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"A square mile or Two of Rough Ground..."
Prominent Toronto architect John George Howard [1803-1890] presented the City of Toronto with a very great gift in 1873, his large west end estate of High Park. In the seventeen years that followed, he managed the process that turned his farm from an isolated retreat in the country into an urban park of almost 400 acres. This article looks at John Howards efforts to develop this park, as well as his continuing influence in the years after his death. It also examines the idea of a natural or forest park in an urban setting and the ideas, events, and individuals that have shaped High Park.
Most cities in the new world were established on a body of water with the natural environment-often impenetrable forest-all around. The transition from clearing in the forest to urban center was often rapid. Enormous changes within the lifetime of pioneers saw the once feared forest become a source of nostalgia. Remnants that survived the initial onslaught were sometimes recycled as parks. It did not seem to matter if they were altered, or indeed if they had to be rebuilt into some resemblance of the former landscape, they now became worth preserving. Canadian city parks like Halifax's Point Pleasant Park [1866], Vancouver's Stanley Park [1886], and High Park are examples that both define and stand in contrast to their particular urban environment.1
John Howard arrived in the town of York as a young man, with his wife Jemima, in 1832. Behind him were early careers as a seaman, surveyor, architect, and speculative builder. There were opportunities in the colonies for a sober, hardworking, and ambitious man. In the course of his career, he was the architect of important early buildings, as well as a popular art instructor at Upper Canada College, a surveyor for the City of Toronto, a land developer and a Justice of the Peace.
In 1837, John Howard purchased the 160-acre Park Lot 37 on Lake Ontario, some four miles west of downtown Toronto from King's College, for 160 pounds.2 Although engineer and publisher James Cull had already been allowed to remove pine forest from this park lot to be used to build Toronto wharfs,3 it remained picturesque, a...