Toronto's first immigrant reception neighbourhood, demolished for City Hall
The Ward
For nearly a century, the crowded downtown district known as the Ward served as Toronto's first stop for waves of Irish, Jewish, Italian, Chinese and Black newcomers, before the city demolished most of it for civic buildings and hospitals.
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The Ward, formally St. John's Ward, occupied the area roughly bounded by College, Yonge, Queen and University in downtown Toronto, and served for nearly a century, from the mid-1800s onward, as the city's primary first-landing neighbourhood for successive waves of newcomers. Irish famine migrants, Black refugees who had escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad, and later Jewish, Italian and Chinese immigrants all settled there in overlapping succession, each community using the Ward as an affordable, dense entry point into the city before moving on to other neighbourhoods as their circumstances improved.
Cleared in the name of civic progress
City officials and reformers of the era routinely described the Ward's crowded, poorly serviced housing as a slum requiring clearance, and the neighbourhood was steadily demolished across the early-to-mid 20th century to make way for civic and institutional development, including Old City Hall, the new City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square, and the string of hospitals now known as University Avenue's Hospital Row. Almost nothing of the original Ward survives physically today, but historians increasingly treat it as one of the most consequential neighbourhoods in Toronto's immigration history, the common point of origin for several communities that later built distinct neighbourhoods, including Kensington Market's Jewish community and Chinatown, elsewhere in the city.
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