Banned alcohol in 1904, didn't reverse it until 1998
The Junction
A railway and stockyard neighbourhood that banned alcohol sales in 1904 to curb rowdy factory workers — and stayed officially dry for 94 years, surviving four separate failed attempts to overturn it.
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Toronto has a lot of neighbourhoods with distinctive quirks. Few can match the Junction's: a single municipal decision that stuck for nearly a century, well past the point almost anyone still remembered why it was made.
Railways, stockyards and rowdy taverns
The Junction grew up around the crossing point of four major railway lines in the late 1800s, its economy built on mills, factories and, eventually, the Ontario Stockyards — for decades Canada's largest livestock market and the centre of the province's meatpacking industry, part of the same industrial history behind Toronto's Hogtown nickname. Like most railway and factory towns, it also had a lot of taverns, and a lot of fighting and public drunkenness that came with them.
Banned in 1904, and it stuck
In 1904, fed up with the disorder, city aldermen banned the sale of alcohol in the Junction outright. What might have been a temporary crackdown became a genuinely permanent local law — referendums to overturn it failed in 1966, 1972, 1984 and 1988, each one a fresh attempt that came up short.
Finally reversed in 1998
It wasn't until a plebiscite tied to the November 10, 1997 municipal election that Junction residents finally voted to overturn the ban, taking effect in 1998 — 94 years after it started. The Ontario Stockyards themselves had already closed in 1993, relocating well north of the city, by which point the neighbourhood was already well into the transition from industrial district to the design-shop-and-restaurant strip it's known as today.
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Sources
- BlogTO — A Brief History of Booze in the Junction
- BlogTO — 10 Quirky Things to Know About the Junction
- Wikipedia — The Junction