The Ward, Toronto
in Toronto, CanadaCategory: Attraction
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598 Bay St, Toronto, ON M5G 1M5, Canada Print route »
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The Ward (formally St. John's Ward) was a neighbourhood in central Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.It was bound by College Street, Queen Street, Yonge Street, and University Avenue and was centred on the intersection of Terauley (now Bay Street) and Albert Street. For several decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was a highly dense mixed-used neighbourhood where successive waves of new immigrants would initially settle before establishing themselves. Characterized by authorities in the nineteenth century as a slum, it was the home of refugees from the European Revolutions of 1848, the Irish Potato Famine, the Underground Railroad, and then refugees from Russia and Eastern Europe. It was the centre of the city's Jewish community from the late nineteenth century until the 1920s when the Jewish community moved west to Spadina Avenue and Kensington Market and was also, until the late 1950s, the home of the city's original Chinatown, of many of the city's original Black residents centred on the British Methodist Episcopal Church, at 94 Chestnut Street, and of the city's Italian community until it moved west along College Street to Little Italy. The city's Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and numerous other non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants first established themselves in The Ward.
Today, the area is considered a part of what the City of Toronto now calls the Discovery District, the area having been consumed by the central business district. The old neighbourhood has wholly disappeared. The area was officially known as St. John's Ward, one of the municipal wards that the city was divided into, but it quickly became known simply as "The Ward".
