Riverdale Historical Society—since 1999

  Toronto’s Don Jail and the Evolution of Capital Punishment:  The Story of Canada’s First Executioner Over the course of two decades (1890-1910), John Radclive, Canada’s first official executioner criss-crossed Canada officiating at over 100 hangings. Initially a staunch advocate of capital punishment, Radclive’s stance on state-sanctioned killing shifted over time. Radclive conducted his first execution, Thomas Kane (1890), and his final two executions, John Boyd (1908) and Pavel Steffoff (1909) at Toronto Don Jail. These three events not only had a profound effect on Radclive, but also forever changed the practice of capital punishment in Canada.

  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 gri...

  CHANGING IDEALS: REFORMATION AND PUNISHMENT Third in a series about the Old Don Jail By Elizabeth Abbott                                                                    View from Necropolis             Construction of the new jail was dogged by one crisis after another. The decision taken to begin by building the central block and two wings. The site of the new Don Jail was also chosen, city land across the Don River from the Necropolis, which would “afford the greatest advantages to the city in point of access and economy.” [1]             Construction began and with it, one crisis after another. The Police Board was demanding, meeting on the work site and issuing unauthorized orders on th...

  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN  UPPER CANADA  PRE 1865          First in an Old Don Jail series                                                          by Elizabeth Abbott                                                                                                                            The Old Don Jail is much more than an imposing heritage site looming over  Gerrard Street  just west of the Riverdale Library at  Broadview Avenue . It is also an architectural tri...

 Second in a series focusing on Toronto’s Old Don Jail  By Elizabeth Abbott       By the 1850s, Toronto was burgeoning and so were its criminals. The city was in urgent need of a new jail. On 7 March 1857 , City Council voted, not unanimously, that “William Thomas Esquire … prepare a plan and a jail for this city after the model of Pentonville England Reformatory Prison.” [1] This decision was double-barreled: it selected Thomas without competition and, more crucially, it decreed the kind of institution he would design.       William Thomas (1799-1861) was an English architect who emigrated to Toronto in 1843, drawn by the city’s dynamism and the fact that, despite an ongoing construction boom, it had few architects. He was an affable man as well as a talented and versatile designer whose elegant work soon established him as Upper Canada ’s pre-eminent architect.            ...