The Junction — Where the Irish Worked

The Slaughterhouses and Irish Labour

The Junction's name comes from the convergence of five railway lines in the late 19th century, and the railways brought industry: meatpacking plants, foundries, manufacturing facilities. The William Davies Company — which would eventually become Canada Packers — established its slaughterhouses and packing plants in the district in the 1870s, and by the end of the century the Junction was home to what was described as the largest pork packing operation in the British Empire.

The work was hard, dangerous, and malodorous. The slaughterhouse floor in the late 19th century was one of the most gruelling workplaces in industrial North America, as Upton Sinclair would document for Chicago in The Jungle (1906). The conditions in Toronto's plants were similar. The Irish immigrant workers who dominated the workforce were there because it was work — because after the Famine and the crossing and the arrival in a new country, you took the work that was available.

Second-generation Irish-Canadians — born in Toronto to Famine-era parents — moved into the slaughterhouses and the railway trades in large numbers in the 1870s and 1880s. By the 1890s, the Catholic parishes of west Toronto had a distinct character: working-class, Irish-descent, labour-organised. The parishes and the unions were the twin institutions of the Junction's Irish community, and they reinforced each other in a specific way: the Church provided the social framework, and the unions provided the economic strategy.

A Dry Town in a Wet Province

One of the most distinctive facts about the Junction's history is that it was a dry town — prohibition was voted in by local residents in 1904 and maintained until 1997, when a municipal referendum finally reversed the decision. For 93 years, no alcohol was legally sold in the Junction.

This was not primarily a Catholic temperance movement, as one might assume from the neighbourhood's Irish Catholic character. It was, initially, a temperance movement driven by Protestant reformers who were the dominant force in West Toronto politics in the early 20th century. But the Irish Catholic community accepted and in some ways accommodated the prohibition: many Catholic parishes ran their own social clubs that provided the gathering spaces that pubs would otherwise have offered.

The 93-year dry period gave the Junction a preserved quality that is now its heritage asset. Because the neighbourhood didn't have the pub culture that would have attracted redevelopment, the Victorian commercial streetscape along Dundas West survived largely intact. The buildings that Irish workers walked past in 1905 are still standing today.

The Catholic Parishes of West Toronto

The Catholic parishes of the Junction and surrounding west Toronto — St Cecilia's, St Pius X, Our Lady of Sorrows — were built by and for the Irish working class community that dominated the neighbourhood. These were not genteel parishes: they served the meatpacking workers, the foundry workers, the railway labourers, and their families. The character of the parishes reflected the character of the work.

The Catholic school system in West Toronto was substantially an Irish-Canadian enterprise. The teachers, the principals, and the religious orders that staffed the separate schools were predominantly Irish-descent through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The education they provided was shaped by a specifically Irish-Catholic vision: English-medium, catechetical, oriented toward respectability and advancement, but anchored in an ethnic-religious identity that distinguished the Irish Catholic community from both the Protestant majority and from other immigrant groups.

More Toronto Irish Heritage

→ Cabbagetown: The Irish Neighbourhood That Named Itself

→ The Liberties: Toronto's Original Irish Quarter

→ Irish County Finder Tool