The Life of a New City: Toronto, 1834

MR. DERRY:

Distinguished Past Presidents, members, and guests: With the fanfare that has heralded the arrival of this week's start of sesquicentennial celebrations of the City of Toronto, it is inconceivable that anyone present today is unaware of the event. The week started with celebrations at City Hall and a party on Monday evening, and we have in the last few days all read a number of articles on Toronto and its origins. Indeed, we have become intimately conscious of the humble beginnings of the city, and the scathing viewpoints of visitors, particularly when confronted with roads and sanitation which were not considered to be up to the standard of the day. The city leaders were certainly conscious of the problems - though possibly not at that time in a position to fully address them - when they decided to change the name from York to Toronto. Indeed, as stated by Mr. McLean, then speaker of the Legislative Council, "The adoption of such a musical name [as Toronto] was a means by which the inhabitants would not be subjected to the indignity of residing in a place designated dirty little York."

Indeed, when we look at our fine buildings and streets, the cultural attractions, and the many other features that make this city such a pleasant one to live in, it is hard to appreciate what the city might have been like in 1834 and what sorts of lives its inhabitants led. For this reason, we thought you might find it interesting to hear a little about life in the new city of Toronto in 1834. It is, in fact, a double pleasure for us, for we are not only to hear about a subject of considerable interest at this time, but we are also to hear about it from one of Canada's most highly respected historians.

Maurice Careless graduated from the University of Toronto in 1940 and went on to Harvard to do graduate work. His studies were interrupted by service in the Canadian naval service and the Department of External Affairs during the war, but he joined the Department of History at the University of Toronto in 1945 and completed his doctorate from Harvard several years later. Dr. Careless became a full professor at the University of Toronto in 1959 and was department chairman from that time until 1967. Since 1977, he has been "university professor," which, as was mentioned when we introduced Dr. Frye, is a particular honour in that he is a professor of the university as a whole, and not attached to one particular department.

Professor Careless has published fourteen books on Canadian history and numerous articles. Two of the books - Canada, Story of Challenge, published in 1953, and Brown of the Globe: Statesman of Confederation, published in 1963 - won the coveted Governor General's Award. The fact that Dr. Careless, the authority on George Brown, is addressing us this week is additionally timely, since I noted in Monday's Globe and Mail that this is the week of the 140th anniversary of the Globe. Dr. Careless's newest book - to be published this sesquicentennial year - is Toronto to 1918.

Dr. Careless has been involved in a large number of activities and is currently Chairman of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. He was also for five years Chairman of the Multicultural Historical Society of Ontario and a member of the Ontario Commission on Post-Secondary Education. It is not surprising that he is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including being made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1962, receiving honorary doctorates from several universities, and being made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Dr. J.M.S. Careless to address us on "The Life of a New City: Toronto, 1834."

DR. CARELESS:

Joseph Binks of His Majesty's Sixty-sixth Regiment well remembered March 6, 1834. "The day when Little York became the City of Toronto was a grand one. The town was very gaily decorated, and everybody kept holiday." The young bandsman from Ireland's County Mayo was then serving here in the garrison, and as the only band in town, his unit was in great demand to help the beaming citizens celebrate the proclamation of their new municipal existence. "There was no competition," said Binks, "and we had to be paid liberally. Three dollars a man...." Be that as it may, the band, he added, "was out all day, and in the evening we went up to Sir John Colborne's [the Lieutenant-Governor] who gave a grand dinner there. Ah! no one thought that Toronto would become the city it is. It was a dirty little place at the time......

It was fifty years later that Binks thus recalled that first day of cityhood. By that time, he dwelt in a built-up Toronto of railways, factories, gaslight, and horse-drawn streetcars. Today, one hundred and fifty years since our civic birthdate, in a metropolis of vastly greater complexity, we again find cause to celebrate the anniversary of 1834, and wonder what it was like to have lived here then, when small Muddy York was incorporated as the aspiring new City of Toronto. And this gives me my own means of celebration; taking us back to the way we were at the opening of our civic career.

Of course, when Toronto obtained city status, under an elected municipal government of its own, it had already had a previous existence as the Town of York since 1793. Begun originally as a British garrison base beside its sheltered harbour, and soon made capital of the new province of Upper Canada, this tiny governing centre developed a commercial life as well. Merchants, craftsmen, and innkeepers gathered there to supply the needs of York's garrison and officialdom; and particularly to serve the trade and traffic starting to flow by way of Yonge Street, the capital's key route inland, where farms and settlements were spreading into the forests. During the War of 1812, when still not much more than a village, it was twice raided and looted by American forces. But afterwards, it began to grow more rapidly, as mounting waves of settlers flowed into Upper Canada from the British Isles.

As this migration tide pushed out frontiers and greatly enlarged markets, York's business enterprises climbed in number and scale. In fact, by the early 1830s, a veritable commercial boom was sweeping the town, while its banking and insurance operations multiplied also. British immigrants, workers, businessmen, and professionals flocked in. New houses, stores, and public buildings went up apace. And York's population more than tripled between 1827 and 1833 (roughly from eighteen hundred to six thousand), making it by far the largest urban place in Upper Canada. At the same time, the growth years sorely strained its old local administration under appointed district magistrates (it had no municipal powers of its own), raising sharp problems of finances and services for this expanding urban centre - but equally raising confident hopes of progress if it gained municipal incorporation as a city. Hence, in 1834, that change was accomplished.

An act of civic incorporation went through the provincial parliament in February, to take effect on March 6. Among other things, the act adopted the older, Indian-derived name for the locality, Toronto, thereby getting rid of the demeaning label "little" in front of York, which the town had inevitably had stuck on it to distinguish it from more notable Yorks in England and the United States. More importantly, the incorporated city got its own elected municipal government, with corporate financing powers. And its boundaries were much enlarged, reaching from the harbour all the way north to present Bloor Street, to the Don River on the east, and to what is now Dufferin on the west. The outer reaches of this civic territory then were virtually unoccupied, and constituted the "city liberties," which could be organized within wards as population spread. Five wards each electing two City Council members were set up for the settled core area. They ran only from Parliament west to Bathurst, north scarcely to modern Dundas, and at that held some pretty empty fringes. By mid-1834, the new city included some ninety-two hundred inhabitants, though some of these increased numbers were due to its expanded bounds. Still, Toronto was building out steadily. Aside from this, it was the first incorporated city in the province, and its wealthiest and fastest-growing urban centre.

Such a ranking did not make it a London, Paris, or New York. Toronto in 1834 was very much a frontier boom town; raw, messy, and mucky, with practically no sewers or water system, surfaced streets, or even sidewalks. It was half-built, gappy, and considerably unsorted. Log and board shacks, blacksmith shops, and cow barns were jumbled in with stores and residences quite freely. The main travelled streets were mud tracks for part of the year, dustpits for much of the rest. Street lamps (oil, before gas came in, in the 1840s) were few and flickering. Pigs rummaged in street garbage; cattle got loose to trample gardens in spite of efforts at control. Privies stood in every backyard. Smells were compounded by new soap factories rendering animal fats at the harbourfront, by the large tannery of Mr. Jesse Ketchum on low-value backlands near Queen and Yonge, and by many other sources of undisposed refuse. About all that Toronto dirt lacked was the soot that later steam industry would bring. And that was coming too, for by 1834, two iron forges were steam-driven, while steam engines were being built in town for use in mills and steamboats.

Yet there were far better aspects to the city. It had some substantial public buildings and a fair number of dignified private homes. On central King Street in particular, new brick store blocks were going up, lining this chief east-west artery and knitting together the city's commercial core. Elsewhere, too, terraced rows of well-proportioned town houses were being developed, a sign that urban residential living was taking hold in a former rustic village. The water carts, the warehouse wagons, the stagecoaches jolting out for the Kingston or Dundas highways, or up Yonge Street right to Holland Landing, may have churned up the unpaved streets, but they marked a bustling town life also.

Above all, there still was space - for flowering gardens of the gentry or vegetable plots of the humble - and the open country itself was within easy reach. The sandy peninsula which protected Toronto harbour from the lake (and which would become the Island when storms in the 1850s broke through its neck) was a wilderness liberty of bush and trees: a prime place for fishing, boating, riding, or just roaming. Furthermore, thanks to the small size and limited density of this Toronto, there were no jam-packed, unhealthy tenements for the masses. Working people more generally had their own cottages, many toward the outskirts; and if most of these homes were rented and the worst mere shanties, they were separate family dwellings. Only the poorest, largely impoverished, immigrants had to crowd into rooms in older, declining houses, from which those who could soon moved on.

Altogether, if the new city was not a great metropolis, to the bulk of its inhabitants it offered a huge improvement over bush cabins, starvation Irish hovels, bare Scottish crofts, or the dreary, huddled life of English factory towns. In the main, too, it was vibrant, essentially healthy, and blithely optimistic. Advances would surely come - and they did. But enough of these generalities. It is time to take a closer look at the Toronto scene in 1834, by scanning the living, working city as a visitor would have found it on arriving there that year.

You would travel in by lake (we hope on a mild, sparkling spring day) as a passenger on a well-appointed steamboat like the twin-engined, Toronto-owned Cobourg, which could do fifteen miles an hour. The tall, stone lighthouse of 1808 on the western tip of the peninsula points the way to the harbour. You steam in past the defending garrison at the entrance and on to Toronto Bay. The garrison, with its mounded earth and wooden ramparts, looks a bit run-down after twenty years of peace, though loyally British Torontonians have not forgotten the American attacks of the War of 1812. Beyond the fort, there is still an expanse of empty land along the western bay shore, before the city is reached further up the harbour. This is part of the original Garrison Reserve tract set out in 1793, but town growth has already cut into it, and more will be taken as Toronto spreads westward. Soon you come opposite an outer scattering of suburban residences set in planted estates, then you glimpse the General Hospital off John Street; and now the built-up western section of the city rises before you.

Mansions and gardens front on the glistening water. You note the new provincial Parliament Buildings, completed in 1832, which occupy a square on Front Street between John and Simcoe: three formal, but plain, two-storeyed blocks of Georgian red brick. Behind them, amid trees, stand Government House in pale green stucco and the solid brick clumps of Upper Canada College, occupied in 1831 by that government-endowed academy for sons of the elite. This prestigious western town sector, which might be termed "government Toronto," has plainly drawn much of top official society. It displays such affluent homes as "The Palace" of John Strachan, the Anglican archdeacon, later bishop, who is an imperious force in both church and state; or stuccoed Holland House, erected by Attorney General Henry Boulton in 1831 as the first local venture in the new Gothic Revival style. But now your vessel is passing the foot of lower Yonge Street to dock at the steamboat wharf at the bottom of Church. And you have arrived at the central core of the community.

Standing on the upper deck, waiting for a medley of immigrants below to get their children and goods ashore, you look out on a waterfront of scurrying small craft and laden schooners, rough store-sheds and workshops, baggage, barrels, and carts. Above the shore-bank on Front looms the four-storey

North American Hotel topped with a roofwalk, and behind, the impressive bulk of the new St. James' Anglican Church, put up in stone and brick in 1832, which neighbours the not-quitefinished St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, neither yet crowned with their steeples. Past these structures to eastward the City Market extends, a stretch from Front Street back to King and east to Jarvis in which stands the recently erected, roomy, red-brick Market Building. This holds offices, shops, and stalls and, since incorporation in March, houses City Hall as well. You will readily discern that, what with the public market and municipal headquarters, the two leading city churches, and the main mercantile domain that centres up on King Street, this central sector clearly focuses the civic and business life of the new city.

Gazing further eastward, you view the Old Town, the initial Little York plotted out in 1793, which runs merely from George Street east to Berkeley. By now, this eastern sector is somewhat in decline, a place of worn little back-street wooden houses affording low-price shelter for poorer inhabitants. Yet it still has a line of older white-painted mansions on Front commanding the lake, and some other significant edifices. These include the elegant, Georgian brick townhouse built on Duke in 1822 for the Chief Justice, Sir William Campbell (he died this January), and the august premises on George of the powerful Bank of Upper Canada, which is so closely tied to the ruling set of provincial officials, the so-called Family Compact, that it is dubbed by Reform opponents the government's "pet bank."

East beyond the Old Town limits you see little growth as yet, for this is a scrubby, dank area, which does not invite much more than outskirt shacks with cabbage patches, in a district later to be disparaged as "Cabbagetown." Moreover, as the Don is neared, low, soggy wetlands spread still more widely about the eastern end of the harbour. None the less, here stands a newly added Toronto landmark, the towering windmill put up to grind grain for the millers James Wort and William Gooderham, brothers-in-law who came out from England in 1831-32. By 1834, their wind-driven mill has already been superseded by a locally made steam engine; but their firm will grow to major size in Toronto - especially after it takes to the distilling business in 1837.

Other little milling and manufacturing enterprises, you learn, are located further up the water pathway of the Don. But now you head ashore, to probe Toronto inward for yourself. You go up past warehouses around rutted lower Yonge, past the busy shopping area of King, spreading now on to Adelaide above, and so come to Queen - or "Lot Street" as it will remain into the 1840s. The name derives from the park lots laid out from this base line in 1793 and extending to Bloor: one-hundredacre strips for gentlemen's estates and, not least, to grant to government officials. These holdings now belong to Toronto's dominant families, such as that of John Beverley Robinson, the most capable member of the Tory Family Compact, or Judge D'Arcy Boulton, whose own park lot, you discover, features a stately brick suburban residence, The Grange, set well west of Yonge and north of Lot. Still further out northwestward, you reach the country seat of Dr. William Baldwin, a wealthy city landowner, physician, lawyer, and architect combined - but more remarkably, a Reform political figure, not a Compact Tory, despite his elite social ties. Dr. Baldwin calls his hillcrest retreat "Spadina," the Indian word for hill, he explains, while hospitably greeting you on your visit. From this pleasant house he designed himself, the doctor looks down from wooded heights that rise behind the lakeshore plain on which Toronto lies, to plan house-lot subdivisions to develop along Spadina Avenue, the broad roadway he has laid out through his estate north from Lot Street (which we will call Queen again hereafter). His lawyer son, Robert, is already working on the family properties, and has entered Reform politics also. More than that, this young reserved Toronto patrician has recently shared in drafting the city's set of incorporation; and as a Reform provincial premier in the next decade, Robert Baldwin will succeed in bringing responsible self-government to Canada after more radical Reformers have signally failed.

You return to Queen, observing that urban building has already reached into the park lots just west of Yonge, where a neighbourhood of unpretentious planked or rough-cast cottages extends north from Queen: Macaulaytown, subdivided out of the estate granted in 1797 to the army surgeon, Dr. James Macaulay. West from here, on Queen's north side, there stands an imposing brick edifice, Osgoode Hall, built in 1829 on land sold from Beverley Robinson's park lot to house the Law Society of Upper Canada. Beyond Osgoode Hall, wide College Avenue (future University Avenue) opens northward to the lands of the provincial university, chartered since 1827. But as that institution will not even get its cornerstone laid till 1842, this handsomely landscaped roadway remains largely empty, as Spadina Avenue similarly does further westward.

In the other direction, east from Yonge on muddy Queen, there is little to be noted. Rosedale, the country villa of Sheriff Jarvis, lies well to the north. About all you will see to admire is the park-lot home, Moss Park, an opulent classical residence standing above Queen near George, which belongs to William Allen, the President of the Bank of Upper Canada and Toronto's richest capitalist. This effectively marks the northeastern edge of occupation; for the deep course of Taddle Creek and its swampy outflow, the Meadow, thus far have blocked the opening of Queen on eastward to the Don. The Taddle will not be buried in sewers till the forties. And the whole obvious community need for such public projects turns us back downtown to assess municipal activities in the new city.

The municipal regime, which began operations following the first civic elections late in March, was surely intended to provide better urban services in sewerage, street improvement, police and fire, refuse control, and more. Hopes were high when Reform apostles of progress won twelve places in the new City Council to eight firm Tories, and when this Reform majority duly chose as mayor from its numbers Mr. William Lyon Mackenzie, dauntless editor of the hard-hitting Colonial Advocate, and a leading radical Member of Parliament. Yet, in the intense political partisanship of the day, the two sides have done nothing but quarrel in Council meetings. Nor has the hot-tempered, red-wigged Mayor promoted much peace and light; especially not when he uses his power to have a belligerent Tory alderman thrown out forcibly. Important standing committees of council have been set up, and they are getting plank sidewalks laid. But sewer-building is not proceeding; finances have been poorly handled, and a public protest is rising over tax rates. The last, indeed, will bring tragedy in July, when in an angry mass meeting over taxes at City Hall an overcrowded balcony collapses. It hurls protestors down on the market stalls below, killing five and injuring fifty, some being impaled on butcher's meathooks.

Worse disaster will come in August, as cholera sweeps Toronto. Over twenty-five deaths a day occur by mid-month. The General Hospital and other hastily acquired quarters are crammed with sick and dying; a temporarily appointed Board of Health can do little in the current state of medical knowledge. Five hundred will die in the small city before the epidemic lifts in the autumn. The mayor himself is stricken but survives. These grim occurrences can scarcely be held against the city government, but for the rest of its term, till year's end, it goes on fruitlessly squabbling and sinking deeper in debt. Thus, in January 1835, the voters will put in an all-Tory Council, led by Mayor Robert Baldwin Sullivan, a conservative nephew of Dr. Baldwin, and this second regime will at last take up sewer construction. The first has not inaugurated municipal life very gloriously; though Mayor Mackenzie himself should not be overblamed. In his one chance in office he has faced situations and opponents about as obdurately difficult as he is himself. Still, three years hence, he will be leading armed radicals down Yonge Street to seize the ungrateful city in the Rebellion of 1837 - which will collapse in utter confusion. Toronto's tempestuous first mayor and its most celebrated rebel proves pretty consistent in behaviour, it appears.

Yet there is more to the city's life of 1834 than hot politics, hopeful development, or thriving business. It has its leisure side and cultural concerns as well. Thanks to the natural expanses around it, fishing and hunting not only help stock the larders, but are popular pastimes too: wild turkeys can be shot along the Don right into the 1870s. Then there is winter curling and skating (no hockey yet), summertime horse races, cricket, and bowling. Well beyond these is social drinking: in major hotels like the North American and the Steamboat, in taverns such as the Bluebell on Queen, the Greenland Fishery by the Parliament Buildings, and others too numerous to mention - along with illegal, shifting little grog shops that the city's High Bailiff and his few policemen can never manage to remove. Bandsman Binks of the Sixty-sixth happily remembers one of these, a favourite soldiers' resort, "The Devil's Half-Acre," where a gallon of whisky can be had for a shilling. Theatre is popular also, if of doubtful quality; it is usually presented by travelling actors to well-lubricated, rowdy audiences in hotel ballrooms, at City Hall, or even in tents. Sometimes the stage offers Shakespeare; but also, as at the Steamboat Hotel in October, it may be "The Extraordinary Exhibition of the Industrious Fleas," or, in a tent behind the jail in July, a mighty presentation of the Battles of Waterloo and New Orleans - with extra charge to see the boa constrictor. Higher sorts of social activity certainly include consistent churchgoing, to St. James's or St. Andrew's, to the Catholic church out Queen East or the Methodist chapel on King West. Then there is the Mechanic's Institute, founded in 1831 to bring useful knowledge to ambitious artisans, but which chiefly attracts more affluent citizens because of its growing library and enlightening lecture series - like that of 1832 on the "sublime truths of science." The Institute has 140 members by 1834; from it will grow Toronto's Public Library. Early in 1834, moreover, the Society of Artists and Amateurs has held the city's first public exhibition of paintings (196 in all). Musical concerts and choral groups, the Horticultural Society and temperance associations, have other appeals. And at the Commercial News Room, which displays Toronto's seven lively newspapers, the businessmen who gather there will launch the Board of Trade that October. Whether all these doings are highly cultural or not, the city plainly does much more than live by bread alone.

And here we must leave it. At a lake harbour which in 1793 displayed only waterfowl, empty woods, and a few Indian fishing encampments, a vigorous urban community has reached full life by 1834. Ahead lie a hundred and fifty more lively years of Toronto's growth - which today we commemorate by recalling how it was when the new city began.

The appreciation of the audience was expressed by BGen Reginald Lewis, a Past President of The Empire Club of Canada.