Like many modern cities, Toronto is a city made up of many “centres” dispersed throughout its districts and neighbourhoods. The
idea of the “town square” of early settlements rarely applies in the megacities of the 21
st century. So, my original description (in my thesis booklet) of a “downtown urban area” as an ideal site characteristic is a little fuzzy. To narrow things down, I looked at one of the
original centres of Toronto, the St. Lawrence neighbourhood. Not surprisingly, it
had the typological buildings found in the old “town square” – the city hall (now St. Lawrence Hall), the church (St. James Cathedral), and the marketplace.
Since, historically,
St. James Cathedral had a churchyard (one of the first kinds of burial space in the townscape), it has strengthened the idea of choosing this site as a reference to the original town square of the city.
The burial ground was established in 1797 when Peter Russell, administrator for Upper Canada, set six acres of land aside for the purpose of building a church and providing a burial ground (making it one of the earliest cemetery spaces in Toronto). An 1820 Crown Deed states that the land is "for the sole use and benefit of the parishioners and inhabitants of the said Town of York, forever as a churchyard and burying ground." The cemetery eventually reached its capacity and the church had to excavate the remains and move them to a new cemetery in the fringes of the city (what is now called the St. James Cemetery). However, not all of the remains were excavated, and veteran groundskeepers know “that bone fragments regularly surfaced on the lawn nearby, especially after a good rain” and that the bulk of the bones are thought to be in parking lots behind the church and to its west.
Other than the physical historical link to pre-existing spaces of death, the site is also in close proximity to what most people today consider the heart of downtown – the financial district at the busy corridors of Yonge Street & Bay Street. The physical density of the area, both in its sky-scraping buildings and its population during the day, just goes to show how people see this part of the city. That said, the site is enough distance from the financial district that it has a totally different feel to it: old 3-4 storey brick buildings, oil-lit streetlamps, and a 19th century-style garden by a large park create a welcome feeling of nostalgic calm. This characteristic proved to make the site favourable because it seemed to be a nice medium of the “big busy city” typology and the almost quaint small-town feel of the St. Lawrence neighbourhood (close enough to the bucolic settings for cemeteries we have now). In addition to that, places like St. James Park & St. Lawrence Market are popular among young families, couples, students, tourists, & dog owners. This site characteristic is ideal because, in order for me to reach the largest amount of people with my message of living life fully, I need to be in a place of gathering.
The site’s history, location in the city, its character, & its popularity among the people in Toronto make it ideal for my thesis project.
