The Ward

The Ward
Type	Neighbourhood enclave
Location	Toronto, Ontario

The Ward is a Toronto neighbourhood, home to many of the immigrants and refugees arriving in Toronto-the-Good, first introduced in Season 2 of Murdoch Mysteries.

The Ward is where Nomi Johnston lives upon moving to Toronto, (ep.1314).

History

The Ward, officially “St. John’s Ward”, is the storied and eventually infamous immigrant enclave that existed from the 1840s to the 1950s in an area bounded by Yonge, University, Queen and College. It was a densely populated neighbourhood in what is today's downtown Toronto.

The Ward was home to refugees from the Irish Potato Famine; Americans who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad; migrant Italian labourers, and finally thousands of Jews escaping persecution in Eastern Europe in the 1890s. By the 1910s and 1920s, The Ward had become home to Toronto’s growing Chinese community, and eventually came to be known as the city’s first Chinatown.

Situated in the heart of a predominantly white, anglo-Protestant and politically conservative city, The Ward provoked both explicit and thinly veiled racist responses from outright assaults on Chinese merchants to strictly enforced rules about conducting business on Sundays.

As a pejorative, “The Ward” became code for slum-like conditions and alien influences deemed by some to be incompatible with Toronto-the-Good. By the early 1910s, reformers began pushing for various measures to either contain or raze The Ward’s slums.

While St. John’s Ward was hardly the only neighbourhood in Toronto that saw large-scale immigrant settlement during the population boom that extended from the 1890s to the 1920s, it became one of the densest and most over-crowded, as well as one of the most visible. Many immigrants worked in the sweatshops in the looming T. Eaton Co factories along Yonge Street or ran their own businesses – from peddler’s carts to cafes, bottling factories, and junk yards.

Trivia

• From 2015-16, a slow-moving drama played out on the site of a sleepy parking lot north-west of Toronto's City Hall where a team of archaeologists meticulously peeled back the asphalt as part of the site preparation for a new courthouse on Armoury Street. Upon completing their excavation between 300,000 and 500,000 artifacts were unearthed and the site turned out to be a small corner of St. John’s Ward. The archaeologists had discovered the remnants of a 19th century Black church, a synagogue founded by Russian Jews, row houses, and factories.

External Links

• Ward Museum
• The Ward