To test the market, the first sale of 18 lots took place in Nov. 1833. Three other auctions followed in 1834 and 1836 and realized the following amounts:
- No. 1 25 Nov. 1833 (18 lots; £7,618)
- No. 2 18 Nov. 1834 (8 lots; £1,068)
- No. 3 8 Dec. 1834 (12 lots; £2,237)
- No. 4 12 Nov. 1836 (104 lots; £11,272)
 |
| W. Allward’s Old Soldier watching over Victoria Square. Courtesy TPL: JRR 4113 |
This 2-acre space, now called Victoria Memorial Square, has links with York's founding. Katharine Simcoe, the infant daughter of Lt. Gov. and Mrs. John Graves Simcoe was the first person buried there [Read more: A history of the square]. Although it has been a city park since the mid-1880s, the square remained in the ownership of the Government of Canada until July, 2011, when it was the last piece of the Military Reserve to be granted away. From 2005-10 the City of Toronto undertook an extensive re-landscaping of it in partnership with area residents and the Wellington Place Neighbourhood Association. Its central “Old Soldier” monument of 1907 by Walter Allward honours the dead of the War of 1812 (see also). Victoria Memorial Square is now part of the Fort York National Historic Site.
Some plans between 1834 and late 1836 showed Victoria Square connected by a wide avenue to a ten-acre reserve for a new Government House, south of King Street to the lakeshore, between Peter and Spadina. Colborne pushed strongly for accommodating his successors in something better than old Elmsley House, for which the British Government would have had to foot the bill. But it wanted none of the project. So instead in the final plan of 1837, Clarence Square and more building lots were created at the east end of Wellington Place, as the wide avenue came to be called.
This area was far from the town's market square at King and Jarvis, which commended its having its own place where daily shopping for perishables was possible. The earliest schemes proposed a market square on Niagara Street west of Bathurst; then on the axis of Adelaide Street east of Portland; and finally as a two-acre space flanked by Adelaide, Brant and Richmond Streets. Here St. Andrew's Market — named for the surrounding ward — functioned, most notably before 1900. The under-utilized south half of the square became the St. Andrew's Playground in 1909, the City's first such facility.
As planning to extend the town on the Military Reserve went ahead a second cemetery was opened there, used briefly, then closed even before the final plan of lots and streets was adopted. In 1832 a graveyard was established in haste at the west end of Newgate [Adelaide] Street for the victims of York's first cholera epidemic. Over 200 people had been buried in this ground when it was closed in 1835. On some early plans it shows as a rectangle within McDonell [Portugal] Square which was granted to the Roman Catholics for a church and presbytery in 1837. The first St. Mary's Church was not built on the site until 1852; the present structure dates from the 1880s.
[with & without names of lot owners]
Proceed to Next Chapter: The Lunatic Asylum