Late last fall, a small team of archeologists completed excavating an unremarkable parking lot near Toronto city hall, a painstaking process that had captivated workers in the commercial towers overlooking the site for months.

By the time the archeologists backfilled the site, located on Centre Ave. and designated to become the home of a giant new provincial courthouse, they had found the foundations of Toronto’s most important 19th century black church, as well as hundreds of thousands of artifacts from The Ward, the impoverished but vibrant immigrant neighbourhood that existed there from the 1840s to the 1950s.

Yet the evidence of this poignant past is in grave danger of disappearing because the two public agencies responsible for the site and its archeological treasures — Infrastructure Ontario and the City of Toronto — seem incapable of coming up with a dignified, accessible and sustainable plan to publicly interpret and commemorate these findings.

For the past eight months, officials with both bodies — Infrastructure Ontario is an agency of the province responsible for developing new public structures — have dismissed numerous ideas for acknowledging the discoveries, often for dubious or excessively bureaucratic reasons that reveal a troubling tone-deafness to what’s at stake.

As I reported in the Star and Spacing, the crews unearthed everything from handmade toys to tools, commercial bottles, hat forms, and even an arrowhead — a reminder that the site, prior to European contact, stood on the table lands just south of a sacred indigenous river later known as Taddle Creek.

In one corner, archeologists found what they later described as the most extensive collection of 19th century footwear ever discovered in Canada, some of it the handiwork of an African-American cobbler who settled in Toronto in the mid-1850s. Elsewhere on the site, they dug up the foundations of a synagogue, old factory buildings, numerous outhouses, and several working class cottages.

Without question, however, the most enthralling and historically singular discovery was the British Methodist Episcopal Church (BME), a place of worship established on Chestnut Street in 1848 by five African-Americans who fled slavery and came to Canada via the Underground Railroad. The church evolved into the spiritual, social and political hub of the entrepreneurial black community, whose members lived in the area during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The remnants of the BME has been described by one expert, archeologist and historian Karolyn Smardz Frost, as the most important black history site in Toronto.

That it might not be preserved in some way is troubling. While Toronto has a long history of wiping away evidence of the low-income, newcomer communities, the mindless erasure of black history is a deeply corrosive force whose symptoms persist to this day, and not just in the U.S.

Consider the fact Premier Kathleen Wynne and Mayor John Tory pledged to do better with race relations when they appeared in July at a public forum held to air concerns raised by Black Lives Matter. Despite that gesture, their respective officials seem poised to eliminate the remaining physical evidence of the BME. The irony is both rich and troubling.

It’s worth dwelling on the specific significance of the church. In the 1850s and 1860s, Toronto’s black community swelled as families fled not just slavery and civil war, but the violent bounty hunters dispatched by slave owners to retrieve their property. Those who settled in the cottages on Elizabeth, Chestnut and Centre likely gave thanks for their freedom during services in that church, which also ran a Sunday school and offered a meeting space for local abolitionist groups and the black self-help organizations whose members found lodging and work for refugees.

In early September 1863, Samuel Gridley Howe, a member of a fact-finding team established by President Abraham Lincoln, came to Toronto to learn how a free black society functioned; Howe almost certainly paid a visit to the BME. Decades later, the BME’s conferences, activities and expansion plans were carefully covered by Toronto’s daily newspapers, including the Star.

But perhaps the most intriguing detail about the BME’s history involves the man who owned the land where the church would be built. Lawyer, Family Compact scion and future chief justice John Beverley Robinson owned a narrow strip of land extending north from Queen St. In 1828, he sold six acres to the Law Society of Upper Canada to build Osgoode Hall; 20 years later, as he parceled off the rest of the land north of Osgoode, he sold the lot at 94 Chestnut St. (then Sayer) to those five former slaves, who sought to build a small church there. The price: £20.

Why did Robinson consummate this real estate deal? His motivations aren’t recorded, but it seems relevant that some years earlier, as solicitor general for Upper Canada, Robinson issued a legal opinion blocking the extradition of a black couple, Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, who’d fled slavery in Kentucky and made their way to Toronto. U.S. authorities wanted them returned on trumped up charges. The legal reasoning that allowed them to remain in Canada, Smardz Frost explains in her book about the Blackburns, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land, forms the basis of Canada’s current extradition laws.

There’s an elegant symmetry to the fact that a courthouse will rise on ground once occupied by the BME, an institution whose existence is linked directly to those most human cravings for freedom and justice, as well as the Blackburn’s legal saga.

Yet provincial officials appear to have ruled out options for either in situ preservation of the BME foundation, or some kind of memorial on the grounds of the courthouse. Why? Because of a long-standing policy that requires such buildings to be studiously neutral in design and free of any kind of political or partisan elements.

At an Innis College panel discussion earlier this year about the dig, University of Toronto constitutional expert Peter Russell roundly dismissed those policies, citing several international and domestic examples of courthouse design — including our own Supreme Court and South Africa’s Constitutional Court, which is filled with art depicting the oppression of apartheid — that are most assuredly not neutral.

City of Toronto officials, meanwhile, have shot down suggestions for using parts of the Nathan Phillips Square grounds or even space inside City Hall — built, it should be said, on the razed blocks of Toronto’s first Chinatown — for either commemoration, preservation or for the display of artifacts found at the dig site.

Given that the courthouse will be a privately developed, state-of-the-art complex with a price tag of well over $500 million, it seems increasingly clear that neither government wants to let historical preservation and interpretation get in the way of a massive development scheme, especially if there’s cost involved.

Which is shocking, really, given that both governments share formal and legal responsibility for the stewardship of our collective heritage, including archeological findings. (As recently as last month, in fact, council approved a motion requiring the City to properly store archeological artifacts found within city limits.)

In the months since I initially wrote about this dig, I’ve spoken to scores of curious people who may not know chapter and verse of the history of this long forgotten place, but instantly recognize its poignant symbolism and the critical importance of sharing these stories with current and future Torontonians.

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Many ask: What will be done to honour these fascinating discoveries?

Unfortunately, the more pressing question seems to be: Why are our public officials trying to get away with doing virtually nothing at all?