Inside the Museum — The Market Gallery

By John Goddard

Inside the Museums views Toronto’s heritage museums for the first time as a single community — linked by events, personalities, and function. In this special excerpt we visit The Market Gallery at 95 Front Street East — the upper floor of the famous St. Lawrence Market. Walk into the market’s interior and look back carefully, and you clearly see an earlier building. It is the remains of Toronto’s first purpose-built City Hall. John Goddard takes us on a detailed tour, providing fascinating historical background and insight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jun 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781459730014

John Goddard

John Goddard is an author, magazine writer, and former Toronto Star reporter. His books include Inside the Museums: Toronto’s Heritage Sites and Their Most Prized Objects and Rock and Roll Toronto, with pop critic Richard Crouse. John lives in Toronto.

Book preview

To my late godfather, John Wedgewood Green,

whose love and financial support made this book possible.

Contents

Cover

Title page

Dedication

Preface and Acknowledgements

Chapter 6

Bibliography

Copyright

Preface and

Acknowledgements

Photo by John Goddard

Thousands of subway riders glimpse it absently every day. A portrait of William Lyon Mackenzie peers from the platform mural at Queen Station, his face as round and orange as a wheel of cheese, his expression as knotted as when he first encountered Upper Canada’s stifling elite. Mackenzie served as Toronto’s first mayor and led the star-crossed Rebellion of Upper Canada. He was the grandfather of William Lyon Mackenzie King — Canada’s tenth prime minister, whose own orange-pink visage graces the Canadian fifty-dollar bill — and died three blocks from his subway-wall portrait, at a house that the city preserves as a museum.

One day I decided to visit the house. Like many people, I knew of Toronto’s heritage museums, and had been meaning to get around to seeing them. Mackenzie House, as it is called, proved a revelation. I discovered something called a Rebellion Box, one of hundreds of small