The working class neighbourhood of St. John’s Ward was a salad bowl of distinct customs and cultures.

From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, familiar sights and sounds of the old country — all the old countries — echoed through muddy streets lined with ramshackle, wooden cottages in this tight-knit enclave.

The area — from College St. to Queen St. E. and University Ave. to Yonge St. — commonly known as the Ward — attracted immigrants seeking a better life. There were Irish fleeing the Potato Famine, slaves escaping the United States and displaced Jews from Eastern Europe. Italian immigrant seasonal workers came out of thewilderness to winter in the city, Chinese railway workers moved in north of Union Station along Elizabeth St., creating Toronto’s first Chinatown and black families from Canada’s East Coast were drawn to Toronto’s active black community.

While much of what made up the overcrowded Ward was deemed a slum and torn down, stories from this slice of history are being preserved by Toronto Ward Museum (www.wardmuseum.ca ), a virtual museum of migration created in September 2015. The founding partners include Heritage Toronto, the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, N.S.

The idea is to tell the stories of those who made the area home. To share their struggles and reveal how they shaped today’s Toronto, says Ward Museum founding executive director Gracia Dyer Jalea.

“In a city as diverse as ours, where at least 50 per cent of us were born outside of Canada, it’s important to understand how constant mobility has built the city, brought new synergies and conflicts, and continues to shape future development,” Dyer Jalea says.

The site showcases people who lived in the Ward and includes projects that look at the impact local communities have on newcomers. The signature event is Dishing Up Toronto, which offers multicultural cooking demonstrations in museums, warehouse spaces and private homes. It’s held in collaboration with Culinaria Research Centre at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Register on the website

“People approach food with a certain openness. It becomes an intimate approach when people share food and break bread together ... human stories and human connections are made,” Dyer Jalea says.

Two current pictorial online exhibitions tell the stories of the historical newcomers to the city.

Pathways to Toronto, a joint project between University of Toronto Scarborough students and the Faculty of Information’s Museums Studies graduate studies program at the downtown campus, profiles six Ward settlers. One portrayal is of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn. The husband and wife escaped slavery in the United States to become wealthy Canadian landowners. The Blackburns started Toronto’s first taxi company, initially a horse and carriage, in 1837. Thornton Blackburn would pick up wealthy clients in front of St. James Cathedral at 65 Church St.

The second online exhibit, Picturing the Ward, commissioned by Infrastructure Ontario, tells the stories of Ward residents through the voices of their descendants. The idea of this storytelling method is to allow the public to experience “the voices of immigrants, their understandings of their own lives and experiences in Toronto and others from different backgrounds,” Dyer Jalea says.

Among the diverse group of Ward residents profiled in Picturing the Ward are William C. Wong, the editor-in-chief of the Chinese Shing Wah Daily News; an Italian couple, Edward and Donna Pasquale, who became the country’s leading distributor of Mediterranean-style ingredients and products, and the reverend Thomas Henry Jackson of the British Methodist Episcopal Church, who was a prominent member of Toronto’s black community.

Here are condensed versions of their stories from the Picturing the Ward exhibit.

William C. Wong:

As told by William C. Wong’s son, Nelson Wong

William C. Wong was born in Guangzhou (Canton) South China on Aug. 29, 1907. He moved to Toronto via New York City in 1937. Wong accepted an offer as a newspaper editor of the Shing Wah Daily News in Toronto on Hagerman St. He rented a room in the Ward at 61 Elm St.

As editor-in-chief of the Shing Wah Daily News (from 1937 to 1977), Wong translated local news into Chinese for those in the community who didn’t understand English.

(The newspaper became the largest Chinese newspaper in North America and was in existence from 1922 to 1990.)

Wong worked multiple jobs as headmaster and teacher at the Toronto Chinese Middle School until 1944 and worked part-time as a grocer. He then began a career at the Prudential Assurance Company.

He and his wife Elizabeth bought their first home at 66 St. George St. and raised their family of four there.

Elizabeth became the first female Chinese Canadian real estate agent in Toronto.

William’s eldest son, Nelson, was directly affected by the Chinese Exclusion Act, having been born in 1940. The Exclusion Act denied Canadian Citizenship to Chinese Canadian children born between 1923 and 1947. Nelson, despite being born in Canada, was not automatically granted Canadian citizenship at the time of his birth.

The act was officially repealed in 1947.

Throughout his life, William Wong used his political clout and savviness to build bridges and advocate for the rights of the Chinese-Canadian community.

He became a Canadian citizen in 1957.

He died on Aug. 6, 1998 at the age of 91.

Edward and Donna Pasquale

As told by the Pasquales’ granddaughter, Anna Marie Kalcevich, who runs Pasquale Brothers in Etobicoke.

Edward Pasquale was born in 1897 in Prezza, Italy. After being denied entry into the U.S. in 1912, his family came to Canada looking for a better life in 1912. Brothers Pamphilo and Edward (two of five siblings) lived in the Ward as young teens. They founded Pasquale Brothers on Elm St. in 1917 to cater to the growing Mediterranean community in the city.

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The Pasquales sought to bring Italian culinary traditions to Canadian tables. Along the way they would become the country’s leading distributor of Mediterranean-style ingredients and products.

A year after opening the store, Edward married Donna Bernardo, who was also born in Italy and moved to the Ward in 1904 when she was 2 years old.

During the Second World War, the Pasquales received the last container of olive oil to arrive in Toronto after an embargo was placed on products that came in from Italy. After the shipment ran out, they became one of the first companies to sell sunflower oil produced in Canada.

Edward ran the business with his three children and son-in-law Henry Madott. The business was relocated several times before settling on a King St. E. location.

The business relocated several times before settling on a King St. E. location, where Edward ran the business with his three children and son-in-law Henry Madott.

The manufacturing end was sold to IMASCO in 1969, which permanently changed the name to UNICO to reflect the product line.

Henry Madott died of a heart attack on March 31, 1979; Edward Pasquale died the following year.

(Pasquale Brothers Specialty Foods celebrates 100 years in Toronto this year. The store on King St., under the second-generation of Pasquale-Madott, moved in 2003 to 16 Goodrich Rd. in Etobicoke. The store sells spices and delicacies including 100 different cheeses.)

Rev. Thomas Henry Jackson

As told by Rosemary Sadlier, grandniece of Rev. Thomas Henry Jackson

Rev. Thomas Henry Jackson was one of the last ministers of the British Methodist Episcopal (BME) Church on 94 Chestnut St. He was also a husband and father.

In the 1940s, already an accomplished minister around Ontario, he moved to Toronto’s Chestnut St. to lead the congregation. Despite being an influential leader of the black community, he was never a wealthy man.

The church, which was founded in 1856, was a social, political and spiritual centre for Toronto, serving as a possible terminus of the Underground Railroad in the church’s early years.

To members of the community, it was a safe and inclusive space where people could gather and support each other. Even those who did not consider themselvesreligious came to the church for a sense of community and belonging.

By 1953, fewer members of the black community lived in the Ward, having moved to other parts of the city, so the congregation decided to sell the church to members of the Chinese community who by then made up a significant percentage of the Ward’s population. The church was converted into the Toronto Chinese United Church, the first in Toronto’s history, leaving the BME church to merge with the Afro-Community Church at 460 Shaw St.

That same year, Rev. Jackson died and Rev. A.S. Markham carried on as minister of the church.

The church remained on Shaw St. until April 16, 1998, when it was set on fire, a crime that was never solved. Following the fire, the church moved to its current location on Eglinton Ave. W. and Dufferin St.