ABSTRACT
The Leslie Street Spit is a 5-km manufactured peninsula that extends from Toronto’s old industrial lands into Lake Ontario. It is composed of construction debris, and is a worldclass birding site that hosts rare and endangered species. This paper examines the discarded and buried artifacts that underlie this celebrated post-industrial landscape and discovers that these artifacts, when contextualised through archaeological research methods, tell a story that previously had been obscured. It is a story about urban development processes, the destruction of the built heritage of Toronto, displacement of poor communities that got in the way of modernist ideals, and the ability of nature to transform industrial space into romanticised ruins. In this case, the act of memory suppression is performed in two specific ways: by omission and misrepresentation of the contents of refuse transported to the Spit from policy and planning records, and by the power of nature to distract civic attention from critical awareness of what has actually been destroyed.
