On the last Saturday in May 2019, a long line of people wearing coats and clutching umbrellas snaked around the side of a building just east of the Don River. Darkening skies and the menace of rain would not deter them from doggedly waiting their turn to go inside.
The occasion was the annual Doors Open Toronto, which, since the year 2000, has invited the public to explore city structures of architectural, historical, cultural, and social significance. Since 2014, one of the most eagerly visited buildings to throw its “doors open” has been the Bridgepoint Administration Building, better known as the Old Don Jail. The irony, of course, is that after all the years people spent trying desperately to get out of that infamous place, people are now eager to get in.
Once inside, visitors craned their necks in the soaring central rotunda to marvel at the skylight and clerestory windows, before walking down an old staircase and filing past a row of impossibly narrow cells in the basement.
The undeniable highlight of the tour, however, was the execution chamber on the second floor. Folks clustered in the corridor as a volunteer delivered a brief background blurb, then they stepped past the heavy steel door to peer around the grim two-level space where twenty-six men were hanged between 1908 and 1962.
What would Frank McCullough or the Boyd Gang have thought of this strange turn of events? They spent hours sawing away at the iron bars of their cell window to make their successful escapes from the forbidding jail. Or the acrobatic Polka Dotter Kenneth Green and his human pyramid, all of whom failed in their attempt to jump over the perimeter wall to freedom?
No need to speculate what Ontario Correctional Services Minister Frank Drea’s opinion would have been. The man who presided over what he hoped was the final closing of the Don Jail doors in 1978, intending to invite in wrecking crews ASAP to smash the whole toxic place to smithereens, made his views blazingly (and presciently) clear at the time: preservation of the building “would mean that the curious would line up” to tour it, which, to him, was totally “repugnant.”
To be fair, the old pile is in very different shape nowadays from the one that Drea walloped with his silvery sledgehammer on the last day of December 1977. With the participation of a slew of architectural firms and historical restoration experts, it has undergone a full makeover.
The process began in the early 2000s, when Michael McClelland, principal at ERA Architects, was invited to participate in the development of a conservation strategy for the historic building in keeping with the general changes Bridgepoint was planning for the site. The big challenge was how to turn a highly stigmatized space into the administrative centre of a new hospital devoted to complex care and rehabilitation. A series of heritage reports and applications submitted by ERA to the City of Toronto and to the city’s Heritage Preservation Services stressed that the aim was “to encourage the evolution and growth of the site, while protecting the unique cultural and historical value of the site.” This, then, would entail a reconfiguration of the building to fit its new purpose as well as an inside-and-out heritage restoration.
In 2008, ERA organized a review of the building’s exterior to evaluate the installation and condition of the security bars, as well as the general state of the window frames, the glazing, the surrounding masonry, the roof, and the outer walls above grade. In spite of the Don’s age and scanty maintenance over the years, the investigators found that the exterior was in surprisingly good condition. Their main concern was the deterioration caused to the window surrounds by the iron security bars.
In fact, what to do with the bars, those very visible reminders of the jail’s dark past, caused much controversy. Bridgepoint would have liked to get rid of them all, citing “concerns regarding the impact of retained jail bars on patient and staff well being,” but heritage considerations won through, and an agreement was reached to keep the bars on basement windows, and at least some of them on the other floors. This proved to be no easy task. As Andrew Pruss, principal architect at ERA, points out, the iron bars “were actually embedded in the stone frames and the windows were built around them.” In most cases, the only way to remove the bars was to cut them out and reinstall them in the designated locations after the window masonry had been repaired. Without replacing the ugly mesh that covered many of the windows, of course. In stark contrast to the hours it took would-be escapers to painstakingly saw their way through the bars, the recommended removal procedure using oxyacetylene cutting torches would make short work of both vertical and horizontal bars — under two minutes apiece.
In 2008, ERA also undertook a “Bridgepoint Health Don Jail Prisoner Cell Survey.” Interestingly, the survey noted that none of the cell doors still had locks — a reminder that thirty years previously, Frank Drea’s staff had done a very good job of cutting them all away. To give a representation of the various types of cells existing in the jail, ERA identified four unique kinds to keep as examples. These consisted of a group of six one-person cells with their adjacent corridor or day room in the west wing of the basement; one solitary confinement cell in the same area; eight partly modified punishment cells in the central block, also in the basement; and, on the fourth floor on the east side of the central block, a couple of the 1888 Willmot-designed iron cells with their doors and stencilled numbering still intact. These iron cells occupy the space previously filled by the governor’s residence. It was decided to retain the cells numbered 4 and 5, but conceal them in an office behind a large swing door.
The four steel-clad death-row cells on the second floor, so reviled by Drea, would emphatically not be retained. However, the small east- facing window with its multiple sets of bars, through which McCullough and the Boyd Gang had escaped, would remain.
Other must-haves in the heritage restoration were a rebuild of the rooftop ventilation towers (the west tower had been removed in the 1940s and the east tower in the 1970s), and the restoration of two chimneys in the central pavilion. The clerestory windows and the skylight in the rotunda would be restored and the glass floor reinstated. The annex on the west side, alias the Laundry Building, would be demolished and replaced by a new bridge link with Bridgepoint Health. Other amenities would include washrooms (an immense improvement over the night pails used by the previous occupants in their skinny cells and the single toilet and cold-water tap eventually installed in the overcrowded corridors), an elevator, and a new, glass, entry vestibule on the north side.
The final piece of the restoration puzzle was the “Bridgepoint Health Heritage Interpretation Plan” of 2008. Both the province and the city had identified the Old Don Jail as being of historical and architectural significance, and among their requirements was the development of a permanent public interpretation display. Additionally, one of the guiding principles established by the city was to present the jail in “a positive light as a progressive penal institution for its time.” What a fine line the developers would have to tread between acknowledging “important heritage features … such as the window bars, death row or gallows” and providing “sensitive interpretation for elements … which may have negative associative values including the gallows or death row.” Visitors may stroll through the building and the grounds today to discover whether the interpretive displays on the architecture and development of the jail, penal reform in Canada, and prisoner history succeed in achieving this delicate balance.
Between 2010 and 2013, multiple challenges and surprises awaited the teams of architects and heritage restoration experts involved in wrestling what Andrew Pruss calls that “large and derelict building” into its present shape.
As part of the redevelopment of the Bridgepoint Health site, the annex on the west side of the jail, which had originally served as the Laundry Building, was demolished in December 2009.
One of their dilemmas was the extent to which the building’s exterior should be stripped of the ingrained grime and soot that had built up over the one-hundred-and-fifty-odd years of its existence. It ended up getting a light cleaning. As Michael McClelland notes, they wanted to keep some of the patina, so that it “looked as if it had age to it.”
Even the surrounding garden area was the subject of some debate: one proposal was to install coffin-shaped features in the former northeast exercise yard or “Murderers’ Graveyard” where the bodies of hanged inmates had originally been interred. Understandably, that suggestion did not fly.
Inside the building, one of the most extensive problems was the configuration of the tiny cells, which, as McClelland explains, were all “structural”; that is, the walls of each cell supported three stone ceiling slabs, and, just “like a house of cards,” another identical cell was stacked on top. The slabs had to be gingerly removed one by one, making for great difficulty in opening up the spaces for their new and more expansive use as administrative offices.
And then there were the surprises.
During the course of the project, for example, workers discovered original finishes, such as remnants of wallpaper, hidden behind walls and ceilings. One of these fragments has been preserved and left in place for public viewing just below ceiling level in what was formerly the governor’s apartment. Closed to the public for obvious reasons is a small room bristling with pipes and cables where two charming paintings, one of a waterfall and the other of a lake, adorn the walls. The landscapes, probably from the hand of a single inmate, are now carefully protected behind glass.
The restorers kept many fascinating features — the corridors or day rooms are there, as well as the railings and balconies in the rotunda, still supported by their coiled cast-iron serpents and griffins. Generally, however, the building is quite different now — a bright, white space with stone and blond wood floors, red accent walls, and glass and iron gates and balustrades. It is peopled during the day by hospital administrators, clinical experts, and their clients, as well as the odd interested member of the public wandering through on a self-guided tour. One staff member who often works late at night remarks that “for the history it has, it has a good feeling. You’d think it would be creepy, but it feels warm.”
Described as a “wooden nickel,” this disc was produced by a former correctional officer to commemorate the closure of the Don Jail in 2013.
But its sound and fury have been muted. And that is supremely ironic. As Pruss observes, “It was crowded for most of its history. That intensity is missing.”
To the great delight of property owners in bustling Riverdale on the east side of the Don River, there is no longer a jail at the corner of Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street East — for the first time in more than a hundred and fifty tumultuous years. The Old Don Jail has been transformed and its toxic neighbour, the New Don Jail, demolished.
It is the end of an era.