One hundred and 65 years old, vacant since 1977 and the site of 34 hangings, Toronto’s Don Jail stands stoically on the corner of Gerrard and Broadview. Normally, it’s a ghostly sighting on a drunken bike rode or a common point of folklore on the streetcar deep into the city; this past weekend, it was a tourist attraction and the locals were psyched.
Open for the first time in over 30 years to the public for Doors Open Toronto, the Don has attracted a line snaking for miles, the assemblage of slowly reddening hopefuls treading upon the parking lot where three skeletons of former inmates hung for their crimes were found in 2007. The signs all instruct newcomers to give up the ghost — when we arrive at noon, chances are already slim that anyone will be provided entry for the day's final 4:30pm tour. The crowd seems anxious, as if touring the facilities of a decrepit institution known for murders, suicides and escaped criminals is their only option for a gorgeous Saturday afternoon.
But because we are journalists, we get to sidestep the lines and head to the inner sanctum. The parking lot is littered with ice-cream trucks, hot-dog stands and the Don Jail gift shop. (“Do you think there’s a signature shank?” my friend Eric quips.) Volunteers wearing commemorative t-shirts (black and white stripes signifying bars) and carrying clipboards manage the traffic. I stare at a family chomping down on vanilla cones, happily soaking up the sunshine on plastic patio furniture.
Yet this Doors Open appearance is only the first step in the Don’s great PR makeover. Bridgepoint Health, the curving mental facility that looms over the Don’s artifice like a weeping willow, plans to gut the facility and use it as an administrative office. With tours now available to the public during the day and evening, feel free to book your next corporate event or wedding at the Don’s multi-level façade. Boasts the website: “From … the soaring architecture of the four-storey central atrium and the surprisingly intimate Governor’s apartment, your guests will undergo an almost surreal experience as they retrace the steps of Toronto’s most notorious prisoners.” You too could split canapés with the ghosts of murdered police officers and child rapists!
The grand atrium stretches high to the rounded ceiling, ornamented by peering gargoyles and serpents that, we are told, signify temptation. It looks like a birdcage for human beings, with three floors of curving staircases. The efficient tour guide (ours is blonde and trussed up like a sexy jail leader for Halloween, clacking her ruby nails on her official clipboard) informs us that it was transformed into a “chic New York nightclub” for the set of Tom Cruise’s Cocktail. (Later I will find the clip on YouTube and watch Tom fling martini
shakers in the air, as the limestone walls glimmer with tinted neon.)
Cameras perpetually flash, as heat-stroked octogenarians document every location they can find, aiming their lenses high at the domed ceiling, the commemorative display of handcuffs and cell keys, and the “real Don officer” wearing a vintage uniform and impressive mustache. We squint to see the prosthetic leg that held a small hunting knife used in self-defense. In the later years, the conditions in Don were thought to be so deplorable that Justice Richard Schneider famously struck a deal that anyone serving time in the Don would immediately have their sentence shaved in half.
Tourists collide with tourists as conversation overlaps viscerally. (“This is like a shitty Altman movie,” Eric illuminates.) An agro-dude exclaims, “This is fucking retarded” when he can’t hear the prison guard’s tale of patrolling the cells to his satisfaction. “I’ve been waiting for four hours in the sun,” he tells us, “and this is shit.” Another group makes its way through the corridor as we try not to be jostled. Our group soon relocates to the Governor’s Quarters — the then-sumptuous digs of the Don administration. We run to view the (non-operational) fireplace and Pepto Bismol-pink walls of the administrative offices. It is rumoured there was once Victorian wallpaper.
Led again to the Atrium and down another hallway, a string of windowless prison cells used for solitary confinement travel down a lonesome corridor. The walls seem soaked in ick. Though remarkably well preserved, the Don’s storied quarters are beginning to creep me out, despite the middle-aged man posing for a cellphone portrait, his lined and grinning face framed by bars.
We walk up a creaking staircase in twos towards the gallows. Our tour guide informs us that the last hanging was on December 11, 1962, a double case of two felons who had murdered police officers, the last case of capital punishment in Canada. Previously used as a latrine before plumbing was installed in the 1900s (the Don opened in 1867), the drop-off is vertigo-inducing, as one thinks about all the men who have jumped to their deaths. Further down the hallway, we view the cells (though we only have two minutes) where upwards of three inmates shared a space. The shallow, windowless bunkers, about the size of a small closet (or New York studio apartment), are scarcely enough space for one, and the idea of three criminals waiting out their sentence here seems asphyxiating.
“Alright!” the tour guide informs. “Last chance for pictures here!”
We walk down the Atrium to the main entrance, where the Victorian artifice designed by William Thomas in 1852 is still remarkably well preserved. The bearded face of Father Time stands guard in the impassive doorway, a reminder, says our cheery guide “of how while time may stop in here, outside in the world, it’s still going.” Apparently the worm-eaten bricks surrounding the structure (called vermiculite) were intentionally designed to illustrate a feeling of loss.
The guide tells us more tales of Don lore. The suicide of a man who, set to be hung, jumped out the window instead. The triple-barred windows that were introduced as a result of the 1950s escape of the bank robbing Boyd gang (who were later recaptured and then hung on December 16, 1952). The site of floggings, child labourers and rumoured ghosts that moan at night will soon the space will be a wall of cubicles. “Doesn’t this seem a little fucked to you?” I ask Eric. He concurs.
Our final destination is a wall of irregular (and apparently valuable) bricks set to be removed in the Bridgepoint renovation. Upon further examination, each stone has been adorned with the scratching of a released convict’s name. Some have added the proclamation “Last Time” to their signature, a collision of identities, dates and locations. But then I look further. “Jays ’95,” reads a brick to the far left. Did the Don Jail know its fate before it ceased to exist? The satisfied expressions of the white-haired tourists tell me all I need to know.