What had been going through William Thomas’s mind, in those heady days of early 1857, as he settled before his drawing board, with pencils, pens, watercolours, and compasses within easy reach, to create the first sketches of his prestigious commission, the new Toronto jail?
Thomas’s instructions from the city council were straightforward enough: to base his designs on Pentonville Prison, London, and incorporate the principles of the separate or silent system. So his thoughts must first have turned to that imposing structure with its lofty central hall and five radiating wings.
Thomas probably spent quite some time musing about the basic functions of a prison, too. Here, he may well have come across volume 21 of the Encyclopaedia Londinensis, published in London in 1826. In a long entry under “Prison,” this self-styled Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature goes into great detail on the basic aim of imprisonment, which “is, of course, the prevention of vice, and, towards this end, it operates in two ways; first, by inflicting such distress on the prisoner as shall prevent him from repeating his offence; and, secondly, by exciting the terrors of the people in general, so that the anticipation of a like punishment may restrain them within the bounds of good behaviour.”
In addition, the encyclopedia offers helpful hints on what a prison should look like, so as to ensure that its form would appropriately embody its function: “The style of architecture of a prison is a matter of no slight importance. It offers an effectual method of exciting the imagination to a most desirable point of abhorrence…. The exterior of a prison should, therefore, be formed in the heavy and sombre style, which most forcibly impresses the spectator with gloom and terror.”
With such examples and opinions in mind, Thomas created a series of preliminary drawings of the proposed jail between November 1857 and February 1859 for submission to the Toronto city council. These plans feature a south-facing central hall with four long wings, one extending directly to the east and one directly to the west, and two diagonal wings projecting northeast and northwest. With the exception of back-to-back cells designed to accommodate felons at the ends of the diagonal wings, all the cells were to be arranged on the outer walls, allowing for easy surveillance of the corridors, à la Pentonville, from the central hall. Men and women would be accommodated in separate wings and adults and juveniles on different floors. There were administrative offices and work rooms and day rooms and a small section for debtors; there was an apartment for the governor, and, of course, a chapel on the second floor. Also proposed was a highly decorated octagonal watch-tower at the back, allowing observation of the surrounding area.
The council, however, approved a simplified plan consisting of just the central block and the two side wings, and construction began.
These initial drawings were discarded once the provincial prison inspectors rejected the Pentonville model in 1860, and the plans had to be radically revised. Fortunately, a sufficient number of those originals survive to show us how the actual building differed from what Thomas had first envisaged.
The final product was a smaller, but still hugely imposing, rectangular structure, comprised of a four-storey central pavilion flanked by three-and-a-half-storey side wings. Golden stone from Niagara and Ohio and brick from Toronto brickyards were used for the exterior of the central block, and the wings were of creamy-white brick. Stone, wood, and iron were used in both the exterior and interior trim, and the roof was made of slate.
Architects and historians agree that Thomas’s overall design largely followed the Renaissance Revival style, especially with regard to the façade. Characteristic of this style, which drew heavily on sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance architecture, are large, formal buildings with symmetrical façades, prominent quoins or cornerstones, and rusticated or rough-textured stone piers and columns.
Charles (later Sir Charles) Barry, who designed the façade of Pentonville, was an ardent admirer of Renaissance Revival architecture, and, although the Pentonville model had been thrown out in Toronto, his influence on Thomas may still be seen both in the impressive bulk of the Don Jail and in the exaggerated detailing of the central pavilion, such as the rusticated piers and columns and the vermiculated or worm-like patterns carved into the stonework. These sculptural details also reflect Thomas’s own love of elaborate stone-carved decoration, which you can see in his other work, such as Brock’s Monument at Queenston.
The final version’s tiny, iron-gated back-to-back brick cells, arranged along the centre of each wing, were designed to accommodate the general jail population at night. The windowed corridors alongside the cells were essentially day rooms where inmates would congregate during the daylight hours when they were not working, eating, or, perhaps, exercising. A few larger cells, original purpose unknown, were located on the third floor. Grimly, there were also several segregation and punishment cells that were used as an alternative to flogging the unruly. These were larger than the standard cells, but solid oak doors shut out every glimmer of light, leaving the occupant in complete darkness. As noted a century later in Bridgepoint Health documentation on the history of the Don Jail, this type of confinement was a serious matter in an institution that lauded the importance of providing fresh air and natural light to prisoners.
In addition to the cells, the jail had a suite of apartments for the governor and administrative offices for the staff. There were also a chapel, a kitchen, a sick room, classrooms and visiting rooms.
The most outstanding feature of the new building, however, was the towering four-storey semi-octagonal rotunda (later familiarly called “the dome”) with its skylight and clerestory windows designed to allow in the natural light so dear to the hearts of the early prison reformers. A glass floor, subsequently covered over, allowed the light to filter down to the basement. Two balconies with cast-iron railings supported by iron brackets in the form of serpents and griffins, which had been wrought locally at the St. Lawrence Foundry, ringed the rotunda. Anecdotally, the serpents were designed to represent the lawbreakers confined in the jail and the griffins the officers tasked with confining them. The acoustics were excellent in that soaring space. Grimly, however, inmates were sometimes flogged there on purpose-built scaffolds, and the sound of their anguished cries would be carried to the cells of their fellows in the outer wings.
After all that stopping and starting and building and rebuilding, how successful from the architectural point of view was the end product?
That depends on whom you ask.
Over the years, historians, architects, and the general public have weighed in with very varied opinions on the merits of the fourth Toronto jail. Think of a bottle of red wine. One expert may describe it as “having subtle notes of raspberry and wild blueberry” and another as “tasting of berries; really oxidized,” or “nail varnish and soap.”
So, too, with the Don Jail.
On the one hand, you have this balanced assessment from Eric Arthur in 1964:
It is an impressive building in the manner made famous by Piranesi the etcher and by George Dance the younger, who designed Newgate prison [in London, demolished in 1902]. Compared with the grimness of Newgate, the City Jail is a friendly building in spite of rustications, vermiculated quoins, and barred windows. Interesting elements in the design are the flanking ventilators rising out of the roof … which might well have come from the hand of the great eighteenth-century English architect Sir John Vanbrugh.
Then the significant flaw: “One might criticize Thomas here for the weakness of the crowning cornice and pediment and for the complete lack of connection between the central mass and the flanking wings.”
George Rust-D’Eye, in his Cabbagetown Remembered (1984), positively raves: “Inside is a setting of spaciousness and grandeur, with a skylighted eighty-foot-high tower.… The Don Jail, with its uplifting interior and well lighted and ventilated cells, reflected the humanitarian principles of rehabilitative justice which the erection of such a magnificent building for this purpose was intended to embody.”
There is one design feature that has evoked fierce controversy over the years: the menacing stone face that frowns down on you as you climb the stairs to the solid iron-studded oak entrance doors. “Be afraid; very afraid,” it seems to be saying.
Rust-D’Eye’s take? “Over the central doorway is a magnificent carved keystone of a man’s face, with flowing beard and hair, welcoming all who enter.”
Others are not so upbeat about this stony visage, also known as Father Time. McArthur and Szamosi described it in 1996 as “scowling downward as if to say, in the argot of the prisoners, ‘You’ve done the crime, now do the Time.’ This is Thomas’s best expression of architecture parlante, denoting the spiritual function of the jail. It is massive and menacing and suitably depressing by reason of its function.”
“The architectural feature was intended to instill fear in those who crossed the threshold,” The Canadian Encyclopedia informs us bluntly. “His face could well be the disgruntled expression of the building itself, for if ever a building was cursed from its inception, it was the Don.”
Over the years, many others have echoed these conflicting points of view. But when the jail first opened in 1864, its teething problems seemingly forgotten, it was reportedly described as “a palace for prisoners.” Folks at that time were clearly of Rust-D’Eye’s opinion.
Then, in December 1868, the Globe published a sensational report stretching over four columns under the banner “Toronto Gaol: Twenty-Four Hours Within Its Walls.” The anonymous reporter was possibly the first, but certainly not the last, to inveigle himself (or sometimes herself ) into the jail to share with readers his impressions of the conditions from an inmate’s point of view. His boldness was tempered with great prudence, as he had no desire to spend a moment longer than twenty-four hours on the premises. He had thus arranged to be detained on remand and to be released on bail the following day.
The official who admitted him had no compunction in relieving him of a plug of tobacco and a few matches, and roared “Take him away!” when challenged. The turnkeys were menacing. He described some of the inmates as the scum of society, men plainly marked by vice and crime. The food was revolting, with supper consisting of oatmeal porridge. “There was no milk, nor sugar nor molasses, nor any of the little concomitants generally considered necessary to make this dish palatable, so I sat a little while looking coldly at my porridge.” A table companion, after first politely asking permission, grabbed his food and hastily gobbled it up. There was the odd bright moment, though: an inmate’s offer of a puff on his pipe, and the general sympathy from his fellows when the issuing of his bail bond seemed to have been ominously delayed.
Nestling amid these “day-in-the-life” details were others that pointed to what may be regarded as fundamental flaws in the makeup of the jail.
As a “casual” prisoner in temporary detention, the reporter was offered neither a cell nor a bed overnight. (“Do you imagine you can have a bed here without being bathed?” asked a turnkey in disbelief.) He spent the night “on a form eight inches in breadth” in the corridor or day room outside a row of cells, with two other inmates as uncomfortable companions.
In a paragraph headed “No Heat — No Water,” our man from the Globe writes: “And now it began to get intensely cold. There was no heat in the cold stony pavement, I had nothing to cover me, and for hours I walked up and down that dreary corridor, with the cold shooting through every joint, my head aching, my tongue parched with thirst, for not a drop of water was to be had.”
Besides the lack of adequate accommodation and heating in the Toronto Jail — then just four years old, remember — there was another serious shortcoming the reporter came across in his brief sojourn there — the general absence of sanitary facilities. This was his knee-jerk reaction immediately after being locked in: “Never shall I forget the sickening sensation that came over me, when I entered that corridor. To say that it was badly ventilated, or that it smelt badly, would not give the most remote notion of the truth, for it seemed to me to contain the quintessence of all the filthy smells that had existed from the creation of the world…. The whole place was a mass of the most disgusting horrible exhalations.”
A partial explanation for the fetid atmosphere started to emerge after supper, when the prisoners were marched down a staircase to a backyard. Each one of them seized a pail. “Thinking that they were about to carry water from a well which was hard by,” the reporter became “eager to show [his] industry,” and grabbed two, to the “high enjoyment” of his “brothers in trouble.” His efforts were greeted with a thunderous “How dare you take two pails” from a guard on duty. And later, as his long, cold, dreary night in the corridor dragged on, the ghastly truth was revealed: the stench became intolerable, and he now knew what the pails were used for.
Finally, after twenty-four exceedingly uncomfortable hours in the Toronto Jail, the reporter received his precious bail bond, and he once again “stood in the pure fresh air of heaven a free man.”
In spite of protestations that he had faithfully recorded what he had seen, heard, and felt during his incarceration, his somewhat florid style suggests that a certain amount of exaggeration may have crept into his narrative.
A view from below Castle Frank in 1870, looking southeast across the Don River toward the Don Jail.
However, certain facts are incontrovertible.
In his final architectural designs, William Thomas had been obliged to embrace the fundamental precepts of the Auburn-style prison. The best an inmate could hope for was to be locked up alone at night in one of the poky little cells. In utter darkness, possibly, as there was no lighting at all in the cells, a situation that would not change throughout the lifetime of the jail. As the arrangement of the cells was back-to-back, light could filter through to them only via the corridors — which were, with the passage of time, fitted with rows of overhead electric bulbs. The plans made no provision for toilets in the cell areas, hence those foul night pails. And what were the chances of inmates being able to spend their nocturnal hours in quiet contemplation, and, perhaps, repentance? What with the free interaction between those locked up in the cells and overflow inmates in the corridors (which, it must be added, were not heated, at least in the early days), this would clearly have been impossible. And, as time went by, inmates would have companions doubling up with them in their cells, possibly even in their beds. By contrast, although those confined in Eastern-style prisons were horribly isolated and desperately lonely for their full term, at least they spent their days and nights in bigger cells with amenities such as individual windows, adequate heating, and toilet facilities.
William Thomas might have argued that, according to the Auburn principles, cells were meant only for sleeping. Prisoners would spend their daylight hours in workshops, classrooms, or planting peas and potatoes on the industrial farm. So why waste space? A poor argument, as things turned out. As time passed and theories of penology changed, inmates at the Don spent more and more time in the cells and corridors, and more and more inmates were crammed into each one.
The much-vaunted and forward-looking white and gold stone-and-brick Palace for Prisoners in Toronto, with its emphasis on the moral and physical health of inmates, was rapidly tarnishing around the edges.