A DIFFERENT TIME
Clock-tower ruins on Yonge St. offer a glimpse into Toronto’s LGBTQ history,
Walking up Yonge St. last week, the sight of the old Fire Hall No. 3 clock tower was striking, as if it were a Roman ruin. The tower stood tall, its lower half looking scarred and battered, surrounded by rubble from the demolished buildings that had surrounded it.
The site is being prepared for a residential development that will incorporate the tower into the design. For decades the clock tower peeked above the roofs of the seemingly unremarkable buildings at Yonge and Grosvenor Sts., a Victorian oddity.
Built in 1872, the fire hall was decommissioned in the 1920s when the city sold it off. The site of a variety of commercial enterprises including a car wash and used car business, in 1940 a small single-storey streamline modern addition was added out front to accommodate a tire repair business, beginning a series of alterations that consumed much of the old fire hall.
The St. Charles Tavern opened here in 1948 with a two-storey addition added to the site, devouring all of the original fire hall but the clock tower. By the 1960s, the tavern had become one of the few gay bars openly serving Toronto’s LGBTQ community. Later, it was the site of famous Halloween drag shows that attracted hordes of onlookers including many who hurled abuse in both solid and vocal form. The tavern closed in 1987 and was later renovated into apartments and a retail unit at ground level.
It was fitting, then, that during Pride last weekend the Trans and Dyke marches passed by the exposed tower, as well as the main Sunday pa- rade, as it’s the only thing left connected to the LGBTQ history here. Seeing it now, raw and uncovered, also provides a real-time understanding of how ruins become ruins and unlocks some of their mystery.
When walking around a city like Rome, there seems to be a ruin on every block as the living city bustles around it: an arch here, a foundation or wall there.
They’re bits of bigger structures that have been lost, chipped away over time, and it’s often hard to tell what their original context was.
Standing by the construction fence along Yonge now, the original placement of the fire hall can be appreciated, set a few metres back from the sidewalk rather than meeting it as the storefronts did. Like many ruins, the clock tower base is being supported by additional bracing, and on each side decades of layers can be seen: broken brick, flaking interior paint, a first floor arch and second floor window bricked in.
Most interesting are the round portal windows revealed just under the tower roofline. The black tar line below them suggests they were higher than the later additions, but they weren’t visible from the street. They’re all just clues that suggest there was once more to this structure, though it would be hard to know exactly what without looking at the archival photos of the fire hall or the St. Charles Tavern, for that matter. It’s likely the tower will be moved closer to the sidewalk as the new building is added in around it, so the original position will be lost too.
Toronto is a city of few ruins, and those we do have are strange, often moved from their original location as the city redevelops.
The Guild Inn grounds, high atop the Scarborough Bluffs, have a collection of architectural remnants salvaged from buildings torn down in Toronto as postwar modernism and parking lot mania swept across downtown. Eight columns from the Bank of Toronto building that once stood at King and Bay Sts. are even arranged there to form an open air Greek theatre.
More city ruins have formed the Leslie Street Spit, the now-massive artificial landform that reaches out into the lake. Begun in the 1950s, it continues to expand with each dump truck load of construction debris from this ever-growing city. A wander along its length on foot or bike reveals old TTC waste bins, concrete utility poles, mid-century modern tiles, porcelain toilet shards, thousands of pieces of granite counter top and a near endless collection of bricks, some worn so smooth by Lake Ontario’s waves they look like multicoloured pills.
Ruins, Roman or otherwise, are often buried below the newer city: humans don’t always wipe the slate clean; rather they build on top of it. In Toronto I’ve noticed some once-small streets that have evolved into big arterials are rising up on the buildings along it as the repaving begins to add up.
It’s subtle, but look for it on Dufferin St. north of Dupont St., Kingston Rd. in Scarborough, or wherever the city has grown and changed but also stayed the same.
Colonial Toronto is young by global standards, and perhaps we clean the slate more than other places do, but the layers are slowly building up here too.