King of his Casa Loma died penniless
Landmark’s survival means tycoon Sir Henry Pellatt’s name has also endured
His home was also his castle. And even though controversial capitalist Sir Henry Pellatt and his wife, Lady Mary, only managed to live in it for about a decade, Casa Loma remains a lasting architectural, historical and tourism legacy for Torontonians.
It’s been a bumpy road for the 64,700-square-foot Casa Loma, Spanish for “house on the hill.”
Completed in 1914, it’s now a tourist and special events venue, run by Liberty Entertainment Group since 2014. But when the Pellatts left the 98-room residence in 1923 because of debts and worsening finances, the castle’s future was uncertain.
For a brief period in the 1920s, the Gothic revival castle — designed by noted Toronto architect E.J. Lennox, who was also a billiards-playing buddy of Pellatt’s — was turned into a hotel and then a nightclub.
Then, unable to sell it, it sat empty for years, during which time it was vandalized. Some suggested it be torn down. By 1933, the city had seized Casa Loma for the approximately $30,000 Pellatt owed in back taxes.
In 1937, it was leased to the Kiwanis Club of West Toronto as a tourist attraction. Tours cost 25 cents.
Shortly after signing the lease, the service club asked Pellatt to speak at a castle event. By this time, Pellatt was living in straitened circumstances. (He would die less than two years later in the Mimico home he shared with his former chauffeur.) Star reporter Gregory Clark covered the event and noted that the once rotund Pellatt had lost 70 pounds and cried during the singing of “God Save the King.”
But when he started talking, there was a hint of the former boastful business tycoon who had brought over Scottish stonemasons and per- sonally supervised the 300 to 400 tradesmen on site during the three years it took to build the castle.
“People ask me if I am sorry I built this place. I most certainly am not,” Pellatt said. “It cost me nothing . . . I developed all this beautiful residential district round about and that development paid for Casa Loma.”
The story went on to say that Pellatt “noted with great unhappiness the vandalism evident in chipped carvings . . . Casa Loma has been entered by the kind of muskrats who would hammer off carven roses in relief on solid walnut.”
If nothing else, the survival of Casa Loma has meant its creator’s name has also endured.
Pellatt was born in1859, educated at Upper Canada College and joined his stockbroker father’s firm at age 17, after taking a tour of Europe. Biographers such as John Denison ( Casa Loma and the Man Who Built It, Boston Mills Press,1982) say this is when he fell in love with castles.
At age 18, he joined the volunteer regiment the Queen’s Own Rifles, starting a lifelong association.
He also had a dream of being a champion runner. At age 20, Pellatt set a North American record in New York, running the mile in 4:42.4, beating the U.S. champion.
He married Toronto society beauty Mary Dodgson in1882; they later had a son. The next year he started the Toronto Electric Light Co., securing a contract to install lights in Toronto’s downtown. Within six years he had secured a 30-year monopoly to supply street lighting to the city.
Pellatt also became involved in the Northwest Land Co. land deals, invested in Canadian Pacific Railway and was part of the Toronto Electric Railway Co., which operated the city’s streetcar system.
According to the Casa Loma website, by 1901 Pellatt was chairman of 21 companies.
He was part of a consortium that built the first hydroelectric dam on Niagara Falls’ Canadian side.
All the while, Pellatt was borrowing heavily from the Home Bank of Canada and others.
In 1903, he bought 25 estate lots on top of Davenport Hill, then purchased more land just north of there for stables and a hunting lodge. Construction on the stables started in 1905, the same year he was knighted by King Edward VII for his devotion to the Queen’s Own Rifles. No expense was spared: mahogany stalls, Spanish tile flooring, horses’ names in gold. Estimated cost: $250,000.
By 1911, his fortune was estimated at about $17 million, and that’s the year the first foundation stone went into the ground for Casa Loma. Plans called for 98 rooms, 30 bathrooms, an electric elevator, a library for 10,000 books, a dining room to seat 100, an indoor swimming pool, three bowling alleys and an indoor shooting range. The last three were never completed.
The front page of the Dec. 6, 1913, Toronto Star Weekly told readers that Pellatt’s bedroom was “60 by 40 feet” and that the castle would have a telephone in “almost every room.” Further, the Pellatts would have up to 50 servants “to keep the house in good trim.”
Although the First World War delayed the finishing of the inside of the castle, in 1913, the Pellatts moved in.
Trouble was brewing. Land Pellatt had bought failed to increase in value. The Ontario government supported public ownership of hydroelectric power and Pellatt and associates were forced to sell out by 1911. A 1913 public inquiry into the insurance industry had found him in a conflict of interest.
By1920, according to a biography by Bill Freeman, Pellatt’s company owed millions to various financial institutions, including $1.7 million to the Home Bank, which went bankrupt in1923, taking with it the savings of more than 60,000 Canadians.
In late 1923, Pellat and his wife moved from Casa Loma to their farm north of Toronto. Lady Pellatt died in April 1924. In June that year, a fiveday auction was held for Casa Loma’s contents, valued at $1.5 million.
People came from all over North America to bid on treasures that sold for mostly rock-bottom prices. Pellatt told the Star that although he regretted parting with “the collection of 45 years of rigorous search, the process was something like getting a tooth pulled. Once over, one proceeded to forget all about it.”
In total, the auction brought in about $250,000.
Pellatt remarried in 1927, but his wife died not long after. On March 8, 1939, Pellatt died virtually penniless.
He was given a lying-in-state at St. James Cathedral and a procession, with a riderless horse and 300 members of the Queen’s Own Rifle, watched by thousands, to a mausoleum in north Toronto.