Bruce Bell, History Columnist –
Every time you walk through the main doors of the Metro Grocery store on Front Street (kitty-corner to St. Lawrence Market), you’re walking into Toronto’s history.
The store occupies the ground floor of the 1981 Market Square, but the locale dates back to 1827, when the site was home to the famous Steamboat Hotel. Ulick Howard built the façade of his new hotel to resemble a then state-of-the-art steamboat that had appeared on Lake Ontario in 1817.
The two-story Steamboat Hotel had an unobstructed view of the harbour and guests would gather along its second-floor balcony to watch magnificent sunsets. It was decades before the warehouses that today stand across the street were built.
Although no bigger than a modern average home, the Steamboat was for years the Royal York Hotel of its day, the centre of social activity when the city was known as Muddy York.
On June 19, 1828, a circus called ‘The Grand Caravan of Living Animals’ arrived in town with a poster announcing ‘The great African Lion, South American Tiger and Jaguar, the Camel, the Leopard, the Baboons and the Monkeys, will be exhibited at Mr. Howard’s Steamboat Hotel’.
The Steamboat was also where powerful government men of the day converged after elections to kick up their heels.
On July 12, 1828, after a victorious return to power, a party was given to honour John Beverley Robinson, Attorney General of Upper Canada. He was paraded through the streets of York, held high on a chair amidst music and cheering.
The men wound up at the Steamboat Hotel, where Howard put on a show of music and entertainment. They subsequently drank themselves under the table.
Drinking alcohol was a major pastime in Toronto’s early days. With few amusements and a population of about 6,000 in 1830, the city had 60 taverns and as many brothels.
A brothel could be a few rooms above an inn or the back room of someone’s house. If an establishment had a sign above its door reading “Oysters and hot coffee always ready,” it meant a prostitute was on call. In the early days of York the red-light district was just west of the Steamboat Hotel on the long-vanished Henrietta’s Lane.
Sometimes selling her body was the only way a woman on her own could make enough money to feed her family. If she was discreet the authorities usually left her alone, but the men who visited her were publicly shamed.
In the May 26, 1831, edition of the Black newspaper The Canadian Freeman, Francis Collins (to whom a plaque is dedicated in St. James Park) wrote, “Houses of infamy are scattered thro’ every corner of the town. Young lawyers and others of respectable standing, crowd to it at noonday and some of them visited it in open day and on the Sabbath!”
The Front Street Metro’s frozen food section was once the location of the Colborne Theatre. In 1829, Charles French, a printing apprentice with William Lyon Mackenzie, in a drunken state, confronted a man named Nolan after a performance. French stabbed Nolan, who was well known as the town’s bully, and was convicted of murder.
Popular opinion supported, French but judicial authorities (including Robinson ) deemed that French be hanged for his crime, which he was. All theatrical performances in York were banned until further notice.
Three years later, a group of actors descended upon York in the area around what is now Market Square. Newspaperman William Lyon Mackenzie, later leader of the 1837 Rebellion, wrote:
“Our town has been infested with a company of strolling players. Allowing such a party of strolling vagrants to keep a giddy party of foolish people up on Saturday night [until] perhaps two or three o’clock upon Sabbath morning we wonder why they have not been arrested under the Vagrant Act!”
As the town’s harbour developed, infilling of the shoreline began in the late 1820s with construction of the first warehouse on the south side of Front Street. The Steamboat Hotel found itself landlocked away from the new shoreline, so after a few years its steamboat sign was taken down. By the 1830s, it had become the City Hotel under a new owner.
Who says Canadian history is boring? On Front Street, a modern supermarket was a previous site of ghosts of our political past, the roar of a lion and an actor’s romantic soliloquy.
