Named for the Irish county that sent thousands of its workers here
Corktown
Corktown took its name from County Cork, Ireland, whose famine-era immigrants settled around the breweries and distilleries of Toronto's east end in the 19th century.
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Corktown developed in the early-to-mid 19th century along King Street East near the Don River, named for the large number of Irish immigrants, many from County Cork, who settled there to work in the breweries, tanneries and other industries that clustered near the river. The neighbourhood's working-class Irish Catholic character shaped its early institutions, including Little Trinity Church, built as a free church specifically to serve residents who couldn't afford the pew rents charged at Toronto's more established Anglican parishes.
An industrial neighbourhood, redeveloped
Corktown's fortunes followed the industries around it through the 19th and 20th centuries, and much of its original housing stock and factory buildings were gradually cleared or redeveloped as the surrounding West Don Lands and Distillery District areas underwent major redevelopment starting in the 2000s. A small pocket of original 19th-century Corktown streetscape survives around Little Trinity Church and the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse, offering one of the few intact glimpses of the neighbourhood's original working-class Irish character amid the newer condominium development that now surrounds it.
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