RE-RELEASE: St.Lawrence/Old Toronto

Hello, it is the first episode of 2021. This is Ashley speaking, of course, and I moved earlier this month. And it's pretty incredible that no matter how many times you move, how you forget how much time it takes to go through that whole process and to get set up, and I'm still not set up, but life has to go on.

So last weekend, I was able to go out on my first Walking in Place walk for the year, and I decided to go to the St. Lawrence Market area. Of course, I've always known about this area, it's one of the most touristy parts of town because it's part of old Toronto, which as you can imagine, it just means that this is one of the first areas of town that was really settled when the British came here. A lot of the buildings are still from that time, though they are restored to a certain extent, but we'll get into that later.

Honestly, I've been to this area, I've been to the market before COVID, I worked at office building that isn't too far from here. So I'm familiar with the area. But I've never really looked into much of the history of this area. And I'm not sure why, because I learned a lot of stuff that I found super interesting, and I hope you do too.

Let's meet at the corner of St. James Park at Adelaide and Jarvis you'll see a Victorian looking like wire-ish archway. So it's not a perfect arch, it has a little peak at the top, almost like when you write notes, and you draw that like bracket that comes out a little bit and then comes back down. You know what I mean? And then you write a little note next to it. Anyways, that what it reminds me of, it's covered in vines. And it's pretty, and that's why we're starting there. That's the only reason. If you're new to the podcast, between each stop, there will be 30 seconds of ambiance, sounds of the area that we're walking in. It's 30 seconds so that if you don't want it, you can easily skip it. But if you do want it, it's not too long. So meet you there in 30 seconds.

We're now standing underneath the pretty archway at Jarvis and Adelaide. So just start walking southwest towards the cathedral. And I'll talk to you a little bit about the park.

The park is called St. James Park, because it used to be part of the church grounds of the St. James Cathedral, which is what we're walking towards right now. It was named after St. James the Apostle. But when I looked into that a little bit more, there's apparently two St. James the Apostles. One is called St. James the Great and the other is called St. James the Less, which I thought was kind of harsh. But when I looked it up, it's just nicknames to help distinguish them by either age or height. So maybe St. James the Great was older and taller and St. James the Less, you know, was younger and shorter. But regardless kind of got the low end of the bargain. If you're the less instead of the great in my opinion. I'm sure there was a lot of FOMO and like inner turmoil within the apostles as there are with any group of friends. So the park now is an urban public park. It's owned by the church still, but also the City of Toronto. It was designed to be a park but the land that it's on, like I mentioned was part of the church grounds. What that means is that it was part of their cemetery. If you've listened before, you know I have a thing for cemeteries so I'm sorry, but I just can't help it. At some point in time, the cemetery was too full. Old cemeteries always seem to get too full. No one seems to be able to anticipate how many people are going to die. So a combination of it being too full and influential people in the city just not liking, after a while, that there was a cemetery right in the middle of town, they made the decision to move the bodies up to Parliament where St. James Cemetery is. So yeah, if you've ever wondered about why that's called St. James Cemetery, it's not a coincidence. It's literally the overflow of bodies. The Chapel in that cemetery is called St. James the Less so maybe this whole area is actually named after that apostle. Take that, St. James the Great. They didn't move all the bodies though. There's a parking lot just northwest of the church that lies on top of unmarked graves from almost two centuries ago. It's owned by a condo now. Those people literally paid for paradise and we put up a parking lot. Granted if they're unmarked they might not have paid for their graves... you get you get the joke I'm trying to make.

Rumour has it that there are still cholera victims buried under the park. At the time, it was thought unsafe to disturb the bodies of people who died from cholera and infectious disease. The City of Toronto had a cholera epidemic in 1832. And again, two years later. There's a plaque right by the park that talks a little bit about it, it's at the opposite end of the park, on the southeast corner. If you go to look at the plaque, or if you look it up, the portrait is always of these old 1800s like depictions of women. And it's always a before and after. And on the left, it shows this beautiful young woman with her hair done up just so, gentle, like waves, framing her face, and she's got round healthy cheeks and colour in her face. And then on the right, you see the after picture. And she's all gaunt and all gray and blue, and she looks disgusted. She's grimacing and her eyes look exhausted. The reason that they were depicted this way is because you're constantly sick, all your fluids are being drained from your body, you're not retaining anything. So you're super dehydrated, some of them would actually take on a bluish tone. I mean, keep in mind, too, these images are drawn of British immigrants. So we're talking pale white people.

You've definitely heard of cholera before, it was a huge epidemic. It spanned most of the world. People at the time, were moving a lot in between countries, and they didn't know how it was spread for the longest time. So it was only a matter of time before it got here. People were immigrating here at the time and unknowingly brought it with them. Some of them might have gotten sick on their way. Some of them are already sick when they got here. And even though they would quarantine people when they got here, it still started to spread like wildfire, because well, a) that happens. We know. We're living through something similar right now. And this was centuries ago, they had even less tools to figure out what was going on. People thought cholera spread by immoral behavior or bad air, which I guess for certain diseases, bad air could be the cause. But not for this one. They didn't know at the time that it was spread through contaminated food and water which are, you know, pretty key parts of life. Sewage flowed freely through the streets at that time. So I'm sure that didn't help. Eventually, the government appointed a Board of Health to advise existing hospitals to focus on treating cholera. But it says a lot of people were frightened to even go for help. They were afraid that if they went to the hospital, they would get cholera, and that just that whole, everything I just said, you know, how familiar does that sound? That was in 1832, you know, almost 200 years later and that's exactly what's still happening. So yeah, that it happened again, there was a second spread in 1834, two years later, and the city had already implemented because of the first round their first public health bylaws. So it's basically because of cholera that the city got a Board of Health.

So we're just about at St. James Cathedral, I'll give you 30 seconds to find a spot to get a good look at it. Or just to I don't know, think about cholera, I guess? I'll see you in 30 seconds.

We're looking at St. James Cathedral right now. It's really tall. The length of it spans from King Street up to Adelaide, the front of it faces King, just east of the corner of Church and King. Church had a bunch of churches on it. And this is one of them. And it was the first one. The congregation itself was established in 1797. So we're talking way back. But this structure is actually the fourth version of the structure and it was built in 1853. So it's it's still pretty old. And in that first, you know, just over 50 years of existence, it went through three previous versions. There was a wooden church at one point which lived through the war of 1812. So it got robbed and damaged by American troops. It was replaced by a stone structure at one point. We'll talk about the Great Fire a little bit later, but the third version got taken down by the Great Fire of Toronto. When the church reopened again, shortly after that it actually became a cathedral.

One of the questions that occurred to me here was what's the difference between a church and a cathedral apparently a parish is a community of worship. Whereas whereas the church is the actual physical space or building that they worship in, so you don't need a church to have a parish, but you can technically have a parish without a church is what I understand. And a cathedral is a church but it's like a church promotion. So if the priest that leads that church becomes a bishop, then their church becomes a cathedral by virtue of the priest being a bishop. The priest in question here was John Strachan, who I've spoken about a couple times in previous episodes. He was a big figure in the early development of Toronto. He was an Anglican priest and he was the first Anglican bishop and yeah, this was his church, his cathedral, for a long time. He's actually interred underneath the altar to this day in the church so that's where he was buried. From an architecture standpoint it's Gothic Revival like to a tee apparently and it was there was actually an international competition for who would design it and Frederick William Cumberland and Thomas Ridout one if right out. Sounds familiar to you. I spoke about the right out family in the Cabbagetown episode. Thomas Ridout the architect here and his uncle was John Ridout who was the last man killed of a pistol duel in New York. He was killed by Samuel Jarvis, who is the namesake of Jarvis Street just nearby and fun fact, John Ridout's gravestone is one of the many gravestones embedded in the entryway to the cathedral.

So let's talk about the Great Fire a little bit. The Great Fire was also known as the cathedral fire and it was the first major fire in the history of Toronto. It was so big that it could be seen across the lake. So Lake Ontario, from St. Catharines, Ontario. So if you look that up on a map, but it's pretty, pretty incredible that you could see it, we're gonna walk part of the path of it, but it stretched all the way down to the St. Lawrence Market. So that's a good two or three, you know, city blocks of fire, just in one direction too because it spread east and west as well. Basically what happened was it started in a tavern near King and Jarvis around 1am and just spread right through buildings on Adelaide Street and at some point worked this way towards the Cathedral and the spire caught fire and it just continued working its way south. At around 330 or 4am. It started raining, which helped out a bit. They weren't able to get it out until like 5am. At the time, we didn't have real firefighters like we had volunteer firefighting agencies, and we had only just gotten fire hydrants, but they just didn't have enough manpower or water power or whatever to get through a fire like this.

In terms of today, just a few years ago, in 2016, this is where they held the funeral for Rob Ford, the previous mayor and city councilor, kind of infamous. There's a Canadian show called Mary Kills People and they've shot near here. In general, they support the LGBTQ community, they walked in the Pride Parade. They also host drop ins for people in the city who need food or hygiene products or haircuts or even foot care. So whoever needs it can come in when they have these clinics, which is I think, once a week. They're also home to one of the Chinese ministries in Toronto. I didn't know this, but there's a large Anglican Chinese community and they have different ministries spread throughout the GTA held out of churches that are specifically chosen for their location to be near higher concentrations of Chinese Torontonians. The church also has a professional Cathedral Choir whose repertory spans eight centuries, which is pretty wild. And one of the most fun facts that I learned about it is this cathedral is one of two churches in all of North America that have this big change ringing bell system, the only other church that has this kind of bell is in New York City. So basically, the bell is rigged up to a bunch of ropes. And it takes a whole team of people holding on to each of those ropes and to like pull it in a certain pattern to achieve whatever ring pattern the lead person has chosen to do. The change patterns have names like "Double Oxford", so it's just very British. It's kind of like music, like they're all playing the same instrument, but it's multiple people that have to work together to play the same instrument. When I went it was a Sunday and I heard the bells a number of times, but they weren't on the hour. I'm not exactly sure how often they normally ring. I don't know if maybe they were ringing because it was a Sunday.

Alright, now we're going to head east. So walk east on King and then cross the street at Jarvis. And there's a big old building at the corner of King and Jarvis. I'll meet you there in 30 seconds.

We're now standing in front of St. Lawrence Hall. This building was built in 1850. So the year after The Great Fire,. That's for a specific reason. So this whole block was actually the St. Lawrence Market for a long time. We'll talk more about the St. Lawrence Market at our next stop. But the building that's currently on the south side of Front street is actually the South Market Building but the original St. Lawrence Market was the North Building, which was on the north side of Front street. And it first expanded all the way back here to King, but it was burned in The Great Fire. And when they were rebuilding everything, they realized they needed a place for politicians to address people, essentially. And it was also a venue for musicians and other performers who eventually came to the city. So they decided to build that kind of building here. But the lower levels were still integrated into the market and they had some stores and businesses and the building itself did connect outside to the St. Lawrence Market. That only lasted a short while. By the 1870s, the city had a few more larger performance venues. The city still found uses for it. For a while it was the home of the National Ballet. It was also the meeting place of anti-slavery activists in Toronto, and in 1851, the North American Convention of Coloured Freemen met here for three days to discuss issues of slavery and Black immigration from the US and Black leaders from all across North America as well as England met here. And they decided ultimately, as a result of this convention, that Canada would be the best destination for refugee slaves. The reason that they needed to have this meeting, you know, other than the obvious reason: the issue became more urgent because in the States, they had passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which basically gave southerners in the States the ability to search for and retrieve the people they had enslaved and bring them back to their homes and enslave them all over again. And they were entitled to do that even if they found them in Northern states where slavery had been abolished that didn't protect the enslaved people from being taken back. As a response to that, it became even more urgent to help enslaved people escape.

In a minute, we're going to walk down Market Lane Park, which is the little lane just on the west side of this building. If you're walking, you can start heading there. I just want to point out that right in that area, so I think it's just west of Market Lane Park across the street from St. James Park and the cathedral. There's a plaque honouring Marianne Shad. So Mary-Anne Shad was a really important figure in the anti-slavery movement in Canada. She was from the States. She was born free. She She was never enslaved herself. Her parents were activists and she grew up an activist as well. Mary-Anne Shad had been here for that convention and was convinced by other activists in attendance to move to Windsor, where she started a newspaper called The Provincial Freeman, that was specifically speaking about the anti-slavery movement. She was co-editor of that newspaper, her co-editor was a man and it went under his name as the sole editor. She knew that people would be less into reading it if it showed that it was edited, you know, and published by a woman. So she asked her friend, Samuel Ringgold Ward, who was a Black abolitionist, he published several other papers as well, but he she asked him to help her publish it so that it could go under his name rather than hers. She eventually expanded to Chatham, Ontario, as well as Toronto, and this area is where the Toronto office was for the paper, which is why there was a plaque around here.

So now we're gonna walk down Market Lane Park. So walk south down Market Lane Park. As you walk, you'll notice on the left, there's a big construction site. This was the location of the North Building of St. Lawrence Market, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a minute. And I'll meet you near the current St. Lawrence Market, which is the building on the building on the Southwest corner of Jarvis and Front. See you in 30 seconds.

That whole walk that we've just done from the cathedral to here was one of the stretches that was affected by the fire, which is pretty, pretty wild. If you look up the north side of the street where that construction site is, so like I mentioned earlier, that was where the original St. Lawrence Market was, and for a long time, it continued to be the North Building of the St. Lawrence Market. It was the first market in the city and opened in 1803. Shortly after two more were built, but neither of them are still around. One of them was called St. Andrews, which is now a park and the other was called St. Patrick's, which is now a food court. So kind of similar, but not a market anymore. So the North Market, the original market, was where farmers and vendors would come on Saturdays to sell their goods. People who lived in Toronto at the time are kind of forced to come here on Saturdays because town bylaws prohibited the selling of butter, eggs, fish, meat, poultry, and vegetables between the hours of 6am and 4pm on Saturdays except at the market. Other things happened at the market too. It was the center of the city's social life. So they had auctions here, they even carried out public punishments here. And since this building was built before we abolished slavery in Canada, there was a time where they'd be auctioning off... people. So that's the North building, it was burned down in The Great Fire, so and they did rebuild it. But like I mentioned, they just kind of changed a little bit. So the, they turned the North corner of the block into St. Lawrence Hall. And then they just had a new setup for the St. Lawrence building here. People come and set up their stalls and lay things on a table. It's not the same as the South Market. So if we look at the South Market nowadays, and when it became a market, which was in 1902, it was meant to be a little bit more permanent. So there's actual you know, stalls built into the building for for vendors. So this building became part of the market in 1902. But the building itself had our at least part of the building itself had been here since 1845. Because it was the first city hall. They didn't really have a place for politicians to do their thing, half the time. So this area was the city hall, and in the basement, they even had jail cells for prisoners. Over time, they got a lot of flooding in the cells. And so the prisoners were moved to the Don Jail eventually. They ended up moving to a new building that was built that is what we now call the Old City Hall. So really, this is like the old old city hall. And then they updated this building and they added more permanent stalls and made it part of St. Lawrence Market. One of the stalls with the market belonged to William Davies, who sold cured hams and bacon, and he's the one who apparently invented peameal bacon, and it was his company, that got Toronto, the nickname "Hogtown", because of how many pigs they processed, which is gross, it's a gross thing to say, I don't feel good saying that sentence.

Once the South Market building was done, there was a point in time where they would even have a canopy that went over Front Street between the two buildings so that people didn't have to, I guess just be exposed to the weather on Saturdays when they went to visit both markets. And both markets were in use for a very long time. And the plan is for the North Market building to come back. That is the plan for the construction that's happening. If you've ever wondered why the basement is not fully level, or even if you look at Jarvis or Market Street on either side of the South Market, and it's kind of a weird slope. It's because in the 1800s, they had decided they wanted to push the shoreline of Lake Ontario further south. So they filled it in with land. And a lot of the buildings that are now on this south side of Front street were built on top of that landfill, including this building. If you look at the LCBO building just next to the St. Lawrence Market, you can see the slope kind of reaching its way up the building, which is cool. And that's also why we got the nickname Muddy York because the streets were so muddy on this lower end of town close to the lake because it was a landfill that was literally built on top of a lake.

This next story has some violence. So if you would rather skip over that it's about two and a half minutes long. So if you jump ahead that amount of time, then you should be in the clear.

One last story about this area when they were first getting set up and negotiations were still happening with the First Nations people over land, there was a Chief named Wabakinine. I think I'm pronouncing their name properly. He was an ally to the British for a long time. He helped them during the American Revolution. And he helped them negotiate land terms with the crown and he would come and regularly trade with them. So he would bring fish and game for trade. One night he traded for some rum and he and his wife and his sister drank it by the lake and decided to sleep on the North shore of the lake a bit closer to town than they normally would. And a Queen's Ranger came by to try and bribe his sister into sleeping with him. And she refused and it got physical. And Wabakinine's wife woke up and woke him up. And when he went to try and help, they threw a stone at his head and killed him, and they also attacked his wife. And eventually she died of her injuries. This was a big deal. I mean, it's really, you know, it's very violent. It's not okay, what they what they did to him, but it shook up the relationship that the First Nations people had with the British at this point in time, everything was still kind of fresh, and they were still trying to negotiate somewhat fairly with each other at the time. Like I mentioned, he was an ally of their's. So he was trying to work with them. So especially when he died in this way word it spread pretty quickly amongst the First Nations people and the British were worried that, in their words, there would be an uprising. So everything I read about it, basically the British had seen this whole thing as a way to keep them from taking back their own land, essentially. So they were worried that this would ruin that, but they still didn't really prosecute the guy who did it. People in power gave them their word that they would but the ship he was on to go to court mysteriously got turned around, and it never played out. So that's kind of suspicious. Apparently anytime there was an Indigenous person involved in something like this, so whether they were the perpetrator or the victim, the British settlers didn't really do much about it. They didn't know what their role or rights were. And they were afraid of ruining the relationship. But I mean, it means that sometimes Indigenous people killed the white settlers, and sometimes the white settlers killed Indigenous people. And nobody was really doing anything about it. In the end, even though a punishment wasn't really carried out, the incident did contribute to the erosion of trust between the two groups, obviously, a lot lead up to that. But that was one of the things that started to get people thinking that maybe the British didn't have the best intentions with being here. So I thought that was an interesting story.

Okay, we're gonna walk west on Front Street and I'll meet you at the Gooderham or as it's also known as the Flat Iron Building at the corner of Front and Church see you there in 30 seconds.

We're now standing in front of the Gooderham Building or the Flat Iron Building who've ever wondered why it's called the Flat Iron Building is because it actually looks it looks like it clothing iron, a flat iron. If you're not familiar with the building, it's it's like a triangular shaped building the corner at the intersection of Church and Front is very narrow. So Front Street and the next street over, Wellington Street, kind of come very close together like in a triangle, basically. Where we're standing anyway at church is where that the point of that triangle is and then it widens out. Eventually Wellington and Front become separated by a proper city block. But this building takes up the first space of that triangle. And it looks a lot like the Flatiron Building in New York, famous for the same shape. But this building was actually here before that building in New York. The main difference is the one in New York is a little bit more impressive. It's 22 storeys tall, and this one is only five storeys tall, and there was actually a very similar building here before it that was only three storeys tall. But when George Gooderham bought the property, he demolished that one and rebuilt one of a similar shape to be five storeys tall. If you're wondering how this eve- why is everyone so committed to this triangular shaped building? It's because the the land itself is shaped like a triangle. In the early days of Toronto, they were trying to split up the land in a grid so that it was easy to portion things out to be sold. But they were basing the bottom of that grid to follow the shoreline of Lake Ontario, which obviously is imperfectly straight. And so the grid kind of started messing up as you work your way up. And this is a prime example of that. Instead, they just decided, okay, this piece of land is going to be a triangle. Someone's going to find some way to make that work. And they did! And now it's one of the most interesting buildings in our town.

So I mentioned George Gooderham. He was the son of William Gooderham, who is the co founder of the Gooderham and Worts distillery, which is the reason why we have a distillery district in Toronto. George became a partner in the company later in William's life and he decided to build an office building for the distillery on this site because it was doing really well. The building had the first manually operated elevator in Toronto, and it's still there, it's the kind you actually have to crank. I'm sure they have a newer elevator at this point. And on the back of the building the wide part of the building, if you keep walking west there is a big beautiful mural. The image of the mural actually mirrors the building across from it. It's not painted directly on the building. It's actually attached to a steel frame that's mounted on the building. And it's painted to look like the edges of that like quote unquote mirror are like a canvas like fluttering in the wind is a pretty cool looking mural. Present day the building is used mostly as office space. The bottom floor in the basement of the building are a pub, which I've eaten at many times waiting for shows to start at the Sony Center, which is nearby. Let's walk to Berczy Park, which is right behind the Gooderham building. So just west on Front Street. If you look to your left on front, there's a number of really nice looking old buildings. There were we passed a few as well, including the LCBO building right next to the St. Lawrence Market. And I was hoping to find some cool stories about these buildings. And there were some but I decided not to include them because the summary of it is these were a lot of warehouses and businesses that were set up when the city was really starting to get going especially when they were building the railway. I mentioned before that they had extended the shoreline of the lake further south. So this whole area was kind of like a landfill of sorts. There were plans for it to be waterfront properties here, but it kind of just slowly got bought up and used for these warehouses and in part because they were close to the harbour so it was easy for them to get their materials in from the harbour.

Berczy Park is named after William Berczy, who is regarded as one of the co founders of York. Basically he helped John Graves Simcoe establish settlement here. John Graves Simcoe was a huge leader of Toronto when it was getting started. The most notable thing about this park is the fountain in the middle of it, which I call the dog fountain. There are a bunch of dog statues surrounding the fountain in the fountain and water spews out of them. The fountain functions by way of the dog's mouths, basically.

When I went to visit.. when I took my walk, it was in January, so all the dogs had little scarves on them and were dressed up for Christmas. The Fountain also has its one representative cat. But really it's all about the dogs for this fountain. There's a little troughs that dogs can drink out of and there's like designated pee areas. So it's really built for the dog owners of the city but it's fun to sit and watch people with their dogs as well, which is what I did. Not creep on people but you know, creep on their dogs.

Okay, we're going to walk North now. Walk towards Wellington Street. And if you're standing at the dog fountain, walk straight North. And instead of going up the next like the most obvious street which is Victoria, I want you to go up a street called Leader Lane. It looks kind of like an alley. There's a cocktail bar on the corner of Leader Lane and Wellington, it's all black. And this the street sign for Leader Lane is on the side of that building, it's not on a pole, it's just on the side of the building. And you're gonna walk up Leader Lane. I'll see you there.

As you walk Leader Lane, I think it's kind of fun. It's it looks a little bit like old industrial buildings. And pretty soon you'll see you can't miss it the side of a building that's very yellow, there's a mural on the side of it. That's like a big clock. This is PJ O'Brien's pub, which is part of the Irish Embassy family of pubs. I couldn't find anything really fun or interesting about it, unfortunately, or about this building, but I wanted to point it out because it's to me anyway, it's a very warm and welcome site. And I wish it wasn't COVID time so I could go in and have a drink with a friend. The face of the pub is on Colbourne and directly across the street is the face of another building that is currently Tom Jones Steakhouse. You can tell it's an old building, it's been painted all white. So I've read many sources on this. And I never found anywhere that explicitly said this, but I'm pretty sure that this building is where James Beaty one of the early settlers of Toronto ran one of the city's early newspapers, which was called the Toronto leader, which is why the street is called Leader Lane. I've spoken in past episodes about the family compact, and how there were those in the family compact and on the side of the family compact who wanted the powers that be in the city to form a bit more of an aristocratic structure like they do in England and the people as part of the reformist movement wanted there to be a more democratic structure. So his paper was written from that point of view. And this building is where I pretty sure he first set up that paper. That paper ran from 1852 to 1878. And shortly after, it became the office for Grand and Toy. So Grand and Toy started as like a printing and like stationery business. Again, I'm making some assumptions here. But just based on the timeline and the stuff I read about both of these organizations, it sounds like maybe he -because he stopped writing the paper- maybe he left the printing press in there or something and then Grand and Toy used the facilities as their first office? That's my guess I could be wrong. I've said it many times, but I'm not a historian. Grand and Toy is a big company that up until the 90s like had a bunch of retail locations they sold like office supplies and paper and things like that. It seemed after two guys whose names are Grand and Toy. But after a while, you know, they became pretty big that company so they left this office. I read that at one point it was a jewelry store and it was a different kind of restaurant. For decades now, it's been the Tom Jones Steakhouse, and it was a really nice restaurant and they had fancy clientele but it apparently just went up for sale I read like two weeks ago or something like that.

Okay, we're gonna walk up Leader Lane and turn left on King. You're gonna walk right by the King Edward Hotel which we will talk about but in a little bit instead turn right on Toronto Street and keep walking up Toronto Street. I'll see you in 30 seconds if you're actually walking, then you can press play once you get on to Toronto Street.

We're on Toronto Street now. On the right, you'll notice a little bit closer to the North side of the street, it's a pretty big building, it starts maybe halfway through the street. It's the Consumer Gas Building. I know that sounds kind of boring, like oh to gas company who cares? I was still curious. So I looked it up, there's two things I want to tell you about it. This building was built in 1852. And for a little while before then the city was using gas to power the gas lamps in the city and to people's homes for light. And there was another company at the time providing gas to people, but they were charging a lot for it. And people were upset about it. And they had a public meeting to I guess just complain about it to each other and to and to raise this to that company. And as people were leaving that meeting, a man named Charles Berczy, son of William Berczy, who works the park is named after, Charles would tell them about a new company, he was hoping to start with the goal of selling gas at a price that people could actually afford. And he accomplished that. This wasn't his only gig though he was the city's second postmaster, which is obviously a completely different line of business. Eventually, electricity became a thing. So they shifted their business to be more fuel. I'm not sure where they landed after that. We'll talk about it in a little bit. But the building across the street is Toronto seventh post office. And it was built around the same time. So I do wonder if he had anything to do with that, like as a post as a postmaster, if he was like, scoping out properties, and this whole block was free. And he decided both buildings would go there. I don't even know if that would have been part of his job. But it's a funny coincidence.

Alright, so walk up Toronto Street and turn right on Adelaide until you see the Terroni restaurant which is in a big beautiful building with these pillars in front and get a good view of that building and I will see you there.

So we're standing in front of Terroni restaurant, which, if you're if you're not from Toronto, Terroni is it's a chain of Italian restaurants that are known for having really nice pizzas. But, you know, they have the whole gamut of Italian food. So the building we're looking at, like I said, is it's old, it's got like the yellow brick, yellow stone kind of look to it. It's got these four impressive pillars in front of it. And across the top of the building, it says Adelaide courthouse. This was the city's third courthouse, they ended up moving on from this courthouse not too long after it was built. So this was also built in around 1852. A lot of the buildings we just talked about, were built around this time. 1852. So it came into place and then eventually was left because the city was just expanding so fast. And I guess a lot of people were doing crimes, I don't know. But they they just couldn't keep up with the sizes of these courthouses. And this one was the finest building they had built for a courthouse by far. But yeah, they only stayed for a few decades. This was also the site of a jailhouse for a very long time. There were like cells in the basement here as well, which I find kind of interesting because looking at the front of the building, there are four pillars, the entrance is right in between two of the center pillars, and then there's a pillar on either side of those two pillars, if that makes sense. And in between each of those two side pillars, there's a little entrance that steps down a few steps like into a sub basement and I'm wondering if that's where the cells were or that's where they brought in criminals. I don't know if that whole pillar thing was confusing. Just picture like pillar one from the left. Then there's the little step down entrance, pillar two main entrance pillar three, step down  entrance pillar four. Okay. And right next to each of these pillars, there's a flat front of the building that has like an old school frame that there's either a Terroni poster in, or the ones that are on either side of the entranceway just have information about the restaurant, but it's printed in like big black letters. And it looks very old school. But it's funny because it says, like pickup and delivery and UberEATS and DoorDash, and Skip the Dishes on it. So I think, I don't know, that tickled me.

After the courthouse moved to old city hall. So what we call old city hall, but now we know is new city hall for the point in time that we're talking from. For a while this location was used by the Arts and Letters Club, which will come up again, I'm sure in another tour, because there are other locations that they ended up setting up shop in, but for a while they would meet here. This is a group of artists, architects, writers, musicians, just anyone who was involved with or had an appreciation for the Arts. I say anyone, I'm sure it was just men for the longest time. I don't even know if they ever entered like, admitted women. But yeah, and the Group of Seven would hang out here, Canada's famous group of painters. Honourary mention, I'm not going to get into it too much, but across the street from here, there's a little street called Spice Mill Lane, which is called that because Spice Mills used to be there. And that's all I'll say about it.

Head back to Toronto Street, walk on the west side of the street now and stop at that seventh post office that I mentioned before, we'll talk a little bit about it. This building is now from what I understand an entrance to Ryerson University. But of course, it was initially built as a post office, it looks pretty grand for, you know, the seventh post office, you think it would be the first or maybe the second. And those are really nice buildings that are not far from here either. In fact, the first post office is just a little bit a couple blocks east on Adelaide and I might include it on another tour one day. This post office, it's got like red brick, and it also has pillars in front of it. The address is written in like black cursive iron or some black metal on the front. So you know, it looks looks pretty fancy. One fun fact about it. It's corners at least around the back or rounded so that horses carrying mail to the building would have an easier time getting around it, which is kind of cool. After it stopped being used as a post office, it was used as a government building for a while. And then it was used as the head office of the Argus Corporation, which is an investment holding company that Conrad Black, used to work at. Conrad Black was notoriously caught on camera moving documents out of the building. He eventually went to prison for fraud and I think embezzlement as well. He went to prison in the States though he was convicted in the States, but was eventually led out on bail and deported back to Canada and wasn't allowed to travel in the States anymore. But Trump during his reign, pardoned him because they were friends. So now he's able to go to the States when he pleases though probably not now because of COVID but I'm sure he's still rich. So who knows?

Alright now we are going to finish today's tour at the King Edward Hotel or the Omni King Edward Hotel as it's called now. Just keep walking south on Toronto Street and you're going to be looking right at it when you get to King Street.

This hotel was named after King Edward the eighth who was coronated right around the time this was being built. And it was actually founded by George Gooderham, the son of William Gooderham and the same guy who set up office in the Flatiron Building. He founded this hotel. The hotel finished being built in 1903 and it takes up the whole block on King Street from Victoria to the west to Leader Lane on the east and when it opened it had 400 rooms and 300 bathrooms. I guess a good 100 rooms didn't have bathrooms or maybe it's just because like the fancy Suites have like maybe multiple rooms within them but share a bathroom I don't know but it just seems like a pretty big discrepancy to me. And they eventually added a tower with even more rooms and a ballroom which was popular in the city until the 1950s. Which I guess is kind of true for like ballrooms in general, like did people go to balls after the 50s on a regular basis? I don't know. But the ballroom closed in 1979 and stayed closed for 38 years. It reopened in 2017 after they restored it. There's also a secret tunnel that runs from this building to the Gooderham building. It was meant to run all the way to Union Station so that it was easier for guests to arrive at Union Station and then make their way over to the hotel, but they never finished construction. So it only made it so far as the good or handbuilding. And for a long time, they would use that tunnel to get liquor to the hotel just to you know, make stocking the bar a little bit easier. There were rumors that for a while they used the tunnel to smuggle in liquor during prohibition, you know, so if like fancy guests wanted to pay a little bit extra for it, they could but there's obviously no documented evidence of that. I don't know. I believe it. Apparently, this part of town was pretty popular for a while in general and then it started to fade. It's a very fancy hotel. It was the place to stay for the longest time. Britney Spears has stayed here. Mark Twain has stayed here. On the third, fourth and fifth floors there are condos, that have since been restored. They're still condos there. But they had been there for a long time. And Ernest Hemingway lived in one of them. So he actually lived at this hotel for a while. When the Beatles came here for the first time this hotel was famously stormed by 1000s of Beatles fans. And I'm not exaggerating, I think the number's like 3000 people were flooding the lobby and the street outside just trying to get a glimpse of the Beatles. And John Lennon even came back I think the next year with Yoko Ono, right before they started their bed-in protests, which they did in Amsterdam and Montreal, which was like just a form of protests similar to a sit-in, but they publicly stayed in beds in a hotel for a week in each city. When Liz Taylor and Richard Burton stayed here, there were morality protests outside because they weren't married yet. And they were sharing a room. And then my favourite fact is that Leonard Cohen shot a whole made for TV movie here at the hotel. It was a musical it was about 25 minutes long. And you can actually watch it for free on YouTube. It was called "I Am a Hotel" is basically a series of vignettes of like imaginary characters who are either staying in or worked at the hotel. And each of the vignettes were kind of like a romantic story of some sort. And each were set to one of his songs. He's in it as well. And he has his own romantic storyline with a woman named Suzanne. And there's a song called Suzanne that he sings in it about her and he opens the musical with a song he had already written for a previous album called The Guests. It's a pretty interesting watch, I definitely recommend it. It's hard to describe. It's kind of quirky, and it's kind of dreamy, and there's professional ballet dancers in it. So there's this whole long like dance sequence between a bellboy and a maid and you get to see the ballroom for a little bit. And like I said, it was closed until 2017. So it was a rare glimpse of the ballroom and it remains so because they've restored the ballroom so it doesn't look the same as it did in this movie. So it's kind of cool to see it. The ballroom is used as a venue now for you know, big events, weddings, things like that.

I will leave you on that note. I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you next time.

Walking in Place is written, recorded and edited by me Ashley McDonough. Thank you Lukus Benoit for the theme music and Yasmine Najib for the beautiful artwork.