History
The street is named after hotel owner John Finch, who operated John Finch's Hotel hotel at the northeast corner of Finch Avenue and Yonge Street in Toronto. The road allowance was a concession road, and at one time, there were a number of older churches, schoolhouses, and cemeteries on each side of the road. In the 1950s, Ontario Hydro constructed a series of transmission lines around Toronto, and paralleled Finch from Highway 400 eastward into Pickering. This routing is also a compressed natural gas pipeline.
As suburban development in North York progressed northward in the 1960s, Finch was rapidly reconstructed from a gravel road into a four-laned traffic artery. This began with the realignment of several sections, such as at Bayview where Newtonbrook Creek flows diagonally beneath the crossroads. A rail overpass west of Leslie was built by 1968.
West of Islington Avenue, Finch ended at the Humber River. Traffic proceeding west had to travel on Islington, northwards towards Steeles Avenue, or south across the Humber to Albion Road. As urban development came to the Toronto area, a Finch Avenue alignment was developed in this area, and was completed in the 1980s within Toronto (at Islington), and then briefly into Mississauga with the construction of Highway 427, and Brampton, turning northwestward onto the Gorewood Road concession (formerly Toronto Gore Township Concession 3). The road now ends at Steeles Avenue, where Gorewood Road is cut off by Highway 407. The concession is then called MacVean Drive in northeastern Brampton, north of Queen Street, the former Highway 7. It then continues into Caledon as Centerville Creek Road.
Read more about this topic: Finch Avenue
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)