SENSE OF PLACE
By Gordon S. Grice, OAA, FRAIC
PROLOGUE
As consultants, we rely on repeat business—old clients with new projects, or old projects in need of an update. But in early March of this year, I received an email that was jaw-dropping. The manager of the St. Lawrence Community Office, wanted to know if I was the same person who had done the North Market poster for the City of Toronto, and if so, could I do some revisions to bring it up to date. Here’s the kicker: the drawing was done nearly 40 years ago.
Back in 1987, my illustration studio had been hired by the City to prepare a poster advertising the imminent construction of a festive new St. Lawrence North Market building on the northwest corner of Toronto’s Front Street and Jarvis Street—a replacement for the drab bunker that had occupied the site since 1968. Enthusiasm for the project ran high, but after the initial flurry of excitement, the project went into long-term hibernation. Nothing happened . . . that is, until now. According to the email, the North Market had finally been constructed and was about to open in a few months. The manager wanted to have a new poster, in the style of the old poster, ready for the grand opening.
A lot had happened since 1987. I had raised a family and welcomed two grandchildren into the world. My studio had become a one-person operation and had relocated at least three times. Architectural illustration had been transformed as well: It was all digital now, no longer a hand-done art. And I had changed careers. Having sold my drafting board and retired my drawing pens and pencils a dozen years ago, I had largely abandoned architectural illustration in favour of full-time writing and editing.
To the manager’s first question—Was I the same person who created the poster?—the answer was, technically, yes, with the help of my studio. But at a deeper level, after almost 40 years, was I really still that person?
I decided to find out. I accepted the job, confident that it was something I could do, and set about trying to figure out how in the hell I was going to actually accomplish it. Meanwhile, I had a question of my own, which was not so much an illustrator’s sort of question as a writer’s sort of question: Why had it taken 38 years to build the new market? There must be a story there.
The search for the answer to this question led down a rabbit-hole of discovery that went back a lot further than 38 years. In fact, the story was more than 200 years, old and possibly ba lot older than that.
EVERY STORY HAS A PLOT, BUT DOES EVERY PLOT HAVE A STORY?
Are you someone who believes that every patch of ground has a resident spirit? The Romans called it genius loci and the early Norse called it Landvættir—the spirit of a place. If so, you’re not alone. Such beliefs have ancient origins but persist to this day. It’s estimated that more than 100 million people belong to animistic or ethnoreligious groups who hold such beliefs, in addition to millions more whose more modern religions tolerate such “nonsense.” Nonsense is what most people, at least in Western civilizations, would call this idea.
Then, there are planners, architects and landscape architects, an insignificant subgroup to be sure, who would probably go along with the idea of genius loci, provided that the word “spirit” is replaced by something less mystical, like “character” or “personality.” It stands to reason that every part of the earth’s surface is in some way unique, with its own story and significance, natural or induced, that influences the way we should think about it , especially when it comes time to develop it.
A more useful term would be “sense of place,” which WIKI defines as “a multifaceted human experience encompassing the emotional, psychological, and social connections people feel toward a specific location.” In other words, a plot of land probably does have a natural character, but that character might only emerge over centuries of human use, involving historical, cultural, and even personal connections. While it’s not always possible for architects to establish a sense of place, or to express a site’s natural character in their work, it‘s something worth striving for.
Let me ask my first question in a different way. We know that every story has a plot, but does every plot have a story?
•••••
The plot that gives rise to this question—and the following story—is the half-hectare of land that that currently accommodates the St. Lawrence Market North building, but whose sense of place emerged long ago, before its recorded history, and certainly before it was “plotted” by European surveyors.
It’s reasonable to assume that sometime in the past 10,000 years, since the last ice age ended, North America’s first inhabitants must have interacted with this location in their travels along the shore of the newly formed Lake Ontario, between the mouths of the Humber River and the Don River, long before Europeans arrived. The last ice age had not only created the Great Lakes, but it had also transformed the North American savanna into a dense boreal forest, through which trading routes had been carved. French fur traders in the seventeenth century would have followed the waterside trail, possibly stopping at this very spot, to barter or simply to rest. Unfortunately, we have no record of these visits. It’s also hard to imagine that the North Market site was ever on the shoreline of Lake Ontario. Successive landfills have pushed the water’s edge almost a kilometre to the south.
Historical accounts that provide our current knowledge of the site begin to appear in 1787, with the record of the British purchase of about 100,000 ha. of land on the north shore of Lake Ontario from the Mississaugas of the New Credit. The vendors viewed this “Toronto Purchase” as a land-sharing agreement, according to which the “spirit of the land” would be protected. The purchasers, however, viewed it as land acquisition, “fee simple,” according to British common law, and set about to develop it for their own needs. In 1793, Lieutenant-Colonel John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor of the recently organized province of Upper Canada, decided that this particular swampy, overgrown spot would make a perfect site for his new regional capital, having one great advantage: a natural harbour, which would provide protection against the bellicose Americans. (The War of 1812 was less than 30 years away.) Simcoe’s surveyor laid out a “Plan of York Harbour,” to include a 10-block street grid for the town’s first inhabitants. The grid encompassed an area of about one square kilometer, bounded by present-day Berkeley, George, Front and Adelaide Streets—enough space to accommodate 240 loyal British citizens.
Current residents of Toronto will immediately recognize that this “Old Town” layout doesn’t include the subject of our story, the corner of Jarvis and Front, which is exactly one city block to the west. But that changed when the street layout was quickly amended in 1797. In that year, Lieutenant Governor Peter Hunter, acknowledging that the town was spreading rapidly, stretched the town limits westward. His immediate motive was to increase the land available for residential and agricultural development. But he also wanted to include space for the necessary components of any self-respecting regional capital: a church, a home for civic functions, and a market square.
This idea of forming cities around a public square can be traced back to early Western civilizations. The Sumerians had their temple courtyard, the Babylonians their market square, the ancient Greeks their agora and the Romans their forum—places where goods and ideas could be exchanged and religious practices could be observed. This civic formula was carried forward throughout history in cities throughout Europe.
Lieutenant Governor Hunter decided that the site for the market in the Town of York (having abandoned the name Toronto), would be located on the northwest corner of New Street (now Jarvis Street) and Palace Street (now Front Street). The site’s sense of place was now inadvertently established for all time as a marketplace, so in a way, the Mississaugas’ desire that the spirit of the land would be respected was at least partially satisfied.
The market square was the centre of the city's social life. Discussions, both serious and idle, were held there; punishments were carried out; goods were offered for sale; and public auctions were held. In the earliest days of the town, this included auctions of black slaves. Town bylaws prohibited the selling of butter, eggs, fish, meat, poultry, and vegetables between the hours of 6:00 am and 4:00 pm on Saturdays, except at the market. [Wiki]
The first market building was erected on the site in 1814. It was a small temporary shelter, little more than a covered stall, such as you might find in any farmers’ market today. A more permanent building, including government offices, followed six years later, at about the same time that a humble place of worship was constructed one block west and one block north, on the site of the present St. James Cathedral. Between 1831–1833, a much more elegant market structure was constructed—a sturdy brick building with arched entrances—at last, a market building worthy of the name.
The following year, 1834, was a significant year for the market site, as well as for the Town of York. On March 6, the town was incorporated as a city, with its original name, Toronto, reinstated. The new market building served as a temporary home for the city council, until a new civic building (later to become the South Market) was constructed in 1845.
At the time of its incorporation, the city previously known as “Muddy York,” lacked the conveniences that are taken for granted today, such as sewers and paved streets. But it was felt that sidewalks should be installed to raise pedestrians above the “mud and filth” of the streets, even though, these “sidewalks” were to consist of nothing more than 12-inch planks laid side-by-side on top of the sludge. Still, it involved civic expense that Toronto could barely afford.
Writing in 1885, Charles Pelham Mulvaney, in his History of Toronto and the County of York describes a grisly event that took place in the North Market building on July 30, 1834:
This [sidewalk construction] completed, the city again found itself at the end of its resources, and it was decided to levy on the taxpayers an assessment of three pence in the pound. The proposal roused considerable popular indignation, and was the occasion of two public meetings, one of which, the later, terminated tragically. A balcony in the market, upon which a number of spectators were standing, gave way under the stamping of the crowd and precipitated them into the butchers' shops below, where many were impaled upon the hooks, others broke their limbs, and some seven or eight received fatal injuries.
The very next day, before the city had a chance to acknowledge, let alone deal with that calamity, another disastrous situation developed. As Frederick H. Armstrong describes it in City in the Making. (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1988):
Before the city could recover from this tragedy, fate struck again. Cholera broke out in the jail and the city as suddenly faced with a repetition of the epidemic that had first struck in 1832. – Armstrong, p. 111
This was a very poor start for a new city and a new market building. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the North Market building’s inglorious life was cut short when, On April 7, 1849, another catastrophe struck. The first Great Fire of Toronto spread through the City’s business core, reducing many buildings to ashes, and damaging the North Market building beyond repair.
Immediately following the fire, the market building was reconstructed, with the main entry relocated to Front Street. Meanwhile the new building to the south, which was unharmed by the fire, was nevertheless reconstructed in order to accommodate the city’s civic functions, and a new building, St. Lawrence Hall, was erected, to the north. Having been the scene of fire, epidemic, civic insurrection and resurrection, the North Market site’s sense of place lived on.
A half-century later, in the early 1900s, the civic functions were moved once again, this time to a “new” City Hall (now affectionately called “Old City Hall”) at the corner of Bay and Queen Streets, while some of the market functions of the north building were relocated to the south building. This was followed by another demolition of the North Market and its replacement by a building designed to match the character of the south building. A canopy joined the North Market to the South Market until its removal in 1954. In 1968, the aging North Market was once again demolished and replaced by a much simpler single-storey building, which hosted weekly farmer's markets and antique markets until 2015.
To understand the significance of the North Market site and the persistence of its sense of place, it helps if you consider that, in all, seven consecutive market structures have been erected on the site, none lasting longer than 64 years (building number five, from 1904, to 1968). But the original intent of the space, as a market, a gathering place and a civic centre has persisted unchanged for 222 years, and counting.
The current North Market building, which opened officially this year, features a large, protected market area with civic functions—courtrooms and court offices—on the upper floors, just like the original, and as journalist David McPherson described it:
a beacon of culture, arts and civic engagement. . . . The return of St. Lawrence’s North Market building means a revival of the site’s original historic intent as a community space that’s buzzing with activity seven days a week.– “Rebuilding the heartbeat of Old Toronto.” David Mcpherson, special to The Globe and Mail, Published February 4, 2025.
Indoor and outdoor malls come and go; “retail environments,” suburban shopping centres, superstores, hypermarkets and big-box outlets fulfill transient public demands until they’re redeveloped or nudged aside by online shopping. But marketplaces live on. It’s an old story.
A SITE, A MARKET AND A CITY
The story of the St. Lawrence North Market site is fascinating in its own right, but so too are the interwoven stories of the community and the city, that tell a more comprehensive tale about how a city grows without abandoning its “spirit” of authenticity.
In the nearly two centuries that elapsed between 1814, when the first “permanent” North Market building was constructed and 1987, when the current North Market building was first proposed, the city had grown from a village of about 2,000 people to a metropolis of about 3.5 million. The city’s core had moved gradually westward, relegating the St. Lawrence neighbourhood to its eastern fringe. In 1987, there was little development pressure on areas east of Yonge Street, so they still retained plenty of funky shops, apartments over stores and cheap parking lots.
In many ways, little appeared to have changed since the early nineteenth century. The 1987 proposal shows a neighbourhood with Victorian scale. Many smaller buildings remained, with the overall impression of a low-rise residential–commercial, precinct, still dominated by the 25-metre-tall cupola of St. Lawrence Hall and the spire of St. James Cathedral. The revitalization of the North Market site merely offered the promise that more shoppers would be lured eastward by injecting a little more colour and life into the neighbourhood.
This brings us, at last, to the missing 38 years. In brief, the 1987 proposal faced constant delays. There was cost-cutting, contractual problems, archaeological discoveries on two separate occasions, and a lack of political enthusiasm. It didn’t help that in Toronto, as in city halls the world over, the normal speed of activity is glacial. But while the St. Lawrence project slept, a startling transformation was taking place—and continues to take place—in the city. Consider that in just under two centuries, from 1793 to 1987, the city had grown by 3.5 million people. Then, it took only four more decades for it to grow by another 3.5 million people. Toronto is now the continent’s third-largest city.
Cities change slowly, incrementally, almost imperceptibly. We’re aware that construction is going on—cranes punctuate the skyline and infrastructure projects slow traffic to a crawl—but we take it in our stride. As our city gradually changes, we change with it. We know that things are different, but we’re not always certain what things, exactly. If we leave the city and return years later, or if we see graphic comparisons, as in photos and drawings—the “before and after” pictures—we get an eye-opening sense of where we are, compared with where we were. And as the new North Market slowly became a reality, a neighbourhood and a city was changing around it.
The 2025 North Market neighbourhood is vastly different from the 1987 neighbourhood. Particularly obvious is the radically altered scale. The few features that have survived consist of a handful of buildings and a park. Significantly, these features are immediately adjacent to the North Market, so the low-rise scale of the “market square” has been maintained. The new North Market building occupies its traditional site and serves its original purpose precisely: as a gathering place and attendant administrative functions, with weekly markets and special events, now in a spacious indoor atrium. But an explosion in population and development has taken place all around it. The rest of the neighbourhood has been virtually reconstructed. Two-storey shops have been replaced by ground-floor retail in midrise mixed-use buildings or absorbed into multistorey condominium complexes.
At the centre of this transformation, the North Market has held its own. Always a focus of activity and celebration—a marketplace—a traditional building with a neighbourhood scale and character, preserved within a growing city.
You don’t have to be an animist or a member of a specific ethnoreligious group—or even an architect—to believe that a piece of land can possess a spirit consisting of intangible qualities, physical and cultural, that make it unique and evoke a sense of identity. If you stop to look—at your neighbourhood or your city—you can find other examples, all around you.
EPILOGUE
I finished the poster, almost on schedule, but not quite. There were, naturally, unforeseen complications, mostly due to the collision of obsolete twentieth-century drawing techniques with glitchy twenty-first-century digital technology. In addition, where I had planned on redrawing the North Market and inserting it into the old poster, I wound up redrawing practically the entire neighbourhood instead. But with the help of my Photoshop guru Terry Brown, I managed to pull it all together, and my client was pleased with the result.
The new North Market building itself has its detractors. Some have asked: Is this the best way to use taxpayers’ money? Does the building’s (currently) intermittent use justify the use of valuable civic property? Or, as Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic asked, “Why can’t the City of Toronto seem to build anything great?” [“Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market celebrates grand opening, but the redevelopment has its flaws,” May 9, 2025.]
Taking a different view, referring to the North Market building destroyed in the 1849 fire:
It was the heartbeat of civic life for more than 200 years and the only property in the city that has been used for a single function—food retailing—since its inception. . . . It truly was a heroic Victorian structure. People came from across the province with their goods. Farmers in the early 1900s even drove their wagons right inside the 10 entrances on the east and west sides. –Mcpherson, op. cit., quoting Graeme Stewart, of ERA Architects Inc.
We are easily distracted by architectural forms and spaces. We rarely stop to consider that sense of place exists within the context, not just of space, but also of time—38 years, 200 years, 10,000 years, or even 4.543 billion years. So, if you don’t think that the current building at the corner of Jarvis and Front, properly honours the spirit of its site, or if the built form displeases you in some other way, bide your time. No doubt, there will be a North Market version number eight at some future date. I’m waiting to get the email.