The Bayview Ghost, Part 1

Where exactly was it?

Added 2009-09-03

The Bayview Ghost, built in 1959 but abandoned before completion, was a haunted, vacant shell of an apartment building that sat atop a hill overlooking the Bayview Extension and the Don Valley Parkway for two decades before being demolished. Today, the hill is occupied by a small, isolated community of million-dollar homes,. This subdivision has only one vehicular entrance, True Davidson Drive, across a bridge over an abandoned railway line (more on this later).

But where exactly was the Bayview Ghost on this hill?

The Don Valley Historical Mapping Project at the University of Toronto has provided an online topographic map (caution, this is 12meg jpg) of the Township of East York dated 1961. The portion of that map which includes the Bayview Ghost is compared below to a screenshot of the same area taken from the Microsoft Virtual Earth map provided by FlashEarth.com.

You can easily see which homes actually sit on the same land as the Bayview Ghost. I wonder whether those people know it, or whether those homes change hands more than average...

For additional images of the Bayview Ghost, see this Flickr set by Patrick Cummins.