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 reason the First Parliament is an archeological site is because it was burned down,” says Dena Doroszenko, a senior archeologist at the Ontario Heritage Trust, who argues the property has national and international significance.

At the time, the block was in private hands. But after interventions by the late Pam McConnell — who was the local councillor — and political veterans like former MP Bill Graham, as well as profile-raising exhibits of some of recovered artifacts, the city and the Ontario Heritage Trust (a provincial agency) acquired the land. Council has since approved the construction of a library branch there, to be accompanied by the kind of heritage interpretation and commemorative displays envisioned for the new North Market.

The wrinkle is that the land is heavily contaminated, and it’s not clear how the city plans to fund the remediation, or whether the other archeological materials buried beneath the asphalt, some dating back to the presence of the jail and the gasworks, can even be salvaged from their tomb of highly toxic soil.

Although it’s difficult to picture today, this piece of land once sat at a point where Taddle Creek flowed into an inlet on the lower Don, just north of the lakeshore. The southern border of the First Parliament site, now a parking lot that backs onto the Esplanade, would have been just metres from the water’s edge.

The entire region had been occupied for 12,000 years by successive Indigenous nations when John Graves Simcoe plotted out the original 10 blocks of York in 1793. Just a few years earlier, British colonialists had taken possession of the surrounding 100,000 hectares in the Toronto Purchase with the Mississaugas of the New Credit, which was later disputed. Indeed, a map Simcoe commissioned a year earlier shows “An Indian Hut” marked where the 10 blocks would be plotted out.

Simcoe and his officials designated an area just east of the town for Upper Canada’s first parliament, a low-slung pair of brick-frame structures — the upper and lower houses — connected by a walkway. The colonialists, who had been using Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) as their seat of government, wanted to relocate for defensive reasons, but rejected London. The parliament opened in 1797.

Besides his role as the colony’s founder, Simcoe was known for introducing the first anti-slavery legislation in the British Empire, in 1793. While still in England, Simcoe backed the mounting abolitionist sentiment. “When he came to Upper Canada,” observes Natasha Henry, president of the Ontario Black History Society, “it was understood that he had these views.” But, she adds, he was also moved to act by recent reports of Chloe Cooley, a Black woman living in Upper Canada violently abducted by a Queenston soldier who wanted to sell her in the U.S.

Despite Simcoe’s advocacy, several members of the executive council that would meet in that first parliament were slave owners. The law they eventually passed there, in 1798, was a watered-down version that grandfathered existing “servitude,” but prevented enslaved people from being brought into the colony.

Apart from such legal debates, the parliament buildings served many roles in the tiny outpost, doubling as a church meeting hall and a library when the executive council wasn’t sitting.

About 15 years after they opened, in late April 1813, an armada of naval ships dispatched by the young American republic invaded York during the War of 1812. Everyone who has visited Fort York knows about the giant explosion in the weapon storehouse. But the U.S. forces also looted the town site and set the first parliament ablaze.

“Toronto was then a dirty straggling village, containing about sixty houses,” recalled William Dunlop, a British military surgeon who had been forced to retreat with his unit from Queenston to York. “The church — the only one — was converted into a general hospital, and I formed my lodge in the wing of the Parliament buildings, which had escaped, when the Americans had burnt the rest of that fabric.”

When the fighting ended, the colonial administrators ordered the construction of a new and larger parliament, which opened in 1819, but stood for only five years before it was accidentally burned down, in December 1824.

With a third colonial parliament constructed on a site that is now the CBC headquarters on Front St. W., the first parliament sat fallow for years until local officials decided to build a new jail there, in 1840.

From 1834 onwards, the newly formed City of Toronto had responsibility for jails, but the conditions in an earlier one, at King and Yonge, were crowded and filthy. (As an April 1834 report from the Standing Committee on Police and Prisons noted, “the air of the Prison is always highly impure, and exceedingly injurious to the health of the inmates.”)

But according to Douglas Olver, a former senior correctional services official who wrote a detailed history of Ontario’s prisons, the colony needed a new jail to accommodate the city’s rapidly growing population.

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The new facility was designed by John Howard, based on prevailing ideas about penitentiary design, with limestone cell blocks radiating off a central five-storey rotunda and surrounded by a daunting stone wall.

With two three-storey wings, the jail had 60 tiny cells, as well as several larger rooms for debtors, whose families often lived with them while they served their sentences. Both men and women were incarcerated there.

The Home District Gaol, as it was known, employed a warden, who lived in the rotunda, and two “turnkeys.” They had to operate it “very cheaply,” says Olver, adding that the inmates would have been directly exposed to the damp from the nearby Ashbridge’s marsh, a dumping ground. “You can imagine the stench.”

Only one person is recorded to have been executed there, a 32-year-old man named James Browne, convicted of murder in 1862. Two years later, the city shuttered the facility and relocated all the inmates to a large new institution located on the eastern banks the Don River, a state-of-the-art facility known as the Don Jail.

By then, this abandoned piece of real estate, with its crumbling institutional relics, had come to be surrounded on all sides by a thriving metropolis. A railroad ran along the lakeshore, serving commercial wharves, the rapidly expanding Gooderham Worts industrial complex nearby and a gasworks complex across Parliament St.

Since the 1840s, in fact, the city had seen a growing appetite for gas extracted from coal, for use in streetlights and as interior lighting. The technology was introduced by a Montreal entrepreneur. But when he couldn’t keep up with orders, several local merchants raised capital and set up Consumers Gas in 1848.

Spectacular accidents were not uncommon. The 220-room Rossin Hotel, which stood at King and York, burned to the ground after its on-site gas-producing equipment caught fire. Still, consumers and businesses increasingly signed on as customers, receiving the fuel through a network of buried gas lines radiating out from the company’s gasworks. Such were the profits that the company’s president, James Austin, built himself a grand mansion, Spadina House.

In 1887, Consumers, in full expansion mode, acquired the long-derelict jail site, using the land for a coal shed, rail spur and eventually a looming “retort” building, where the gasification process occurred. The block formed part of Consumers’ sprawling “Station A” campus, which included subsequently repurposed brick buildings such as the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre, at 227 Front St. E. at Berkeley St., and 51 Division, on Parliament and Front. (Consumers eventually set up two more stations, on Eastern Ave. and on Bathurst at Front.)

Although the company demolished the old jail, a courtyard remained on that portion of the block, nestled between two large gasworks buildings. That open space was exactly where the first parliament had stood. In fact, it seemed that city elders and company officials were aware of that geographical heritage. As City of Toronto historian and archeologist Richard Gerrard points out, a Canadian Club heritage program launched in 1909 led to the installation of a plaque in that industrialized courtyard. It noted the previous existence of the parliament buildings and then the jail. “There had to have been some memory” of that earlier use of the land, he says.

Consumers Gas exerted a huge presence in the city. When cheap electricity elbowed aside gas as the dominant lighting technology, Consumers shifted to cooking appliances and industrial uses. A regulated local utility, the firm fought regularly with the city over its accounting policies. And as a large industrial employer, it also saw its fair share of strikes and workplace accidents, including a gas venting disaster in 1923 that killed 10 workers and sent 11 more to hospital.

But with the end of coal gas production in the 1950s, Consumers began selling its real estate holdings, including the First Parliament block, by the mid-1960s. Most of the buildings were razed, the contaminated land capped by asphalt and “car-oriented” uses, as the city’s consultation documents delicately describe the low-slung car wash and gas station that sprang up in the place of those palatial industrial buildings.

Those familiar with the First Parliament archeology all agree that the existence of those artifacts — including charred floorboards that bear mute witness to the 1813 sacking of the site by American soldiers — was a total fluke. “I remember saying it wasn’t impossible, but it’s improbable,” says archeologist Ron Williamson, whose firm conducted the original dig — “a surgical strike” — back in 2000 with funding cobbled together from the city, the province and a wealthy doctor who owned the land at the time. His crew hit pay dirt soon after peeling away the asphalt. “I can honestly say we were shocked out of our skulls.”

Since then, the city and the province have toughened up their archeology policies. Exhibits of the artifacts whetted the public appetite, and a 2001 book about the excavation process, by Frank Dieterman and Williamson, captured the fine details.

Lastly, more recent research by historians like Gerrard has turned up other salient details, such as the location of the 1909 plaque, once considered lost, as well as the existence of items looted from the first parliament: a large flag and a ceremonial carved lion’s head. Both are in the collection of the National Museum of the U.S. Navy, in Washington, D.C. The pillaged speaker’s mace was returned, but Gerrard says: “I don’t think repatriation is in the cards.”

While the parliamentary discovery was originally the headlining detail about this deep dive into Toronto’s past, the scope of the city’s proposed heritage interpretation plan has expanded to include other important elements, such as the Indigenous, industrial and social history of that location.

Gerrard, speaking personally, points out that with many archeological elements still in the ground, it may be better to adopt the physician’s adage of doing no harm — i.e., leaving the artifacts in situ and monitored until such time as the city and the province can find the funds to properly bring all that history to light.

But Doroszenko, of the Ontario Heritage Trust, is optimistic because this innocuous corner of Toronto is in public ownership rather than in the hands of a condo developer.

“Now it’s come full circle.”

For further details on participating in the consultation process, including a planned community walk on March 24, go to firstparliament.ca

Correction March 19, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the first parliament building was a wood-frame structure. As well, the Rossin Hotel was located at York St. and King St., not where the Royal York Hotel now stands.