Dufferin Street

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Dufferin Street is referred to as York Regional Road 53 when it runs in York Region, Ontario. If you meant to search that portion of the road, click here.

[edit] DUFFERIN STREET

Dufferin Street is a north-south route in Toronto and York Region. The road named for Lord Dufferin (Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava), who served as Governor-General of Canada from 1872 to 1878.

The street is cut-off at various locations along the route. Just north of Queen Street, Dufferin ends at Peel Avenue and resumes south of Queen Street, past the railway underpass. The foot of Dufferin Street is within the Canadian National Exhibition Grounds at Dufferin Gates.

Currently, Toronto's City Council has approved the building of an underpass that would connect the portions of Dufferin south of Queen and north of Peel. Expropriation of lands has begun, and work is expected to be completed by April, 2007. [1]

North of Wilson Avenue Dufferin ends and resumes as a small residential sideroad off Sheppard Avenue, just east of William R. Allen Road. This portion then curves back into Wilson Heights Blvd., which provides access to a third portion of Dufferin through Kennard Avenue. The northerly extension of William R. Allen Road in the early 1980s made it possible to avoid the sideroad portion altogether, with many Torontonians unaware of its existence.

[edit] Toronto's Italian community

Dufferin Street has long been an important thoroughfare for Toronto's Italian community. An Italian neighborhood developed around Dufferin and Davenport in the 1890s and soon became known as "little Little Italy". In the 1950s, Italian Canadians from the main Little Italy around College Street and Grace Street headed northwest up Dufferin past St. Clair Avenue and were joined by a new wave of immigrants from Italy. By the 1960s, the Dufferin-St. Clair area (known as "Corso Italia") had supplanted College-Grace Little Italy as the center of Toronto's Italian community.