Immigrant Neighbourhood and Centre Ave

site: By the time the archeologists backfilled the site, located on Centre Ave. and designated to become the home of a giant new provincial courthouse, they had found the foundations of Toronto most important 19th century black church, as well as hundreds of thousands of artifacts from The Ward, the impoverished but vibrant immigrant neighbourhood that existed there from the 1840s to the 1950s, according to Toronto Star. Yet the evidence of this poignant past is in grave danger of disappearing because the two public agencies responsible for the site and its archeological treasures — Infrastructure Ontario and the City of Toronto — seem incapable of coming up with a dignified, accessible and sustainable plan to publicly interpret and commemorate these findings. By John Lorinc Sun., Aug. 14, 2016 Late last fall, a small team of archeologists completed excavating an unremarkable parking lot near Toronto city hall, a painstaking process that had captivated workers in the commercial towers overlooking the site for months. For the past eight months, officials with both bodies — Infrastructure Ontario is an agency of the province responsible for developing new public structures — have dismissed numerous ideas for acknowledging the discoveries, often for dubious or excessively bureaucratic reasons that reveal a troubling tone-deafness to what at stake. Article Continued Below In one corner, archeologists found what they later described as the most extensive collection of 19th century footwear ever discovered in Canada, some of it the handiwork of an African-American cobbler who settled in Toronto in the mid-1850s. As I reported in the Star and Spacing, the crews unearthed everything from handmade toys to tools, commercial bottles, hat forms, and even an arrowhead — a reminder that the site, prior to European contact, stood on the table lands just south of a sacred indigenous river later known as Taddle Creek. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.