Back from grocery shopping Thursday morning, Betty Smith and her husband heard the noise of heavy equipment behind their home on Woodgarden Crescent.It meant a crew had finally come to clear five acres of an early-stage forest, long a treasured part of her West Hill neighbourhood, to make way for affordable housing.
"Both of us started to cry," Smith said a few hours later as she watched a machine called a feller-buncher haul down some of the last trees in that part of the Woodgreen Ravine.
"It breaks your heart," added Smith, who held a picket sign declaring the cutting a crime. "The City of Toronto doesn't listen to people."
With Thursday's speedy clearing of the land, nearly four years of fighting by residents hoping to stop a housing project by WRP, a partnership of 40 women's religious orders and Habitat for Humanity, effectively came to an end.
The space east of tiny Hainford Street near Manse Road didn't belong to the residents. It was left open for an expressway to downtown that was shelved decades ago and over time people living nearby began to think of it as theirs.
Many saw their children or grandchildren play among the shrubs and scrub trees that grew in the wet ground. With time, the green space attracted deer and other animals.
People put out benches and bird feeders and met neighbours in a way that won't be possible any longer.
Though she lives a few blocks away, Irene Wyse said she will miss "the wilderness of it" and its cleansing effect on local air, which some say bears odours from a nearby industrial area.
WRP has said it will build 60 semi-detached houses in the space by 2009, homes it says are badly needed by families trying to better their lives.
Smith said she understands these future neighbours are not at fault for wanting an affordable place to live. "But I'm sure there will be a lot of people in this neighbourhood who will bear grudges," she continued.
Don York, chair of the Manse Valley Community Association, suggested he, for one, is not going to greet the newcomers as friends.
"I can't turn around and start welcoming people that have destroyed the environment we've all enjoyed," he said, adding the affordable housing partnership have "divided the community; they've split east and west."
York was down to playing his final cards in a bid to preserve the space. He thought a report on groundwater at the site, coming to Scarborough Community Council next week, could slow the project down.
He was trying to get a meeting and a sympathetic response from Ontario Environment Minister John Gerretsen, since a water line along the property requires ministry approval.
"As much as we knew this was coming, there's always that little hope," he said.