Rouge Beach and Marsh (Rouge National Urban Park)

This guide to Rouge Beach and Marsh in Toronto's Rouge National Urban Park opens in 1926, when real estate broker Cecil White looked at this stretch of the Rouge River and imagined a Canadian Venice, hiring Italian architects to lay out canals and grand estates for city dwellers escaping the heat. It follows his stalled ambitions through the 1929 stock market crash and the Second World War, and his widow Gladys's attempts to keep the dream alive after his death in 1946. Hurricane Hazel tore through the valley in October 1954, while the canals still sat only half dug.