon would have felt like if only he'd lived to look back from the time I took these shots at the ones he took in the 1950s!
In the winter of 1988-1989, my parents took a trip to the Caribbean, and they brought home to me a decent SLR camera and a couple of lenses. It was easily the best camera any of us had ever owned, and I made considerable use of it within the film-and-development budget I had. I got into B&W photography for a bit, which, to my consternation, turned out to be markedly more expensive than colour; so I didn't do as much of it as I would have liked. One roll I shot was simply me roaming around the area around home... Meadowvale and Erin Mills... sometime in late winter or early spring, 1989. These are some of the shots I took.
Let's start with the Second Line shots.
This shot (in fact, all of these shots) was taken on Second Line, the part that's now Terry Fox Way, in the immediate vicinity of where Dreamcrest Village Plaza is now; about a half a kilometre north of Eglinton Avenue. At the time, I was in the middle of farmland. The view looks across open field to the rather isolated and solitary view of City Hall, which was only a few years old at most at this point.
These following three shots show the view across the field through what's now Century City Park and subdivision toward where Mavis was about to push northward. At the time, Mavis had finally broken free of its bounds at the south side of Eglinton, but hadn't made it all the way north to Britannia quite yet. You can see subdivision filling in the area east of the northbound stub of Mavis.
These next couple of shots are essentially the same, except one is the zoom version of the other. They look southward from the same location as the other shots, down Second Line (Terry Fox Way) toward Eglinton.
Stepping away from Second Line now, here are a few shots of Erin Mills Town Centre, when it was still under construction. You can see the clock tower is still skeletal. I gather it's come and gone in the meantime, which I think is a pity. I lived in Mississauga another 11 years or so, and that tower was iconic and a beacon for orienting oneself.
This shot was taken on Tenth Line, looking easterly across open field toward the Town Centre. You can see there was pretty much nothing in between in those days. This part of Tenth Line doesn't exist anymore per se. By my reckoning, where I took this shot from in 1989, today, I'd be standing in somebody's living room in one of the houses just south of Erin Centre Blvd.
This shot was taken from the vicinity of the intersection of Tenth Line and Eglinton Avenue as it existed at the time. That would have been about half way between where Tenth Line meets Eglinton today to the west and Dubonet Drive to the east.
Finally, this shot of the Town Centre was taken looking across the intersection of Winston Churchill Blvd. with Eglinton Avenue, from Eglinton.
One last shot. It took me a while to figure out what this was, even though, ironically, it was practically shouting distance from where I lived. This is looking across Tenth Line from Trelawny Circle just east of Mockingbird Lanes at Plum Tree Public School, which had only recently been built then. I wish I'd swung the camera just a little to the south and captured the gasworks! They were fairly prominent when I lived in the area... you could hear them venting from time to time... but they're long gone now.
Now I know what James V. Salmon would have felt like if only he'd lived to look back from the time I took these shots at the ones he took in the 1950s!
