By the late 1880s, Toronto was bursting at the seams.
When the city was incorporated in 1834, it had consisted of roughly 5,400 acres, stretching from Lake Ontario in the south to a line four hundred yards to the north of Lot (Queen) Street (the approximate position of what is now Dundas Street), and from Bathurst Street in the west to Parliament Street in the east. (This excludes what were called the “liberties”: areas reserved for new wards that were originally located outside the boundaries but absorbed into the city in 1859.) Within fifty years, the number of residents had climbed from 9,252 to more than 105,000, and by 1891 to more than 181,000.
The city limits had also expanded — galloping northward along Yonge Street, westward to High Park, and, vaulting across the Don River to the east, the city now also included land along Kingston Road.
Along with the exploding population, the number of criminals requiring accommodation in the city jail was seeing a sharp uptick, and there was simply nowhere to put them. “The truth is,” mused the Globe in the late 1880s, “that the Toronto gaol was built for a city of 50,000 inhabitants and has not been enlarged with the growth of the city. It is too small, it has no regular hospital, only a couple of small rooms, which are altogether inadequate, and the heating system is faulty.” Overcrowding extended to every single department. A row of narrow cells had been built in one of the corridors, with four men jam-packed like sardines into each one. The chapel, condemned as “repulsive and hideous” and entirely unsuited for “the purposes of divine worship,” had perhaps just enough room for one hundred churchgoers. This made it much too tight for the existing inmate population. The laundry room was hopelessly small; the drying room was gone, and clothes were being hung up to dry in the chapel and the corridors.
Looking north toward the Don Jail from Munro Street in 1880.
Faced with this dire situation, what was the city to do?
The only way out was to spend some money. Priority Number One was to provide a new dwelling for the governor, “which,” affirmed the Globe, “is something no person could possibly object to.” During the first two decades of the jail’s life, beginning with George L. Allen, the governor had lived in the administration block of the jail itself. Now the current governor, John Green, would have his own residence in a separate building just to the southeast of his workplace. With much-needed space freed up, Priority Number Two could be addressed. This would consist of improvements to the jail, including more cells, an infirmary, and an upgraded laundry room.
It was only fair that Governor Green should have accommodation more suited to his position in the city’s correctional hierarchy. His second- in-command had been treated far more generously. Back in 1865, a gatehouse had been built on jail property, punctuating the southeast side of the wooden security fence. This was initially a simple one-storey building where the gatekeeper was posted, allowing him to control access to the jail grounds. It is not clear whether this was a permanent position or filled in rotation by the turnkeys or head guards. However, within a few years, a deputy governor was hired, and the gatehouse became his home. By 1879, a second floor, with a steeply sloped roof and dormer windows, had been added, making it a modest but quite comfortable residence.
In August 1880, His Worship Mayor James Beaty formally opened Riverdale Park to the general public. This triangular-shaped parkland area was located south of Winchester Street on the west side of the Don Valley. As usual, the Globe was there to offer its readers a sense of the pageantry of the grand opening, which was attended by groups of ladies and gentlemen, “the former largely predominating, adding immensely to the scenic effect with their light and delicately coloured costumes.” From time to time, the Garrison Artillery band entertained the crowd with a “spirited marching air.” The land had originally been earmarked as a burial ground, but some five years previously it had been purchased by the city. With the help of a $1,500 grant and the labour of jail inmates (courtesy of Governor Green), it had been transformed into what one alderman called “a great resort for the people residing in the east end of the city.” To loud cheers, the mayor offered some prophetic words: residents should “look forward twenty-five years, and come to a conclusion as to what the city would be like then. Every inch of available space would probably be built on, and therefore it behooved them now to make an effort to establish at various points open spaces which would serve as breathing places for the pent-up inhabitants of the Toronto of the future.”
This was not just idle talk. Mayor Beaty and his council were men of action: four years later, in 1884, the park was expanded eastward across the Don River to the edge of the jail. At that time, Riverdale on the east side of the Don had just been annexed and the jail absorbed into the city.
Also, ambitious plans were underway to straighten, widen, and deepen the meandering Don River. The Don Improvement Project was a massive restructuring of the lower stretches of the river that began in the fall of 1886. The city’s stated aims were to reduce pollution levels, make the waterway navigable for larger vessels, facilitate rail traffic into the city, and fill in and replace the polluted marshlands with new industrial property. Painful memories of a devastating flood in 1878 that washed away buildings and bridges gave extra impetus to the project. One of the powerful parties involved in the scheme was the Canadian Pacific Railway, which had set its sights on acquiring an additional railway entrance to the city.
“With ‘the Don Improvement,’” lamented Toronto conservationist Charles Sauriol in his 1955 book Remembering the Don, “the last vestiges of a sylvan lower Don Valley disappeared forever.”
And, as it turned out, the project was anything but an improvement. Shortage of funds, political incompetence, and unforeseen conditions when construction work began led to its failure. Also disastrous was the creation of the east-west Keating Channel along the northern edge of the Ashbridges Bay marshes in the late 1890s, with the river eventually being forced into an unnatural 90-degree turn. This increased both the risk of flooding and the buildup of wastes in the river.
However, as part of the Don project in the 1880s, new bridges were built across the lower reaches of the Don River and old ones improved; in short order, residential areas started mushrooming on the eastern side of the valley.
In 1888 (sixteen years into his tenure as governor), John Green was offered a brand new, free-standing house in this very desirable expanded part of the city. Who could possibly refuse?
Detail of an 1891 map of the City of Toronto and suburbs, showing the spread of the city on the eastern side of the Don River. By 1884, Riverdale had been annexed and the House of Refuge [incorrectly named the House of Industry on the map] and the jail absorbed into the city.
In April of that year, architect Charles Mancel Willmot submitted plans for the new Governor’s House, as well as renovations to the jail, with an estimated price tag of $28,700. This latter proposal did not meet with universal approval: Alderman G.F. Frankland, for one, strongly objected to the lavish arrangements being contemplated for the “worthless fellows” confined in the Don. The city council decided to cut out some of the improvements, among them the construction of a new laundry room, and to reduce the bill by about $8,000. As it turned out, Governor Green revealed in 1891 that the renovations ended up costing closer to $40,000 than $20,000.
According to a brief biography in Eric Arthur’s Toronto, No Mean City, Charles Mancel Willmot was born in Yorkville village in 1855. He was apprenticed to the noted Toronto architect William George Storm. In a case of two degrees of separation, Storm had served his apprenticeship with William Thomas, the architect of the jail. Willmott spent a few years in Winnipeg in the 1880s, but other than that, he practised mainly in the Yorkville area of Toronto.
And so the Governor’s House rose up on the northwest corner of what maps in the late 1800s now referred to as Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street.
It was clear that Willmot had absolutely no desire to model his new creation on the forbidding style of its stone-and-brick neighbour, although perhaps the buff brick he chose for the residence was meant to echo the blond colours of the jail. The house, set in extensive gardens, was designed in the typically Victorian Queen Anne Revival residential style. The two-storey building stood on a raised limestone foundation and featured an L-shaped asymmetrical façade, a gable roof, a two-storey bay window, decoratively patterned brickwork, and simple woodwork.
Once the house was ready and the governor had moved in, his former quarters were reportedly fitted up with eighty-three new cells with prefabricated iron walls and bars to accommodate 113 inmates. The Willmot-designed separate Laundry Building, which was initially rejected by the city council, was tacked on to the west side of the jail in 1889. (In later years, this was used as an annex to the jail.)
Another item on Willmot’s list in 1888 was an evaluation of the heating and cooling systems in the jail. According to a Bridgepoint document on the Old Don Jail, the building stayed relatively cool in warm weather, probably due more to its thick walls than to the merits of its ventilation system. Heating, however, was a different and far more serious matter. William Thomas’s original plans had called for the use of steam boilers to force heated air into a complicated network of ducts and flues until it was finally expelled to the outer air through two ventilation towers on the roof. Willmot reported that the structure in the jail did not reflect Thomas’s drawings — it is entirely possible that this scheme had never been implemented because of the hostility faced by Thomas in 1860 from Alderman James Vance and his allies in the city council. Following an engineer’s report in 1889, the heating and ventilation systems were significantly revamped, with the installation of pipes, wooden ducts and radiators, which would have improved conditions, especially in winter.
“It is something, but not enough,” was the consensus.
On December 17, 1900, beneath the sombre headline “The Harvest of Death: The Reaper Was Busy on Sunday,” the Globe announced that Mr. John Green had died at the governor’s residence at four o’clock the previous morning. His end was not unexpected, as he had been ill for some time. “He filled his responsible position with great ability, tact and efficiency,” the news item concluded.
Within a week, a successor had stepped into Green’s shoes: a well-known Markham, Ontario, man named Garrett Robert Vanzant (sometimes spelled Van Zant). The new governor was described in the press as being a very popular personage in York County. Now retired, he had been a hardware merchant in Stouffville, then in Markham. As a prominent Liberal, he had taken an active interest in political and municipal affairs; he was president of the Markham Township Fair, a “member of the Masonic fraternity,” and a justice of the peace. In short, he was considered to be a most excellent appointee.
One of the issues that came bubbling fiercely to the surface during his governorship was a gross injustice that has plagued prison systems since time immemorial: the imprisonment of innocent people. A letter from Reverend Robert Hall in 1903 expounded on one aspect of this dilemma: “The jail is still crowded with … aged and friendless men and women, who have not been convicted of any crime, and this condition has existed to my knowledge for the last eighteen years.”
Vanzant’s response drilled to the nub of the problem: “There is no doubt in the world that these people would not be taken to the asylum under any consideration. They are not insane in the proper sense of the word, but are simply old and feebleminded.… Many persons are brought here who should go to other institutions.… As soon as inmates become any trouble in any of these places they send them here.” As per usual, nothing at all was done to remedy this dreadful situation.
Then there was the long-festering issue of the presence of mentally or emotionally challenged individuals in the general prison population. In 1902 a city committee paid a visit to the jail to look into a charge that “owing to the confinement of lunatics in the jail the place was a sinkhole of immorality.” According to the committee,
Seven [male] lunatics and two nurses [both men], who were also prisoners, were found in one small room, where they had been confined all winter. One of them had consumption. The women had rather better and more roomy quarters, but there were among them one or two epileptics, subject to frequent fits, and the attendant there was a prisoner also. Bertha Moor, who is awaiting trial for the murder of her child, is confined there, where she could be watched, because it was feared she would attempt suicide. Surprise was expressed at keeping her with lunatics.
The shocked committee members all agreed that it was totally reprehensible to keep lunatics in the jail. But as to who should be obliged to take responsibility for this atrocious situation — the provincial government? the jail? — they could not agree.
And so, as on many occasions before and since, nothing at all was done.
By 1906, however, it was becoming increasingly clear that, unlike his predecessor John Green — that man of “great ability, tact and efficiency” — Garrett Vanzant was not destined to die peacefully in his bed at the governor’s residence after a long and respectable career in service. In December, eleven charges were laid against him by W.C. Brown, the jail’s engineer. Brown claimed that Vanzant was “not a fit and proper person to be Governor of Toronto Jail” for numerous reasons, among them that he was unwilling or incapable of maintaining discipline at the jail; that he had been guilty of unbecoming and improper conduct (for example, one witness told the subsequent inquiry that he had seen the governor holding a young lady visitor in his arms); and that he had been guilty of favouritism. And the most egregious accusation: “That the open and flagrant misconduct of the said Van Zant was such as to cause the prisoners to comment thereon and ridicule the said Van Zant to the guards and other employees.”
Vanzant vehemently denied all the charges. The commissioner at the head of the inquiry, who read every single one of the 977 typewritten pages of evidence, was not convinced of his innocence, and neither was the Ontario government. In June 1907, Vanzant was dismissed.
The Reverend Doctor Andrew B. Chambers, pastor of Parliament Street Methodist Church, stepped in to replace the disgraced governor. Born in Ireland, Chambers, noted the Globe, had “occupied many pulpits in many places in Canada.” An upstanding churchman, a Mason, and “a sturdy adherent of the Conservative party” — everyone was totally convinced that, unlike Vanzant, Chambers would prove to be a most excellent appointee.