Built Heritage News - Issue No. 137

1. Toronto: A city of secrets - dirty little secrets
Cathy Crowe

Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto by Terry Murray (Anansi Press, 2006) is one of my favourite books about this City. It’s a handsome pocketbook, a guide to Toronto’s old buildings and the stone menagerie that inhabit them. Did you know that gargoyles, griffins, winged lions, angels, gods and goddesses, kings and queens, deer and polar bears have been watching over this City for more than a century?

In his forward to the book, Christopher Hume writes “Toronto is a city of secrets. It reveals itself slowly, bit by bit, detail by detail.” I live and work in downtown Toronto so I almost always walk everywhere. I often choose my route in order to sneak a glance upwards at one of the historic stone legends atop a building. One of my favourites is the gargoyles atop the Jarvis Street Baptist Church.

Toronto is a city of secrets and these days, as I walk my City’s streets I am quietly noting another history.

I pass the parking garage on Adelaide where Garland S was found frozen to death.

I walk by the hotel on Bay Street, north of the Greyhound bus station, where Brian B died in his sleep, having rented a room for the night to take a break from the church basement program where he slept on the floor.

I seek out the steps of the synagogue in Kensington Market where Eddie F was found dead, only hours after he was discharged from Toronto Western Hospital.

I am thankful for the staff in St. Michael’s Hospital, known as ‘Toronto’s urban angel’ where James Kagoshima and hundreds of other homeless men and women have died, dying homeless due to cancers, heart disease, the cold, fire.

Today I sought out a specific location. It is the Bank of Montreal’s bank machine vestibule at King and Yonge where John Massie sought shelter, later dying from third-degree burns to 80% of his body. I met Bonnie Briggs, the founder of the Homeless Memorial Project. We went inside to get the manager’s card. I’ve decided I have to write him and Mr. William Downe, the President and Chief Executive Officer of BMO Financial Group. It’s not my first time at the site. I went there the morning after John Massie was burned and taken to St. Michael’s Hospital. There was no yellow police tape. No signs of an investigation. No CSI team. No signage from the bank acknowledging the tragedy. No flowers. Just cleaners, and an industrial fan to eliminate all the traces of smoke, the burned clothing and flesh.

Only the gargoyles, watching from above, would have seen what was to become another one of Toronto’s dirty little secrets, another homeless death. The coroner called it ‘misadventure.’ Shelters were full that night and Church basements overflowing. There was no 24 hour warming centre. City-funded outreach services were forbidden to provide survival supplies which would include hot food, sleeping bags and blankets. This, I find grotesque.

If you would like to help us honour and speak out against the deaths of homeless men, women and children please join Toronto Disaster Relief Committee at the Homeless Memorial, at 12 noon on the steps of the Church of the Holy Trinity.

Upcoming dates include February 10th, March 10th, April 14th. Join us for a free lunch inside the Church after the memorial and enjoy the Church’s history and social justice atmosphere. http://holytrinitytoronto.org/

Editor's Note:
Cathy's piece is little different for BHN readers, but I thought you would be interested to know that people you might not think of as allies also love the beauty of the built environment. I worked with Cathy Crowe ten years ago for a couple of years doing advocacy to have housing programs re-introduced in Canada and Ontario. I met her most recently at City TV where she was being interviewed after me by Adam Vaughan, I was there being interviewed about a threatened house in Toronto. I felt that my issue paled in comparison to people dying in the streets--but Cathy reassured me that she was also concerned about the needless destruction of the built fabric. Wouldn't it be nice to see new housing money targeted towards recycling our buildings.

2. Globe and Mail: Fort York's latest battle - for funding
Jeff Gray

Dust off the epaulettes and shoo away the beer festivals, the historic site is starting to get some friends in high places

Globe and Mail photo, towers encroaching in the view of the Fort

Retreating British soldiers, relinquishing the capital of Upper Canada to invading Americans on April 27, 1813, had one last-ditch trick: They blew up their ammunition stores with the enemy just outside the walls of Fort York, creating what one witness called a "a great confused mass of smoke, timber, men, earth," killing or wounding more than 250 U.S. troops.

Nowadays, it makes sense that Fort York's cannons are instead pointed at the cars roaring by on the towering concrete Gardiner Expressway, which looms overhead. Threats to the fort, the site where this city's future was sealed and an independent Canada was born, have long come not from Americans but from the indifference of Torontonians themselves.

And it is not just the indignity of the hulking Gardiner and the nearby flashing billboards. Landfill and a concrete plant - soon to be a park - have long cut off the fort from the lake, as the railways cut it off from the city to the north. A condo boom has now added a wall of glass-and-steel towers to dwarf the fort's 19th-century battlements. School trips are down. A proposed light-rail line just west of the fort's walls has raised alarms.

However, with plans forming to commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812 in June of 2012, the city and the site's supporters say it is time to make amends with the ghosts of Fort York - the city's only official national historic site - and treat it with the respect it deserves, starting with a $15-million visitors centre. But the battle to raise the cash from recession-weary governments and private donors is just beginning. "It has laid there forgotten," said Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone, co-chair of the city's War of 1812 bicentennial committee. Now champion of the fort's revival, he says Torontonians need to be reminded of the war's importance.

He insists that early signs are good. The city has committed $5.7-million, and the federal government - the Conservatives promised to commemorate the War of 1812 in their election platform last year - cut a cheque last year for $617,000.

The city's attitude toward the site appears to be changing. There is now a Fort York Boulevard, a new entrance and new neighbourhood springing up around the fort. A new art installation, meant to mimic the reflection that water would create on the underside of the Gardiner, is slated to recall the 19th-century shoreline that abutted the fort. Pedestrian bridges are planned to link the site to dog walkers, joggers and cyclists in the neighbourhoods to its north. City officials are even investigating whether Fort York could win UNESCO World Heritage Site status.

And, Mr. Pantalone said, as of this summer, the fort will no longer be forced to rent out what is essentially a military graveyard to a summer beer festival that features beach volleyball and rock concerts.

Issue No. 137 | February 17, 2009

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