Toronto just turned into a virtual history exhibition
Including flashbacks to a fatal duel, a legendary musician’s soccer skills and a notorious women’s prison
The Museum of Toronto has launched a new virtual exhibition that spans the whole city with the goal of uncovering overlooked parts of the metropolis’s history. Scanning one of the 25 QR codes scattered across town brings up a blurb whisking the reader back to a key event that happened right there, all those years ago.
The exhibition aims to bring a fresh perspective to the city, encouraging residents to engage with its oft-forgotten past. Here are a few of the historical highlights from the campaign.
Bob Marley’s soccer skills
In 1974, Marley was photographed playing soccer in a Toronto parking lot.
That tarmac belonged to the Harriet Tubman Centre, a now-demolished Black cultural hub that ran through the YMCA from November 1972 to September 1975. According to the Museum of Toronto, it offered “tutoring, steel drum lessons, sports, and community gatherings for Toronto’s Black diaspora.”
It’s not known exactly how or why the reggae legend found himself practising his kicks on the centre’s grounds. The Museum speculates that Toronto’s rich reggae scene might have drawn him to explore Little Jamaica and connect with youth at the centre.
In addition to Marley, soul musician Isaac Hayes got a personal performance from steel drum students at the centre. In an interview with the West End Phoenix, the former director of the centre, Ken Jeffers, said Hayes handed him a wad of hundred-dollar bills, telling him to “do what you need to do for these kids.”
Related: A behind-the-scenes look at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s most iconic paintings
A fateful duel
Before it had a police station, a YMCA and a Hot Pot, the area around Yonge and College was a meadow—and the site of Toronto’s last fatal duel.
In 1817, Samuel Jarvis, a rich slaveowner, killed law student John Ridout over an argument about an unpaid bill owed by Jarvis. Ridout missed his shot, but Jarvis hit the mark and was later acquitted for the killing. It’s likely, says the Museum, that he never paid the bill.
Jarvis would later become Chief Superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1837 to 1845, leaving the position after embezzling £4,000 from First Nations groups.
If his name sounds familiar, it’s because Jarvis Street is named after his family and stands where their property line used to be. Samuel’s father, William, wasn’t a good guy either: he fought to preserve slavery in Canada when John Graves Simcoe tried to make it illegal. Because of Jarvis’s opposition, the bill phased out slavery gradually instead of ending it outright. Move over, Dundas—we’ve got another street to rename.
Related: A social advocate on why renaming Dundas Street is worth the $8.6-million price tag
A notorious women’s prison
Before becoming a sports field, 1155 King Street West was the home of Canada’s first women’s prison, the Andrew Mercer Reformatory.
As the name suggests, its aim was to “reform” women who had been deemed “immoral” or “mentally unwell.” It was established in August of 1880, partly in response to overcrowding at Toronto Central Prison and partly because the legal definition of what constituted a crime was expanding, implicating more and more people along the way. According to Heritage Toronto, few of the reformatory’s inmates were imprisoned for violent offences. Instead, most were there for “incorrigibility,” a vague term that could apply to “anything from vagrancy to disorder, drinking, or suspected prostitution.”
The reformatory was rife with abuse—including beatings, torture and medical experimentation—and faced multiple riots from inmates protesting mistreatment. In 1948, roughly 100 inmates rioted over the treatment of a 17-year-old who had been taken to solitary confinement and abused by the prison’s guards.
Police were brought in to quell the riot, and inmates defended themselves by spraying the cops with a fire hose, throwing dishes, and beating them with baseball bats and chairs. A contemporary news report says that, as they were being taken to their cells, the rioting women bit and scratched the police. The prison finally closed in 1969 amid public outcry and a grand jury investigation.
More info about this virtual tour of the city’s colourful history can be found on the Museum of Toronto’s website.
