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The Ward, Toronto

Black Canadian culture in TorontoBlack Canadian settlementsChinatowns in CanadaChinese-Canadian culture in TorontoEthnic enclaves in Ontario
European-Canadian culture in TorontoFormer neighbourhoods in CanadaHistoric Jewish communities in CanadaHistory of TorontoHistory of immigration to CanadaImmigration to OntarioJews and Judaism in TorontoNeighbourhoods in TorontoUse Canadian English from January 2023
Elizabeth St, at Dundas, looking south
Elizabeth St, at Dundas, looking south

The Ward (formally St. John's Ward) was a neighbourhood in central Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many new immigrants first settled in the neighbourhood; it was at the time widely considered a slum.It was bounded by College, Queen, and Yonge Streets and University Avenue, and was centred on the intersection of Terauley (now Bay) and Albert Streets.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article The Ward, Toronto (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

The Ward, Toronto
Bay Street, Old Toronto

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Wikipedia: The Ward, TorontoContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 43.656 ° E -79.384 °
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Address

Bay Street 600
M5G 1M5 Old Toronto
Ontario, Canada
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Elizabeth St, at Dundas, looking south
Elizabeth St, at Dundas, looking south
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Nearby Places

Bay Street
Bay Street

Bay Street is a major thoroughfare in Downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the centre of Toronto's Financial District and is often used by metonymy to refer to Canada's financial services industry since succeeding Montreal's St. James Street in that role in the 1970s. Bay Street begins at Queens Quay (Toronto Harbour) in the south and ends at Davenport Road in the north. The original section of Bay Street ran only as far north as Queen Street West and just south of Front Street where the Grand Trunk rail lines entered into Union Station. Sections north of Queen Street were renamed Bay Street as several other streets were consolidated and several gaps filled in to create a new thoroughfare in the 1920s. The largest of these streets, Terauley Street, ran from Queen Street West to College Street. At these two points, there is a curve in Bay Street. North of College past Grenville Street to Breadalbane Street was St. Vincent Street, which was later bypassed with new alignment to the west leading to a stub now called St. Vincent Lane from Grosvenor Street to Grenville Street. "Bay Street" is frequently used as a metonym to refer to Toronto's Financial District and the Canadian financial sector as a whole, similar to Wall Street in the United States. "Bay Street banker", as in the phrase "cold as a Bay Street banker's heart", was a term of opprobrium especially among Prairie farmers who feared that Toronto-based financial interests were hurting them. Within the legal profession, the term Bay Street is also used colloquially to refer to the large, full-service business law firms of Toronto.

Atrium on Bay
Atrium on Bay

Atrium (formally known as "Atrium on Bay") is a large 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m2) retail and office complex in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Atrium is located adjacent to Yonge-Dundas Square, and was built upon the former site of the former Ford Hotel Toronto, on the north side of Dundas Street West, extending from Yonge Street to Bay Street. The mixed-use building was constructed in 1981 with parking on the second and third underground levels and retail space street and concourse levels topped by an eight-storey office block that rises to 14 floors on the east end of the site and 13 on the west. As part of downtown Toronto's PATH network, Atrium's Concourse Level is directly connected underground to the Dundas subway station, the Toronto Eaton Centre south, across on Dundas Street. A now-closed underground tunnel connects the Atrium to the former Toronto Coach Terminal located west, across Bay Street. In 2011, H&R Real Estate Investment Trust purchased the property from Hines Interests Limited Partnership who acquired it in 2007 from a joint venture of Brookfield Properties and The Ellman Companies. In January 2014, H&R received a zoning variance from the Toronto City Council which would allow it to add five floors to each of the office towers, expand the ground level to enclose areas now filled by a covered arcade, planters and seating areas and create additional retail space and to redesign a media tower at the southwest corner of the structure.The Atrium houses the first Canadian location of Muji, as well as Long Tall Sally, Canada Post, Red Lobster and Rexall among other shops. The building features a variety of sit-down restaurants and a food court on the Concourse Level. Major office tenants include the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and various arms of the Government of Ontario, including the Land Registry Office, and the Lottery Prize Claiming Centre for the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, located on ground level. Atrium was filmed and used as a set for scenes in a shopping mall in the Canadian drama Flashpoint on the CTV Television Network. The interior was also used in the 1983 PBS TV movie Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.

Toronto House of Industry
Toronto House of Industry

In 1834, the United Kingdom passed a new Poor Law which created the system of Victorian workhouses (or "Houses of Industry") that Charles Dickens described in Oliver Twist. Sir Francis Bond Head, the new lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada in 1836, had been a Poor Law administrator before his appointment. Fearing that Head wanted to introduce these workhouses in Toronto, a small group of reformers and dissenting ministers led by publisher James Lesslie and Dr. William W. Baldwin founded the Toronto House of Industry on alternate, humane principles. The Toronto House of Industry was started by the reformers in the ‘unused’ courthouse on Richmond Street in January 1837 where they had previously met as the "Canadian Alliance Society" of which Lesslie had been president. The Toronto House of Refuge and Industry appears to have been founded on the model of the Owenite Socialist "Home Colonies". A constant struggle between the ruling elite, the "Family Compact", and the Reformers to gain control of the institution prevented this plan from ever fully being implemented.In 1848, a building for the House of Industry was erected at the corner of Elm Street and Elizabeth Street, in the middle of the Toronto district known as The Ward, which housed a highly dense slum populated by successive waves of immigrants. The House of Industry provided permanent and temporary lodging as well as food and fuel to the needy in the community, who often were required to do chores in return for help. It also assisted abandoned or orphaned children, often placing them as indentured servants in homes and farms in and around Toronto.By 1947, the clients of Ontario's houses of industry were predominantly the elderly poor and the Toronto House of Industry building was converted into a home for the elderly and renamed Laughlen Lodge after Arthur and Frances Laughlen. When new senior citizens' housing was constructed 1975-83, in association with the Rotary Club of Toronto, the north section of the old House of Industry was preserved as part of the Rotary-Laughlen Centre.