Kipling Avenue, is a street in the Cities of Toronto and Vaughan in Ontario, Canada. It is a concession road, 6 concessions from Yonge Street, and is a major north-south arterial road. It consists of three separate sections, with total combined length of 26.4 km.. The street travels through the district of Etobicoke and passes such areas as New Toronto, Etobicoke Centre, Richview, and Rexdale, passing through residential neighbourhoods and pockets of industrial and commercial areas. The Toronto Transit Commission's 45 Kipling, 44 Kipling South, 944 Kipling South Express and 945 Kipling Express bus routes operate from Kipling Station on the Bloor-Danforth line. These surface routes provide service along the length of the road. Film studio complex Kipling Studio located on 777 Kipling Avenue is part of Cinespace Film Studios.
History
Originally named Mimico Avenue, the street was surveyed in 1795 as a Meridian road south of the east-west Meridian with lots to the east running east-west and lots to the west running north-south, the street became a central street for the lake shore municipalities of New Toronto and Long Branch. It is believed that the street was named in honour of Rudyard Kipling, author of such works as The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories, in preparation for a planned visit to Woodbridge in 1907. Kipling cancelled at the last moment, but the street retained the name. The Kipling Avenue section in the Town of New Toronto also reverted to its alternate name, Eighteenth Street, at least twice. The section in Woodbridge, was named Eighth Avenue. Kipling Avenue was extended south of Lake Shore Boulevard West with the development of the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital grounds. In 2001 City Council renamed the southerly extension as "Colonel Samuel Smith Park Drive", after rejecting the City Surveyor's original suggestion of Eighteenth Street. The Six Points interchange with Bloor and Ontario's early Toronto-to-Hamilton highway, now Dundas has traditionally been Etobicoke's central intersection. In 1953 Etobicoke left York County and joined the newly formed Metropolitan Toronto launching a period of urbanization which included changing the Six Points intersection to use a number of bridges in 1961. In 2017, construction started on a project to remove the interchange and replace it with at-grade intersections. In March 2019, the interchange was closed and the bridges were removed.
Kipling Avenue remains one of two streets to go north of Steeles Avenue and still be within the City of Toronto. It ends abruptly at the Toronto-Vaughan border. North of that border, Kipling is a broken street and appears briefly from Highway 7 to Langstaff Road. Its original alignment becomes Clarence Street until Major Mackenzie Road. It begins abruptly again south of Teston Road before finally terminating at King-Vaughan Road.
