History
The recorded history of the area begins with the original survey of the northern shore of Lake Ontario conducted by Augustus Jones in 1791. The survey established a baseline soon to be called Lot Street (later renamed Queen Street). The area now known as Alexandra Park was then the southern portions of lots 16, 17 and 18 of Concession 1 of the Township of York. When the City of Toronto was incorporated in 1834, it included the area 400 yards to the north of Queen Street, roughly the location of present day Grange Street. The remainder of the area was annexed by the city in 1859.
The area was purchased from the Denison family in 1841 by Sir Casimir Gzowski, a Polish engineer who built his grand home, which he called 'The Hall', at what is now the south-east corner of Dundas St. W. and Bathurst St. A neighbourhood sprang up around Gzowski's home that was inhabited largely by Polish and Ukrainian immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1960s, 'The Hall' and many of the surrounding homes where demolished to make way for a public housing project. The public housing projects brought in many immigrants from the Caribbean, East Africa, China and Vietnam. Alexandra Park is known for having one of the largest African Canadian communities in Toronto, and people of African American ancestry are still evident in this neighbourhood. In the 1970s and '80s, there were racial tensions between the established Polish and Ukrainian immigrants and the new immigrants. An infamous African Canadian gang called the Project Originals emerged. Drugs and violence were a huge problem, and during this time, a crack epidemic swept the area. In the early '90s, a group of Alexandra Park residents sought to convert the government housing complex to self-governing co-operative housing, in order to attempt to make a difference in the struggling community in an effort to stop the oppression and drug wars the project had been facing for many decades previous. Today Alexandra Park is recovering from its harsh battles in the past, and making an effort to turn a new leaf.
Read more about this topic: Alexandra Park, Toronto
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)