{"id":43421,"date":"2013-05-06T09:00:23","date_gmt":"2013-05-06T13:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=43421"},"modified":"2013-05-06T00:11:29","modified_gmt":"2013-05-06T04:11:29","slug":"lorinc-whatever-became-of-torontos-first-priority-neighbourhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2013\/05\/06\/lorinc-whatever-became-of-torontos-first-priority-neighbourhood\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Whatever became of Toronto\u2019s first priority neighbourhood?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Almost a century before the United Way\u2019s Poverty by Postal Code report<\/a> (2004) begat the City\u2019s \u201cpriority neighbourhood<\/a>\u201d strategy (2006), Toronto officials found themselves confronted with an almost identical set of challenges: concentrated poverty, inadequate housing, a dearth of social services, all in a dense urban neighbourhood populated by a large number of recent immigrants.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ward,\u201d an early 20th century \u201cslum\u201d bounded by Yonge, University, Queen and College, could be described as Toronto\u2019s original priority neighbourhood. The area was a classic \u201carrival city,\u201d<\/a> to use the phrase coined by the Globe and Mail<\/em>\u2019s Doug Saunders \u2014 a zone of transition for the first sustained wave of non-Anglo-Celtic migration to Toronto. Moreover, the significance of the city\u2019s response to the poverty of this neighbourhood cannot be overstated.<\/p>\n

Despite that, the Ward has been almost totally erased from the surface of the city. Only a handful of original buildings remain, and there\u2019s not a single historic marker to acknowledge a poor but vital neighbourhood that taught Torontonians crucial lessons about tolerance, public health, and the uses of public space.<\/p>\n

Between 1881 and 1921, Toronto\u2019s population exploded, leaping from 86,000 to over 500,000. Until the 1890s, the Ward was primarily an anglo-saxon working class community, with some Irish immigrants. By the turn of the century, however, thousands of newcomers had settled in the Ward; most were Chinese, Italian or Eastern European Jews fleeing Czarist pogroms, although there were Scandinavians, Africans and Greeks. Over-crowding became a major problem. By 1911, according to this York University\u00a0 essay by Michael Chrobok<\/a> [PDF], two-thirds of the dwellings in The Ward had four to nine residents, and a fifth had over ten.<\/p>\n

\"s0372_ss0033_it0162\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The conditions, clearly visible from E.J. Lennox\u2019s \u201cnew\u201d City Hall, galvanized officials like works commissioner R.C. Harris and Dr. Charles Hastings, the medical officer of health, who ordered a detailed survey of the conditions in 1911. The so-called slum problem, well known in New York\u2019s Lower East Side and Chicago\u2019s Back of the Yards, was seen as a kind of social contagion, and Hastings warned Torontonians not to be complacent. At the same time, he made it clear that the Ward\u2019s residents had not brought impoverishment upon themselves; the problems had to do with sanitation, education, and public health, not a lack of morality.<\/p>\n

Over the next decade, conditions in The Ward influenced a wave of regulatory and social reforms that would accelerate Toronto\u2019s modernization and its attitudes towards immigrants:<\/p>\n