In mid-2004, a glossy brochure, put together by the architectural firm Urban Strategies Inc. for Bridgepoint Health (the new name for Riverdale Hospital), landed on the desks of the movers and shakers at City Hall. According to the title, it was A Master Plan for the Bridgepoint Health — Don Jail Site. The plan for the redevelopment of the quadrant on the northwest corner of Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street East had been several years in the making, with discussions and input from some two hundred people who lived or worked in the neighbourhood, including hospital staff and patients, members of local business associations, and other stakeholder groups, as well as city and provincial politicians.
The driving force behind this master plan was Marian T. Walsh, who had become the president and CEO of Riverdale Hospital in the late 1990s. Back then, the fate of the venerable hospital was in the balance. The Conservative government of Ontario under Premier Mike Harris, citing the need for cutbacks, wanted to shut Riverdale down, but the community rallied fiercely to save it. Walsh was against taking the hospital off site — “people here needed care,” she explains — although she did come to the conclusion that the existing facilities were functionally obsolete. She was convinced that the residents of Riverdale and far beyond required a modern, state-of-the-art health care centre to handle their complex needs.
The acquisition of the Old Don Jail happened “by accident,” says Walsh. Closed to the public, it was quietly mouldering away into total disrepair.
This is not to say that the Old Don had stood completely empty since very early 1978, when its last residents were escorted out of the building and the iron-studded oak doors securely locked. Some six weeks later, the building again echoed with the sounds of cell doors swinging open and clanging shut. These February 1978 inmates, however, were very different from their predecessors. They went home at night, possibly stopping for a nightcap on the way, and their sentence was a brief three days — the time it took to shoot the first five minutes of a Canadian feature film about a couple of small-time hoods striving to make it to the big time. Originally called Fast Company, later Bad Company, the movie was directed by Canadian author, filmmaker, and investigative historian Peter Vronsky.
Vronsky says that as a public relations stunt the filmmakers issued invitations to the press (they looked like “court summons or arrest warrants”) for a catered lunch on site.
“Of course, we served wine with the lunch,” he adds.
Reaction was glacially slow. Two months later, says Vronsky, the Toronto Sun reported that Ontario Corrections Minister Frank Drea had hit the roof when he heard that drinks had been served in the jail. To a reformed alcoholic and the man who wanted to tear down what he called the “dirty, grimy, stinking” building, this was clearly anathema.
Then: nothing.
It was “a mini-scandal for a day,” says Vronsky.
Tom Cruise flipped bottles in the Old Don Jail as a bartender in the 1988 blockbuster Cocktail; the bar scenes were filmed in the rotunda. If you don’t blink, you can see gargoyles and walkways behind him in some of the shots. Along with other movies and TV shows, scenes from the 1998 teen drama Cruel Intentions were also shot there.
Frank Drea’s reaction to these latest outrages would no longer have been newsworthy. By 1985, he was yesterday’s man in Ontario politics. He served as chairman of the Ontario Racing Commission until bumped from the post in 1994 by the provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) government under Bob Rae.
It would be interesting to know how he might have reacted to a report in the Toronto Star in January 1993 that, by the following Friday, “the correctional services staff and chaplains who have been using part of the old building for office space will have been moved into other quarters, and people will be prevented from entering the Don. Only the newer Toronto Jail, a nondescript, brick structure attached to the Don, will be used. Officials with the government services ministry, which owns the Don, say the building is unsafe.”
Fast forward to the very early 2000s, when Marian Walsh found intriguing the idea of taking on this decaying relic of a crueller time and “changing a place of incarceration into a place of healing.”
The jail became a key element in the transformation and restructuring of the site, which had been regarded historically as that unsavoury place across the Don River where dangerous lawbreakers were warehoused and dangerous patients were treated for contagious diseases.
According to the Bridgepoint master plan, the three on-site care facilities then collectively known as Bridgepoint Health — the 1963 Modernist semi-circular or half-round hospital and the much older Hannah and Hastings buildings — no longer met “the needs of today’s complex care and rehabilitation patients or standards for modern health care delivery.”
According to Frank Lewinberg, the principal architect at Urban Strategies who worked closely with Walsh on the project, even the half-round building didn’t work as a hospital. “You couldn’t move wheelchairs around,” he says.
And that was a serious problem. As noted in the master plan, the patient population had changed over the years, with many more medically complicated and functionally impaired individuals in the system than there had been in the past. Seventy percent of patients now used wheelchairs, and there was no possibility of installing ceiling-mounted lifting systems to ease them from bed to chair. Air ducts were antiquated and low ceiling heights dictated that medical gasses could be supplied only via portable canisters. There were no dedicated washrooms or showers in the wards. Each floor had approximately sixteen toilets and just one shower to serve around one hundred beds.
At the time the master plan was presented, ownership of the site was extremely complicated, with part of the land belonging to Bridgepoint (the two jails, the Gatekeeper’s and Governor’s houses, a building on Broadview to the east of the half-round, and a couple of parking lots); part belonging to the City of Toronto and leased to Bridgepoint (the three hospital buildings and a couple more parking lots); and a section owned and operated by the city (the St. Matthew’s Lawn Bowling Club, the Riverdale Library, and the Don Jail Roadway, which curved in front of the old jail to connect Gerrard Street and Broadview Avenue).
The plan put two options on the table. The first was the “Comprehensive Community Master Plan,” which would see Bridgepoint taking on the redevelopment of the entire site. A new health care centre would be built to the far west and the Old Don Jail would be incorporated, adapted, and reused. Four additional blocks of land would be reserved for future development. The provisos were that the New Don Jail would be “relocated” from the site (read, “torn down”), that Bridgepoint would secure “fee simple” (absolute ownership) of the lands it currently leased from the city, that the city-owned bowling club would be exchanged for a new public park in front of the Don Jail, and the Don Jail Roadway would be realigned.
The second option was a scaled-down “Hospital Redevelopment Plan.” Bridgepoint would build its new health care facility on the lands it currently leased from the city, with the addition of land occupied by the Don Jail annex/former laundry and the building on Broadview to the east of the half-round.
Nothing is ever simple.
If the Grand Bridgepoint Master Plan went ahead, a casualty of the extensive restructuring project would be the existing Bridgepoint Health facilities. And that distinctive half-round building had its devotees. To quote just one: “It is handsome, it has art, it has style. Regardless of how fine the replacement is, if this building goes I’ll be sad. And a bit mad.” And Christopher Hume of the Toronto Star wrote in January 2006: “Completed in 1963, the half-round is one of those rare structures whose every gesture and detail speaks of the age that produced it. Exuberant and wildly optimistic, this is an architectural relic from a time, the last in our history, when the future loomed brighter than the past.… Certainly, the semi-circular monument designed by Chapman & Hurst should be saved. It is unlike anything else in Toronto, a genuine landmark and part of our history.”
Fierce public debate had citizens coming out on both sides of the issue, but ultimately the comprehensive master plan was approved by the city on January 31, 2006. Heritage groups promptly appealed the decision to the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), which, in its turn, approved the redevelopment of the site in 2007.
Paula Fletcher, councillor for Ward 30 (Toronto-Danforth) acknowledged how strongly people felt about the fate of the building and noted that the OMB had been faced with a difficult decision. As she put it, the sad truth was that “the Don Jail and the half round both can’t remain in the Bridgepoint master plan.”
Frank Lewinberg agrees: “We couldn’t save it and build the new hospital in the same location. There was no question in the minds of the decision-makers that we should go ahead.”
By mid-2014, anyone wandering past the once-crowded northwest corner of Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street East for the first time since the early 2000s would have rubbed their eyes in disbelief.
The St. Matthew’s Lawn Bowling Club was gone, its historic clubhouse shunted in 2009 a few hundred metres northeast to a new spot on Broadview at the edge of Riverdale Park — predictably, to complaints from locals who claimed to have been totally unaware of the proposed changes or who protested the loss of the level land it would take up and the trees that were cut down to accommodate it.
Gone, too, was the historic Don Jail Roadway, where crowds had stormed police barricades and shouted “Murderers!” and “Killers!” just after the midnight double hanging of Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas on December 11, 1962. In early 2013, a much more sedate group attended the unveiling of the new Jack Layton Way, its name chosen in honour of the former Federal NDP leader who died from cancer in 2011.
The Comprehensive Community Master Plan for the Bridgepoint Health — Don Jail site was approved by the city in 2006. Bridgepoint took on the redevelopment of the site, which included a new health facility and the reuse of the Old Don Jail as its administrative centre. The areas labelled B, C, D, and E were zoned for possible future use.
The heritage Governor’s House, now rehabilitated and extended, had been leased to the Philip Aziz Centre for adaptive use as a nonprofit children’s hospice called Emily’s House, with the Gatekeeper’s House as its administrative centre.
Reassuringly, the Riverdale Library remained in its customary spot, still serving the neighbourhood as it had done since 1910.
The site was dominated by the new hospital, now called Bridgepoint Active Healthcare, which had imposed its full ten-storey, 464-bed footprint on a prime location overlooking the Don Valley. Christopher Hume, who in 2006 had passionately opposed the demolition of the old half-round building, now conceded with admiration that the new Bridgepoint was “all about light, space, and patient comfort.” It was also about public access, with Riverdale Park to the north and east and gardens and terraces extending to meet it from Gerrard Street.
As for the grand scheme of things: “The site is still waiting for its future,” says Lewinberg. Bridgepoint received four properties that were zoned for buildings nine residential storeys high. They could potentially build whatever they like, even housing units, as long as they stick within the height restriction of nine storeys. Ideally, though, the sites “should all be health related.”
However, he adds with a smile, “The next [development] may not occur in our lifetime.”
A competition in 2014 to rename the green space between Gerrard Street and Jack Layton Way elicited enthusiastic suggestions such as “Gallows Park,” “Hangman’s Haunt,” “Penance Park,” and even the “Lucas-Turpin Memorial Park.” The name eventually chosen was Hubbard Park, to honour William Peyton Hubbard, who had become Toronto’s first Black alderman in 1894.
The much-reviled Toronto Jail — the “new” Don Jail — that clients of Toronto’s Out of the Cold program, with heavy irony, sometimes called “The Don Hilton” was cleared of its residents in December 2013 and formally decommissioned in January 2014.
John Minarik, a correctional officer who retired in 1991, served in both buildings. He says that the new wing was a terrible place, and terribly built. “There was no ventilation,” he says. “You would sweat in your tie and hat.” From the 1960s onward there were big steel plates “holding in the walls” on the east side of the building. In his opinion, “if they ever ripped down the old jail, the new one would have fallen over.”
As it turned out, it was the new one that faced the wrecking crews. And there was not a single squawk from the public when that featureless brick building came down — no angry protesters waving placards on the streets, no poster campaigns going viral, no pleading letters to the newspapers, no online petitions.
The Old Don Jail, a jail no longer, is still there, renamed the Bridgepoint Administration Building and containing office space for administrators, educators, and clinical specialists.
Father Time still frowns stonily down as you mount the stairs to the heavy oak front doors, although he is quite a few shades lighter these days, following a years-long heritage scrape and polish. The restoration was finally completed in 2013, accompanied by challenges, surprises — and macabre revelations from beyond the grave.