July 1958. The City of Toronto was abuzz with excitement and anticipation. A royal visitor — Princess Margaret, sister to Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom and sovereign of Canada — was due to arrive at the end of the month, and the city was planning to roll out the red carpet in her honour. Even though the princess would be in public view for the grand total of one hour and thirty-five minutes, Mayor Nathan Phillips was at pains to stress that there had been “no harsh words” over just how insultingly brief the Toronto leg of her tour was going to be. He assured the press that during that time there would be ample opportunity for every one of the approximately 1,400,000 residents who now made up the population of Metropolitan Toronto to catch a glimpse of her.
The plan was for Princess Margaret and her entourage to spend the night of July 30 on board a special train, probably somewhere in the vicinity of the Rosedale and Don stations. At noon the following day the train was to pull up alongside the “ancient” footbridge, painted a gleaming white for the occasion, below the zoo in Riverdale Park. The party would cross the bridge over the Don River on foot — waving as they went to members of the public and a mass of schoolchildren in the park — be spirited away in a waiting motorcade to meet city and provincial dignitaries, have lunch, drive through the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, wave to more crowds, then leave by train soon after 3:00 p.m. to attend a special theatrical performance at Stratford, Ontario.
The princess’s visit would be short, that was clear, but whether it would be sweet was another matter entirely. The Toronto Daily Star put things in a nutshell in an editorial on July 30, 1958: “What Princess Margaret will make of Toronto we dare not conjecture. A railway siding near an airport and another on the banks of the Don are not exactly enchanting.”
But the real problem was the Don River itself. Beneath the witheringly satirical headline “Our Perfumed Don,” a second editorial lambasted the mayor and other Toronto officials, who “have good cause to be ashamed of the filthy condition of that section of the Don river along which Princess Margaret will be driven to Riverdale park. With belated zeal they have rushed a crew of laborers [sic] armed with rakes and pikes and disinfectants to tidy the ground and sweeten the atmosphere that Her Highness may not learn how Toronto has befouled one of its beauty spots.”
What a black eye for the bustling metropolis of Toronto, which now stretched from Etobicoke in the west to Scarborough in the east and had swallowed up North York to the north. It even boasted its own subway (granted, just a seven-odd kilometre stretch along Yonge Street between Union Station and Eglinton Avenue) and was planning a new expressway to run through the Don River Valley: the now infamous Don Valley Parkway.
The article went much further, however, comparing the situation to “stories told of courtiers waving handkerchiefs dipped in perfume before the nostrils of the king of France as he drove through the tenements of Paris” to protect his delicate sensibilities from the stench emanating from open drains. This was not the Middle Ages, though: “here in Toronto we have turned a river into an open sewer that was complacently accepted until the prospect of a royal visit called attention to its offensiveness.”
As a matter of urgency, demanded the Star, the river should be safeguarded from pollution caused by indiscriminate dumping, with no wrangling over which department should be responsible for keeping things clean. (The newspaper’s call to arms predictably fell on deaf ears, and the banks and waters of the river soon relapsed into their customary “fetid morass.”)
However, with the clock ticking furiously on that afternoon in July 1958, the princess crossed the river and waved and was then speedily shepherded northward from Riverdale Park. Her hosts would hardly have wanted to draw her attention to the smallish rectangular site just to the southeast, at the corner of Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street East, where a building was in the final stages of completion: the new Toronto jail.
Architectural flourishes that graced the Old Don (a façade richly embellished with carved golden stonework, a distinctive keystone face scowling down from above the iron-studded oak front doors, a towering rotunda decorated with fantastical cast-iron griffins and serpents, to name but a few) were not a feature of what was once described as the nondescript structure now directly abutting its eastern flank. Made of red brick with a flat roof, the five-storey Modernist jail was in the shape of a square U, with a high wall blocking off the open end facing Broadview Avenue. The main entrance was on Gerrard Street. The cell blocks were located along the north and south arms of the U. Arranged back-to-back, each consisted of a row of eighteen cells with their doors leading out to a common walkabout area.
One of the most outstanding characteristics of the old building — the natural light that poured into the airy rotunda and cell corridors — was clearly not a priority in the new one, which had narrow slits for windows. As one former guard puts it: “The inmates couldn’t really see out at all.”
No doubt the decision-makers felt that there was no need to worry about the niceties of architectural design when the east wing was stuffed to the gunwales with shiny modern features.
In a November 1958 news story entitled “Addition to Don Jail Filled with Gadgets Open for ‘Business,’” reporter Gwyn Jocko Thomas introduced some of the highlights of this “gleaming new building, a veritable ‘prison paradise.’” Because of the acute lack of “prison-space” in Toronto, both jails would be more or less filled to capacity. However, if prisoners had a choice, being incarcerated in the new building would be a much better option. Male and female inmates (yes, unlike its over-stuffed neighbour, there were women in this one) would enjoy “luxuries unheard of in Ontario prisons,” such as air- conditioning, beds with mattresses — and bed linen! — with plenty of space to move around. Each cell was also fitted with its very own cast aluminum toilet.
The stainless steel kitchen with all its state-of-the-art equipment would do any hotel proud. Dishwashing would be handled by a giant machine, thus giving more “leisure time” to the inmates who were previously obliged to do this job. And, added Governor David Dougall proudly, the “chronic drunks” who used to be tasked with peeling potatoes would be out of a job. A machine would take care of the potatoes, thus saving close to two bags a day. No rotting food smells in this kitchen — there were walk-in coolers to store waste until garbage day rolled round.
There was now a proper hospital and an X-ray laboratory. At the time of opening, a full-time technician examined every inmate admitted — around one thousand per month — often coming across cases of tuberculosis. There were also dedicated rooms and improved facilities for meetings with lawyers and visits from family and friends.
The Big Keys that had opened the doors in the Old Don had no place here. Locks on the main door and cell blocks were to be electrically controlled. Hopefully, the new place would succeed in achieving one of the primary functions it had been designed for — that is, to keep inmates in. But the governor didn’t sound overly confident on that score. “You have to depend on your staff and if they let you down, someone might get away,” he explained.
If there were escapes, however, they would absolutely not be launched from the exercise yards, which had happened from time to time in the old building (think Polka Dot Gang). Prisoners would take their exercise on the flat roofs surrounded by eighteen-foot-high wire fences, with another two feet of barbed wire coiled on top for good measure. An armed guard would be posted behind bulletproof glass in the lookout tower atop the central section of the U with a clear view of both the men and women’s exercise areas. Dangerous criminals would be allowed out in the paved ground-level courtyard between the two arms of the U, which had a thirty-five-foot-high cement wall, again easily monitored by the guard in the tower.
With this new building squeezed between the old jail and Broadview Avenue, the quadrant at the northwest corner of Broadview and Gerrard Street had become exceedingly cluttered by the early 1960s. It featured a veritable hodgepodge of buildings, their variety underscoring the fact that the passage of time had changed the Don Jail from a lonely outpost on the wrong side of the river to an institution anchored in the vibrant community of Riverdale, now very much a part of Metro Toronto.
The south side, facing Gerrard, was bookended by the St. Matthew’s Lawn Bowling Club to the west and the Riverdale Library to the east.
Lawn bowling, also known as bowls, features often white-clad men and women genteelly rolling biased balls along a flat lawn toward a small white ball called a jack or kitty. The sport was huge in Canada around the turn of the twentieth century. The St. Matthew’s Club was founded in 1899 and moved from its original site to Riverdale Park in 1905. The clubhouse, designed by Robert McCallum, city architect of Toronto, was built the following year. Its more outstanding architectural details were a gable roof, horizontal wood siding, and a distinctive wraparound veranda. It was located at the western edge of the site, with twin bowling greens just to its east.
The Riverdale branch of the Toronto Public Library (TPL) on the northwest corner of Broadview and Gerrard dates back to 1910. The Georgian Revival style building was also designed by McCallum. It has the distinction of being one of Toronto’s Carnegie libraries, founded through a grant made to the TPL in 1903 by American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. The library has an elegant curved front and is made of red brick with white Ohio sandstone trim. It sits on a piece of land that was once part of the Don Jail governor’s garden.
The area between the bowling club and the library on Gerrard Street was filled in, from west to east, by the Gatekeeper’s House and the Governor’s House, dating back to 1865 and 1888 respectively. The former initially served as the gatekeeper’s post, but after a few years it was gussied up to accommodate the deputy governor of the jail. In the 1960s, the latter building was still being used as the governor’s residence. Behind them, and separated from them by the curving Don Jail Roadway, sat the looming bulk of the Old Don Jail.
The northwest corner of Gerrard Street East and Broadview Avenue, showing the existing buildings prior to redevelopment of the site around 2007: (1) Hannah Building; (2) Riverdale Hospital; (3) 430 Broadview Avenue; (4) Hastings Building; (5) Laundry Building/Annex; (6) Old Don Jail; (7) New Don Jail; (8) St. Matthew’s Lawn Bowling Clubhouse; (9) Gatekeeper’s House; (10) Governor’s House; and (11) Riverdale Library.
In the early 1960s, another building had risen up just north of the historic jail. This was the new and vastly improved Riverdale Hospital.
Since the very beginning, there had been a hospital or similar establishment on this site. The first such building was the House of Refuge, completed, but not yet furnished, by the spring of 1860. In addition to beds, tables, and chairs, other must-haves included a keeper and matron to head up the staff. The chairman of the Board of Gaol Inspectors, Alderman Vance, the man who had been so intent on making jail architect William Thomas’s life miserable at the time, weighed in with his own unique slant on the job requirements for these individuals:
While having to deal with and govern the lewd, the dissolute and profligate, the indigent, the idle and refractory, the strong, the stubborn and vicious, the maimed, the blind, the Heaven-stricken, the aged, the orphaned and the wretched, the impostor, the innocent and the idiotic; and when considering the while that the grand object of the various treatment is the reformation and protection of each separate individual, it cannot be objected that the Board exaggerates the ability required in one to whom such trust may be assigned.
However, by 1872, the needs of those afflicted and desperate individuals were no longer a priority. From inconspicuous beginnings in the late 1860s, a smallpox epidemic was sweeping across the globe, leaving millions of deaths in its wake. Toronto was not immune to this scourge, and the House of Refuge was converted into a temporary smallpox hospital to cope with local cases. By 1891, the risk of smallpox seemed to have receded, but with a huge influx of immigrants bringing the population of the city to 181,000, other diseases, such as scarlet fever and diphtheria, became prevalent. The smallpox hospital, now appropriately renamed the Isolation Hospital, took care of patients suffering from these contagious diseases.
In September 1894, under the headline “Civic Incendiaries,” the Globe noted that the city council had ordered the woodwork of the smallpox hospital to be torched in preparation to tearing down the walls. And so, in an eerie replay of the fire deliberately set in the Toronto Jail while it was under construction some thirty-four years previously, flames lit the night sky, and the former House of Refuge was reduced to ruins. “The citizens will pay for the bonfire for several years to come, as the forty-year debentures issued for the cost of the [original] hospital have still some ten years to run,” ended the report dryly.
In 1893, as noted in The Riverdale Hospital: 140 Years of Breaking New Ground, the grand and brand new Centre Building of the Isolation Hospital had opened. As demand for beds grew, three other structures were added. The first of these was the South Building in 1904, which was renamed the Hannah Building after being renovated in the early 1940s. In 1911, the North Building was built specifically for patients with scarlet fever; and in 1927, another facility, the Hastings Building, was constructed for the treatment of infectious diseases. The institution was finally taken over by the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto in 1957 and renamed the Riverdale Hospital to reflect its fresh focus on convalescence, rehabilitation, and long-term care.
In 1959 it was announced with great fanfare that a $4,685,000 Riverdale Hospital was being planned for elderly patients. The original thought had been to convert the existing facilities, but it was subsequently decided that a completely new structure would be much more economical. The Modernist semi-circular hospital designed by architects Howard Chapman and Len Hurst ended up costing around $6,000,000. Called the “Taj Mahal of bed-care centres” when it first opened in 1963, its playfully curved lines were meant both to squeeze as much hospital as possible onto the limited space available on the site and to give patients wonderful views over the parkland to the north. Its admirers lauded its additional architectural and decorative features, such as the eighty-foot-long curved mosaic tile mural, the Japanese terrace garden, the steel mushroom-shaped canopies, and the coloured glass exterior walls.
Two of the older buildings — the Centre and the North — had been demolished to make room for the “half-round” hospital, which left four Riverdale-related properties on the site: the half-round; the Hannah and Hastings buildings to its west; and a large parking lot, one of several on the site.
Finally, clinging limpet-like to the eastern flank of the old jail on the Broadview side was the last piece of the jigsaw: the new Toronto Jail, designed as a more humane and spacious alternative to its toxic neighbour.
Building this additional facility was but the latest in a series of attempts over the years to improve conditions and reduce overcrowding in the Don Jail. One early example had been the notorious Toronto Central Prison for men convicted of minor offences, which opened in 1873 just southwest of King Street and Strachan Avenue. In their 1891 report on prisons and reformatories in Ontario, the commissioners noted that “it is by no means unusual to hear that prisoners when about to be sentenced, implore the judge or magistrate to send them to the penitentiary rather than to the Central Prison. They even ask sometimes to be sent for three years to the penitentiary rather than for two years to the Central Prison.” Basing their opinions on the “evidence of a number of gaolers, police officers, and others,” the commissioners put this dislike down to the strict system imposed at the prison.
The facts were far more sinister. The place had developed a reputation for brutality and deprivation. Under the leadership of the first warden, both an alcoholic and a rigid disciplinarian, rumours abounded of prisoners being beaten to death, and even being buried in secrecy. There was no running water for the first five years, and no electricity for a further five. The food was foul, allegedly due to a series of sweet deals between suppliers and corrupt prison officials. Although successive wardens tried to bring in improvements over the years, the place was irreversibly tainted. By 1915, all inmates had been transferred to the newly opened Guelph Reformatory, and the failed prison was shut down.
But that was then. This was now: the second half of the twentieth century. Correctional authorities were confident that this latest up-tothe-minute effort at jail building was not doomed to end in failure, as had all its predecessors.
For the moment, however, there were two Don jails housing men and women on the crowded corner of Gerrard and Broadview, the old and the new, working in tandem. In spite of all the grand juries and the denunciations from the public and the press, the Old Don Jail was still very much in business.