Finally.
In January 1862, after many stops and starts, including the death of careworn architect William Thomas, construction of the new Toronto Jail was just about completed. The stern and substantial building consisted of a sixty-eight-foot-high central administration block made of stone, with two creamy-white brick wings containing cells for the prisoners. The main entrance was on the south side of the central pavilion. On the first floor was a large entrance hall flanked by rooms including the governor’s office, male and female “visitors rooms,” and storage closets. The second floor contained the apartments of the governor and the turnkeys, or the head guards who were entrusted with the jail keys. The chapel was located on the top floor. In the basement were a few holding cells and separate male and female washrooms for scrubbing down the newly admitted. Iron gates at the northern end of the entrance hall opened into a large, four-storey central hall or rotunda. There was some interior work still to be done, such as plastering and the installation of the heating system. But in less than two months’ time, the stout wooden front doors would be thrown open for business.
Then: disaster.
On Sunday, January 19, a fire raged through the building and consumed the centre block. This was the second major conflagration in a public building in Toronto in less than a week: the previous Monday, Government House had been accidentally destroyed by the “devouring element.” Was the fire at the jail also an unfortunate accident? It was not. According to one sombre news report, “it is feared that … the incendiary has been at work and the gaol building wilfully fired.”
Firemen pose with their horse-drawn engines in front of the fire hall at Berkeley Street, built in 1871. On display is the type of equipment that would have been used a few years earlier to fight the devastating fire at the jail.
It was around two in the morning when the caretaker who lived in a nearby cottage, a man named Cooney, was startled from his slumbers by a brilliant light flickering through his bedroom windows. He immediately ran to the main entrance of the jail, to find that the chapel was ablaze. To his shock, the padlock and hasp had been torn off the front doors. A violent snowstorm swept in, bringing some hope of relief, but it did nothing to dampen the flames. The smoke from the fire was so intense that Cooney could not even enter the building. Braving the storm, he sprinted westward toward the city, shouting “Fire at the new gaol!” The bell at Berkeley Street started solemnly tolling the alarm; at round 3:00 a.m. the bell at St. Lawrence Hall rang out in accompaniment, and firefighters hastily trundled out their equipment to deal with the blaze.
When it came to fighting fires in the second half of the nineteenth century, Toronto had several different kinds of equipment in its arsenal: basic and very heavy hand-drawn and hand-powered fire engines, and steam pumpers mounted on a horse-drawn carriage with steel-rimmed wooden wheels. With this type, a water-tube boiler provided steam to a pumping engine that forced water through hoses onto a fire. The hoses were hand-hauled separately on large-wheeled carts.
What unspooled over the next ten or eleven hours would not have been out of place in a Buster Keaton movie.
As the firemen scrambled into action with their horses, hand pumpers, and, it would seem, one lone steam-powered engine, the alarm bells stopped ringing. According to later reports, the watchmen at the top of the bell towers could no longer see the fiery glow — perhaps it had been obscured by the blizzard — so they simply turned off the alarms. After some head-scratching, the chief engineer ordered his men to stop their headlong rush and return to their stations. Then he set off on foot for Berkeley Street to find out for himself what the dickens was going on with those bells. Meanwhile, a police patrolman heading east along Gerrard Street in the downtown area who had spotted the blaze at the jail ran back to St. Lawrence Hall, where he raised the alarm a second time. Out came the fire engines again. However, deep drifts of snow now blanketed the city streets, and men and equipment became hopelessly bogged down. The minutes ticked agonizingly by. Another pair of horses was brought up and harnessed to the steam fire engine. Around five in the morning, the teams finally reached the jail. By this time the roof of the centre building had collapsed and the top floor was a mass of flames.
Back in 1862 you would have looked in vain for a fire hydrant at the corner of Mill Street and Danforth Road (now Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street East); water had to be pumped up from the Don River. So the firemen swept into action and laid out their hoses. Unfortunately, even when placed end to end in a single line there were not enough of them to reach the building from the river. To their consternation, the crews now realized that some of the hose carts had not turned up. More time was wasted as messengers were dispatched for additional hoses.
At 7:00 a.m., some five hours after the fire was spotted, the first stream of water was finally trained on the flames. At this late stage the embattled firemen could only hope to prevent the fire from spreading to the side wings of the building.
About two hours later the steam fire engine burned out, and firemen scrambled frantically to bring in more equipment.
By the time the fire was finally doused around 1:00 p.m., the centre block was completely gutted; its walls charred and cracked. The heat had been so intense that the thick iron gratings on the chapel windows were bent and twisted out of shape.
In the aftermath of the conflagration, there were several suggestions as to its cause. For example, it was rumoured that someone had heard an explosion, similar to that of a powder keg being ignited, just before the fire broke out.
But the most enduring theory is the one advanced by Robertson in his Landmarks of Toronto. “It was supposed that a gang of bushmen had gone inside the building to get shelter from the piercing cold, and either wilfully or accidentally fired the premises.” These so-called bushmen (actually, bush men and women) belonged to the Brook’s Bush Gang, a pack of around twenty violent criminals who prowled the eastern fringes of the city in the 1850s and early 1860s. With their headquarters in a derelict barn in the woods to the east of the jail in what is now Leslieville, these “vagrants and vagabonds” had long brought misery into the lives of fearful residents. “The most vigorous proceedings should be adopted by the civil authorities to disperse and banish these bands of outlaws,” fumed “Suburban” in a letter to the press in 1858.
The fact that the institution was situated in a semi-rural space outside the city boundaries warrants consideration. As historian and author Jennifer Bonnell puts it: “The lower [Don] valley had become, by the 1860s, a repository for urban discards — for sewage and industrial wastes, for prisoners, for the institutionalized poor, and for people who in other ways failed to measure up to nineteenth-century liberal values of rationality, moral rigour, and self-advancement.”
Apprehensive city folk regarded that part of the valley with its inaccessible ravines and polluted marshes as a place of menace and suspicion. Beyond the valley, the largely undeveloped landscape was dotted with woodland areas, all of it suggesting a kind of “underworld” that brought with it “images of darkness, unpredictability, and other-worldliness.”
From the mid-1800s, the untamed ravines of the valley and the largely uninhabited areas beyond were the haunt of marginalized people. Torontonians had become accustomed to harrowing tales of bandits preying on people crossing the Don (Queen Street) bridge or on the road to Kingston. And then there was that much-reviled Brook’s Bush Gang. According to a report in the Globe in April 1861, “they subsist mainly by robbing hen roosts, as the farmers in the neighbourhood know to their cost; by robbing some unfortunate they may inveigle into the bush, or by the wages of sin of the women.”
The wages of sin, as the Bible warns, is death.
And so it was with the Brook’s Bush Gang. That same year, sixteen purported members of the gang, both men and women, were arrested after the decomposing body of John Sheridan Hogan, a local politician and former editor-in-chief of the British Colonist, was found floating in the Don River. Hogan had allegedly been relieved of substantial amounts of cash before he was killed. All of the gang members were subsequently released, presumably free to resume their nefarious activities in the neighbourhood. The lone exception was a “notorious character” named James Brown, who was tried and sentenced to death for his role in the murder. Despite public outcry that justice had not been done, he was hanged in front of the Court House on Adelaide Street in March 1862. This would be the last public hanging in Toronto.
However, Bonnell cautions against too simplistic an attitude toward those populations relegated to the fringes of society. She notes that although the urban elite perceived the valley as being a place of corruption and danger, marginalized individuals who took refuge there, such as the Brook’s Bush Gang, regarded it as a place of safety. What was more, “despite its occasional violence, it was also a kind of social hub for those with few other meeting places to frequent.”
Public fears, however, were not entirely misplaced. Policing in the area was scant: in mid-nineteenth-century Toronto, police authority ended at the west bank of the Don. Both the jail and the House of Refuge that shared its site fell under the jurisdiction of the County of York. It was not until the city annexed Riverdale in 1884 that the police started to exercise control over the east bank of the river between Queen Street and Danforth Avenue.
All that aside, it was the Keystone Cop–style ineptitude of city and fire authorities, admittedly working under extremely challenging conditions, that ultimately sealed the fate of the building. Of course, the jail’s location on the wrong side of the Don River — the east side, that is — was definitely a contributing factor. It was simply too far away, separated from city and services by bad roads and rickety bridges. Today, walking briskly, you could probably cross the Gerrard Street bridge and cover the distance between the jail (A) and where the fire hall stood at Berkeley Street (B) in about thirty minutes. In 1862, travelling from point A to point B in a raging snowstorm via Bell’s Bridge, the rustic Gerrard Street crossing that was washed away by a flood in the late 1880s, would have taken a lot longer; and manoeuvering horse-drawn or hand-pulled fire equipment from point B to point A through deep snowdrifts longer still.
Rickety Bell’s Bridge spanned the Don River at what is now Gerrard Street East. It was washed away by a flood in the late 1880s.
When the embers died and the smoke cleared after the disastrous and probably deliberate blaze, it was time to take stock. The building had been regarded as virtually fireproof. In hindsight, the weak link was the soaring chapel in the centre block, which had been richly fitted out with wood: wooden seats, a wooden gallery and pulpit, and a wooden division running down the centre to separate male and female inmates during church services. The situation was not helped by a profusion of carpenters’ benches littering the room as construction neared completion and a thick layer of wood shavings on the floor. In contrast, the wings of the building had been saved, both because their walls were thick and because they contained little or no woodwork.
William Thomas had been aware of the fire risk, and, as a preventative measure, he had proposed the installation of a large cistern on the roof with a series of hoses connecting it to all parts of the building. The proposal had been rejected. In a supreme irony, such an arrangement might have greatly diminished the catastrophic effect of the blaze.
The damage to the jail was estimated at $30,000; the premises were insured for just $20,000. The Globe reported that the original building estimate had ballooned, and, as to who should shoulder the blame: “the main portion of the $34,000 over-expenditure was caused by fulfilling the requirements of the [provincial] gaol commissioners.”
Now, some four years into the project, it was back to the drawing board. Once more.
In May 1862, the interfering provincial prison inspectors stepped in yet again to “suggest” further improvements. In their opinion, the recently gutted chapel was too large: they believed that it should be divided into two chapels and four rooms. The city council’s Board of Gaol Inspectors meekly agreed. In July, the new architect, William Tutin Thomas, sent a letter to the city council complaining that there were still no roofs on the jail. Unless things started moving very soon, the onset of winter would cause serious damage to both the central building and the wings. In September, the city council was still squabbling over who should pay that additional $34,000 occasioned by the change to the original plans back in 1860. The provincial government had balked at the very idea of paying any part of this. According to one alderman, the government “said they had never ordered any alteration, that there were no books or papers to show they had ever promised anything, and they would never give a cent.”
It would take another two years before the jail was finally completed and open for business. By that time, costs had skyrocketed. The total price for the jail buildings and farm was an astounding $256,812. The provincial government reluctantly kicked in $24,000 toward the alterations, and insurance companies paid a further $15,535 to compensate for the fire damage. And that left the city on the hook for a whopping net amount of more than $217,000.