Toronto — From York to the Distillery District
Victoria Memorial Square
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
This small park was once the burial ground for soldiers and their families from the York garrison. It opened in the 1790s and remained in use into the nineteenth century.
Military towns were communities as well as forts. Soldiers married, had children, became ill and died far from the imperial centres that sent them here.
The cemetery also marks how Toronto expanded. What began outside the compact settlement was eventually absorbed into the city grid and surrounded by development.
Modern Toronto is famous for making land valuable. Burial grounds complicate that logic because they ask a city to preserve land from the market.
The square therefore preserves a hole in the development pattern—and that absence makes the old garrison visible in a neighbourhood that otherwise seems entirely contemporary.