Toronto is built of bricks.

Posted by conference on September 28, 2009 under Blog: New Postings, Tours and Events, Visiting Toronto | Be the First to Comment

We hope when you come to the Ontario Genealogical Society Conference 2010 that you’ll spend a few extra days getting to know our city.

One thing you’ll notice, in contrast to many other North American cities, is the predominance of brick as a building material.

The earliest buildings in Toronto (then known as the Town of York) were built of wood—first rough-hewn logs, then squared timbers, then later frame and clapboard. Only a few of those wooden buildings have survived—most notably Fort York and Scadding Cabin.

As early as the first decades of the 19th century, brick was used for some public buildings and fine residences, and its popularity as a fire-resistant and fashionable building material continued to grow as bricks were manufactured locally.

Glacial action had resulted in plentiful deposits of shale and clay in many areas of Toronto. Small family-run brickyards clustered where these materials were close to the surface, in Yorkville, along Davenport Road, which ran below an escarpment (the shoreline of the prehistoric glacial Lake Iroquois), in the Don River valley and other ravines.

Some Toronto brickyards made several colours of brick. The most common were red and buff. The buff bricks (called “white” by Victorian builders) were used for St. James Cathedral (built 1832), and some grand “Cabbagetown” homes that you’ll see on our “Toronto’s Irish Heritage” bus tour. Many of these buff brick houses use red bricks as accents, sometimes in quite complex patterns.

Red brick was lower in cost, and much more common for residential use, sometimes with the pricier buff as an accent colour. However, there are some wonderful examples of superb red brick construction, including the 1892 Gooderham Building that combined high-quality pressed brick with terracotta ornamentation.

While Toronto’s brickyards have long since closed or left the city, the site of the Don Valley Brickworks which closed in 1984, has been turned into a treasured 16-hectare public park which preserves and repurposes a number of the industrial buildings.