Riverdale Park East

This guide to Riverdale Park East in Toronto starts with the short green pipes still poking out of the slope here, quietly venting methane decades after the garbage buried beneath this grass stopped being fresh. It traces the land back to the eighteen fifties, when it belonged to the Scadding family, then to the city's purchase of it in eighteen fifty-six to build the Don Jail, whose prisoners farmed these very fields. Through the nineteen twenties the city dumped its trash right here, and by nineteen sixty-nine a developer and a city councillor had a far stranger plan in mind for this same ground.