Built with bricks made by prison inmates
Queen's Park
Ontario's provincial legislature has run out of the same pink-sandstone Romanesque building since 1893 — a building whose 10.5 million bricks were made inside a Toronto prison.
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"Queen's Park" functions in Ontario the way "Ottawa" does federally — a place name that's become shorthand for the provincial government itself, centred on a single unmistakable pink building.
Built 1886–1893
The Ontario Legislative Building was constructed between 1886 and 1892 and formally opened for its first legislative session on April 4, 1893, under Premier Sir Oliver Mowat. It was designed by British-American architect Richard A. Waite in the Richardsonian Romanesque style — heavy stonework, rounded arches, domed towers, named for its pioneering American architect Henry Hobson Richardson.
The "Pink Palace"
The building's distinctive colour comes from pink sandstone quarried in the Credit River valley. Its 10.5 million bricks were made by inmates of the Central Prison, a Toronto penitentiary — an uncomfortable historical detail behind an otherwise handsome building, and the direct source of its enduring nickname, "the Pink Palace."
Still in use, over 130 years later
Unlike several buildings covered elsewhere in this guide, Queen's Park has never been repurposed, demolished or extensively rebuilt — it remains the working seat of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, making it one of the longest continuously used government buildings in the province's history.
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Sources
- Legislative Assembly of Ontario — Historical Overview
- BlogTO — A Brief History of Queen's Park in Toronto
- Wikipedia — Ontario Legislative Building