Note from writer: This is a feature assignment by Hasna Hafidzah, written for INI106H1: Writing Literary Journalism: Telling the Stories of the City course at the University of Toronto, Fall 2021.
Grade: A- (80%)
Beneath every land surface lies countless stories, all with their fair share of happiness and sadness that never reached us. Similar to a side character in a novel, sometimes the lives of urban individuals are reduced to mere objects of replacement—they step into one scene and disappear in another—following the direction of the author’s unpredictable storyline. In this case, the author sits on the throne of government, and the storyline is determined by a single signature on a printed paper. When the deed is done, all is gone. A lively neighbourhood becomes a bleak parking lot.
If a building stood on top of a patch of land, people would think about when it first came to be, not what it was before. The historical context often escaped the public eye. But it didn’t escape my thoughts, not for this story. The 1.6 acres of parking that occupied a corner of Armory Street in downtown Toronto was not solely a space where cars came and went. In 2015, archaeologists carried out an urban excavation on the lot and uncovered 300,000-500,000 artefacts from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century under the thick asphalt crust, ranging from ceramics, animal bones, rags, to antique privies, each one bore witness to the past life on the very same urban space centuries ago.[1]
On a chilly December morning, I decided to seek the answers to my little curiosities about the parking lot through John Lorinc, a writer and senior editor of Spacing, a Canadian urban magazine. Throughout his career, he’s written extensively about urban affairs, politics, and specifically about the Ward, a lost immigrant neighbourhood where the large excavation took place. He told me he’s been in the news business, so his focus is writing about what happened last week, not a hundred years ago, but his track record doesn’t entirely confirm that statement. Perhaps his love for untold stories exceeds anything else in this world. On that day, he talked about what people don’t tell me when they talk about parking lots.
Before the parking lot, 10 Armory Street used to be a microcosm of the Ward—now home to Toronto Courthouse—a lively immigration hub bordered by University Avenue, College Street, Yonge Street, and Queen Street West. The neighbourhood welcomed rebellious souls from faraway places, people who refused to accept the inevitability of an appalling fate. Many had escaped famine and slavery, rape and death, exile and expulsion, guided by the faith that all would get better in the land of new beginnings.
The first wave of immigrants hailed from the U.S., African-American slaves who migrated to Canada through the Underground Railroad in the 1840s and 1850s.[2] They arrived in Toronto by land and water, having successfully boarded boats or steamers to reach the city. Boat ride escapes were especially popular among Blacks living near a body of water, specifically in coastal areas. They would make one or two stops in Montreal or Kingston via St. Lawrence River or New England, then go straight to Toronto.[3] The struggle for slave trade abolition didn’t stop there; it extended. Freed slaves established churches, literary societies, and regional businesses to support fugitive slaves rebuilt their lives in the city.[4]
The Black community was centred at Centre, Chestnut, Elizabeth, and Agnes Street, sharing the area with their Irish counterparts who had escaped a similarly devastating circumstance: the seven-year potato famine.[5] There had been a formidable community of Irish in Toronto, but many more migrated during the same time Blacks arrived.[6] Despite their literate background, the stereotyping of Irish grew worse. Labels such as “ghetto” and the imagery of “the poor Irish” affected the likelihood of receiving job offers. Irish men mostly found work at factories, while their women slaved away as seamstresses.[7]
In the 1880s, Italians arrived in Toronto, occupying settlements at Edward and Chestnut Street.[8] A decade later, Eastern European Jews settled in the city.[9] From the 1900s onwards, the Chinese then flocked to the city.[10] These immigrants then crowded the block, rashly building cottages and taverns on every blank space available on street corners and working in factories on the neighbourhood’s fringes. Others struggled, persevered, and established success stories. The cycle of upward mobility sustained the neighbourhood’s economy, with the new generation of self-made entrepreneurs, land traders, and factory owners providing job opportunities and shelters for incoming immigrants and funding community development projects in the Ward. Thornton and Lucie Blackburn were among them. The husband-and-wife duo was infamous for assisting fugitive slaves by distributing employment positions through their lucrative taxi business, The City, and renting out the houses they built north of Osgoode Hall to refugee families. They had escaped slavery in the U.S. twice and worked briefly as waiters in Osgoode Hall before starting the taxi business, whose profits were then recycled into their rental housing constructions. They owned six along Osgoode Hall and rented them out for ten dollars a year. Their doing was partly an expression of gratitude to the community that embraced them at moments of hardship, and the other part was an act of responsibility: there is a business to run—and profit from.
As he gradually sips his coffee, Lorinc simultaneously reflects on his early reportages about the Ward, which began with a profile of Toronto’s longest-serving Municipal Works Commissioner, Rowland Caldwell Harris, or R.C. Harris, for short. During his service, Harris was most remembered for reforming the city’s infrastructure and urban planning. But people don’t quite place him as someone who would bulldoze a neighbourhood to the ground just for the sake of a parking lot.
“In the late 19th century towards the early 20th century, there was a whole move towards public health reform in a lot of cities, and it was also happening in Toronto,” Lorinc explains about the driving factor that eventually led to historical accounts of the neighbourhood’s collapse. “There was a concern in the city that the Ward would become a problem, and the community was considered to spread infectious moral and social disease. These two things came together, and Toronto’s Municipal Works Commissioner [R.C. Harris] and Toronto’s Chief Medical Officer [Charles Hastings] spearheaded the project to clean up this area. At the same time, the world grew more and more racist in the 1920s. Racism just exploded.”
The direct consequence of migration is being precariously exposed to deportation, yet beyond the inspections at the ports of Canada, the stereotypical notions of “othering” loomed larger. In the face of a city that was, as Lorinc puts it, “all English and very Protestant,” the Ward’s growth was too voracious, too threatening. In their perspective, these immigrants were ungrateful thieves who robbed their livelihoods, their future, their security—pollution to the city they wished would stay British throughout history.
Geographically, the Ward consisted of asymmetrical outhouses—some were roofed by weathered wood and bordered by standing barrels on either side of the structures—that were hidden behind reeking, labyrinth-like alleyways. Brick-and-beam factory buildings lined along the outer rear of the block, facing broad intersections where pedestrians and wagons shared the road. It was a sight of a (seemingly) ordinary urban life in the nineteenth century, though not so much amid an industrializing Toronto with its Victorian persona that resisted any aesthetic disruptions. After all, we’re talking about the time when British narcissism culminated—they believe they were the sole promoter of civilization (I mean, have you seen the Pears soap advertisement? “Teaching the virtues of cleanliness” is “The White Man’s Burden.” Deeply problematic). Consequently, the city that represented them had to be naturally “civilized.”
But the Ward had its unique character, one that the rest of Toronto could never really have: a thriving ethnic community life. Each ethnic group managed to build a community solid enough to equally retain their homeland’s culture and adapt to the host land’s. They raised a generation of transnational offspring under the social and cultural norms they nurtured through multiple community-run institutions such as ethnic churches and language schools. Their legacies contribute to the greater cultural repertoire that now defines modern Toronto.
The influx of immigrants never stopped. Their presence further haunted the city until the government decided to do something about it.
In 1946, the motion to freeze all developments south of Louisa Street—a street that is now completely wiped off the map, which was also part of the Ward—was passed at the City Council. “Imagine a place with lots of houses, all jammed, close to one another. The city then hired a real estate broker to cut deals with all the landowners. As the city assembled the land, it bought out each land parcel, underpriced at two or three million dollars. Not a big number now, by government standards. That part alone took ten years, and afterwards they knocked everything down,” Lorinc explains.
It was a gradual process that took upwards of fifteen years, with an accumulated result that laid the perfect construction base for Nathan Phillip Square and the new City Hall at Queen Street West. By the end of the Second World War, traces of the Ward were invisible. The neighbourhood transformed into bleak asphalt and concrete deserts, and its inhabitants had to bid goodbye to all they had built—beloved lives that were too often misunderstood and dismissed—as they were levelled to the ground, just like that.
Post-expropriation, the Ward’s communities spread to many places across Toronto. Amidst a city that prides itself in its ever-changing, multicultural urban habitat of concrete jungles, these ethnic communities still maintain their ways of living. Chinatown moved to Dundas and Spadina, Little Italy now stretches along College and Bathurst. Chinese restaurants survive, Black churches still run mass. The dead revived; the living continues.
Our society is too often engrossed in different phases of either appreciating or neglecting its history—or doing both altogether. Back then, the Ward’s expropriation wasn’t an afterthought. As Lorinc tells me, “Think about the 1950s—the baby boom, the suburban expansion—you have a society that was generally in love with modernization and progress. Holding on to something old was not an idea that people were engaged in. The preservation movements had not really started. At some point, the Ward was a giant cluster of old warehouses, and they were all demolished. Of course, nobody gave it a second thought.”
In contrast, real estate developers would now convert old warehouses downtown into elite lofts and market them at inflated prices or borrow their characteristics—big windows and concrete floors—and incorporate them into their real estate projects. Either way, both employ the “historic” brand tag as a selling point. One property developer advertises its new warehouse lofts at Queen and Parliament with the slogan “Heritage Design. Modern Everything.” and the appealing closing promotion sentence, “It really is the best of both worlds: inspired by history, powered by innovation (What history, exactly? And what is modern, anyway?). Toronto’s history has been increasingly commodified; however, we have yet to witness significant improvement in its urban heritage conservation. It is a reasonable reality for a city once so infatuated with modernity and progress, but the time for excuses is—should, must be—over. Nevertheless, its past mistakes left an inherent reminder to write its history carefully in the future.
“This city has lots of histories that are told and connected to buildings that have a pedigree. Homes of rich people or institutions get preserved, but if you live in a crappy shack that gets bulldozed, there’s no history left of that,” Lorinc concludes.
I return from the interview, still reflective of our conversation earlier. As I’m strolling around Bloor-Yonge on the way home, I pass by swaths of asphalt covered by parked cars. I rethink what the same view would have looked like a century ago—perhaps it was crowded with black Ford model Ts, strictly black only—a total contrast from the multicoloured line-up of cars I’m looking at right now. Maybe there used to be a little life there, and I hope it was a memorable one.
More Toronto’s lost stories will find their way home, and they will be greeted with the love and affection they deserve. Even if they rot into the ground.
[1] Holly Martelle et al., eds., The Ward Uncovered: The Archaeology of Everyday Life (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2018), 19.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Adrienne Shadd et al., The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 2002), 22
[4] Ibid., 27
[5] Martelle et al., The Ward Uncovered, 19
[6] Brian P. Clarke, Piety and nationalism: lay voluntary associations and the creation of an Irish-Catholic community in Toronto, 1850-1895 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 13, 20
[7] Ibid., 20
[8] Martelle et al., The Ward Uncovered, 20
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
Hasna Hafidzah 
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