Fort York - Stories from the Birthplace of Toronto

by Adrian Gamble (Editor), selected articles from The Fife and Drum

136 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific selection of essays forming a a kind of character study of this Canadian national historic site in the heart of the city of Toronto. Fort York, re-built on the battlefield of the Battle of York (1813) in the very year it was burnt down by invading U.S. forces (and added to continuously for some decades thereafter), is one of North America's only surviving War of 1812 forts. Today the fort and its Garrison Common, now a park, cheekily occupy some of the city's prime real estate to the annoyance of condo developers, who have built all around it. Since the fort became nearly obsolete from a defensive perspective in the mid-1800s, this land could have easily been used to build factories, accommodate railways, expressways and condominiums (as was the case all around it). Instead, it miraculously survived, to great public benefit today. A recent article in The Guardian "Land could be worth more left to nature than when farmed, study finds" (8 March, 2021) https://www.theguardian.com/environme... reports on the benefits of leaving land and nature alone, if only for economic benefits. Sites like Fort York occupy a role within cities similar to fields, forests and wetlands within developed landscapes. They become more valuable as the years go by. The question becomes, increasingly, not whether, but how to preserve them.

The 45 chapters in this book, by nearly as many different authors, are organized into five sections covering the period of the fort's founding in 1793 to the present day. This spans the fort's military and post-military history, as it started to dawn on the citizens of Toronto in the late 1800s, that the fort was "historic". Each chapter, short and specifically well-illustrated, represents an article drawn from the pages of The Fife and Drum quarterly, which The Friends of Fort York and Garrison Common has published for the past nearly three decades. The authors are all experts in their own field, writing carefully (and having had the benefit of careful editing by the late Stephen Otto, historian and a founder of The Friends) for a general readership. The editor, Adrian Gamble, who worked closely with both Stephen Otto and the book designer Ted Smolak, has done a masterful job.