Father Time Watches Over the Physical Plant

Fourth in a series focusing on Toronto Old Don Jail

 

By Elizabeth Abbott

           

Father Time Peers over the Entryway to the Old Don Jail

            In certain ways there were two Don Jails. The first was the complex of cellblocks, Day Rooms and chapel that constituted the inmates’ world. The second was made up of the offices, reception rooms and other public spaces designed for the Don’s large service and administrative staff.

The Don’s first residents were admitted in 1864. They entered through a narrow, barred wooden portal and were herded through stairways to where they were stripped, bathed and deloused, a humbling ritual that reminded them that their bodies were no longer truly their own. Even habitual criminals must have been intimidated by their new digs. Everywhere they looked, forbidding images grimaced or leered down on them: coiling serpents, demons and griffons, caste iron metaphors for sin and danger and retribution. There was the massive scope of the jail, towering, impregnable and dreary, and the novel and efficient way their keepers could monitor them. There was the Death Row cellblock with its 6 ½ x 7 ½ feet cells that housed condemned men for about two weeks until, at midnight on their execution day, they were escorted to the nearby gallows to plunge to their death at the end of the hangman’s rope. There were the inmates’ own tiny cells, most a claustrophobic 3 ½ x 9 feet, furnished only with a cot and a slop bucket, with grills above the door to forestall suicides by making it impossible to loop bed sheets on the bars above their heads.

Rotunda Don Jail

The Rotunda, magnificent and vast in its upward sweep, symbolized the power of society over the Don’s inmates. There they assembled for announcements and public floggings then returned to their cellblocks via two floors of wraparound catwalks and metal stairs. The Rotunda floor was stone and its walls dark grey, its vaulted ceiling illuminated by sunshine streaming in through skylights.

Yet true to its character as a prison that reformed as well as punished, the Don also provided solace. Though tiny and bleak, the cells were ventilated and warm, and from them the inmates could look across the adjacent wooden Day Room to the (barred) windows. They were locked in only at night, released by day to work outside on the farm that supplied the jail, the House of Refuge and later the nearby hospital, or in Day Rooms. Larger cells on an upper floor were likely shared by imprisoned women.

The so-called Day Rooms were actually wide corridors adjacent to the cells and were sunny and equipped with a toilet. The inmates ate their meals in the Day Rooms, and some also worked there, picking oakum or performing other tedious tasks assigned to them as part of their rehabilitation. Though it was regimented and strictly run, the Don attempted to provide the environment the Provincial Prison Inspectors had fought for to replace the province’s existing unsanitary, unsafe and punitive jails.

Cells Don Jail

Co-existing with the inmates’ Don Jail was the Don Jail of the men and women who oversaw the inmates. As a workplace, the Don was designed for safety, efficiency and architectural style. Employees could admire the building’s Renaissance Revival exterior, the vermiculated (wormlike) stonework, the bricks from Toronto brickyards, the gold stones from Ontario and Ohio quarries and the slate roof. They could take in the vastness of the imposing structure, then enter the premises through a grand entrance that was a virtuoso architectural medley graced by Doric columns, a round-arched opening and, overhead, the carved image of Blind Justice or Father Time, a bearded reminder of what their place of employment was all about.

Inside, the Don was graceful and stylish, with meeting rooms, a board room, a reception room and the soaring, sunlit Rotunda. The decorations were tasteful, the air fresh in the well-ventilated building. The new classification system and the ease of monitoring inmates and enforcing security contributed much to making the Don an agreeable workplace.

The Governor and his family’s personal quarters were upstairs, with wonderful views of the Don Valley and nearby meadows. The large rooms were adored with floral wallpaper, a luxury at the time. But the inconvenience of living so close to inmates, including men being hanged on the nearby gallows or flogged in the Rotunda, which was visible from a door inside the apartment, drove the Governor to request a move outside the prison. After 1888, he and his family lived in a large house a short walk (and a world) away.

In 1888, the Governor and family moved to this house beside the Don Jail

The Don Jail building was not just a monument to William Thomas’ vision. It was also the focus of civic pride, and a report to Toronto City Council praised it as “in workmanship, in material, in design, in safety and architectural appearance, this building is second in none to Canada.” The Inspectors called it “handsome” and predicted that its classification system, work program and orderly discipline would greatly decrease recidivism. The Don was a triumph of reform-minded thinking, at least to those concerned with reforming the inmates forced to live there.