The Notorious Ward

St. John’s Ward was a festering pool of poverty & disease located in the heart of Toronto in the 19th & 20th centuries. Known simply as The Ward, the area was defined by its border streets: College, Yonge, University & Queen. It housed the city’s poorest: people who had travelled from afar looking for a brighter future, who then did their best to set up housekeeping in Toronto’s worst slum.

It’s hard to reconcile that depiction with Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris’ paintings of the Ward: sun-kissed cottages with picket fences. But Harris’s vision of the area included the colour and warmth that these folks brought to their homes. Many of his Ward paintings do show the ramshackle nature of the buildings but the scene is always colourful and lively.

Another artist was at work in the Ward at the same time as Harris - for thirty-seven years, Arthur Goss was Toronto’s Chief Photographer. His official assignment, in part, was to document the unhealthy living conditions of Toronto’s immigrant families. Goss left behind some of the most haunting images of life in St. John's Ward, while recording it for Toronto’s Department of Health.

The site where these slums existed is the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Taddle Creek, now buried, ran through the land, no doubt a gathering spot for Indigenous peoples.

Early inhabitants of the Ward included Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine and slaves fleeing the States via the Underground Railroad.  

A bustling Jewish community cropped up until it moved west to Kensington Market. Then came an influx of Italian immigrants who created Little Italy before moving west to College St.

The Ward housed TO’s first Chinatown, until it moved to Spadina Avenue and surrounding streets.

The Black community centered around the British Methodist Episcopal Church, which was at 94 Chestnut Street. With families constantly arriving, the community eventually outgrew the little wood frame church and so a bigger one was built out of bricks not far from the original.

Other buildings of note amidst the slums: Osgoode Hall and its law school, which still stands at University and Queen; and Old City Hall, seen in the background in the photo below (also still standing). From the 1920s on, the dilapidated dwellings of the Ward were slowly demolished.

Where the row house stands in the photo above there is now a skating rink, and that whole area is called Nathan Phillips Square, which includes New City Hall, built in the mid-sixties.

Mary Pickford was born in The Ward in 1892 at 211 University Ave. She started life as Gladys Louise Smith and went on to become a star of the silent screen and “America’s Sweetheart”. At the height of her fame she posed in front of her old Ward digs.

There's a bust of Mary near where she once lived, which is now the site of the Hospital for Sick Kids. Mary's smiling face sits out front of the hospital. Here she is wearing my hat -

Not far from the Pickford statuary is part of the old House of Industry. Built in 1848, this more humane version of a workhouse was created to serve impoverished residents in the Ward. Its now owned by the YWCA and, with new additions to the original building, serves as residences for women.

One of the last largely untouched pieces of the Ward exists down an alleyway just south of the former Toronto Coach Terminal, near Bay and Dundas. There are a few surviving buildings along Dundas St. but they have been renovated, so this little slice feels like a cast back in time, tucked away as it is from the 21st century urban hustle.

The area that used to be the Ward is now called “Discovery District” in honour of its pioneering doctors. Where once disease spread like wildfire researchers are now discovering stop gaps and cures for numerous afflictions. 

And down that little alleyway is the last reminder of a place that existed for one hundred and thirty years in all its colourful humanity, as depicted by Harris -

And in all its dismal inhumanity, as recorded by Goss.