One evening this month, about 40 people gathered in the temporary St. Lawrence North Market tent to participate in a very contemporary exercise in local democracy that focused on the earliest chapter of Upper Canada’s local democracy.Their task: cajole the historical narratives out of the so-called First Parliament site, an unprepossessing piece of downtown real estate that has had a front-row seat for every chapter of the city’s meandering story. In a briskly paced presentation, Dima Cook, a heritage conservation planner with EVOQ Architecture, ran through the wildly disparate succession of increasingly urbanized uses of a block bounded by Berkeley, Front and Parliament Sts. Indigenous settlements gave way to Upper Canada’s first parliament buildings, then a Dickensian mid-19th century jail, a sprawling brick gasworks and finally the mishmash of gas stations, car washes and parking lots that now occupy the block. The participants, who have turned up for a City of Toronto-led consultation to develop a “Heritage Interpretation Plan,” mark down on cue cards the episodes and themes they feel merit emphasis. Some feel the plan should stress pre-Contact settlement or the area’s social and industrial heritage. Others focus on how the site witnessed the earliest expression of representative democracy in Upper Canada. “This is the foundation stone,” asserts one man. “It starts right here.”That the city has even embarked on this process can be traced back to a long-shot archeological dig conducted in a tiny corner of the property in the early 2000s at the suggestion of Rollo Myers, an energetic local history enthusiast and founder of Citizens for the Old Town. The test trenches revealed all sorts of long-buried artifacts and fragments from the first parliament, which was built between 1795 and 1797, looted and burned by American naval forces in late April 1813, and reconstructed a few years later. “The rea ...
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