Bridgepoint Health Centre wants new facility to focus on life, not death

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Iron bars do not a hospital make.

That was the consensus this week, when the Bridgepoint Health Centre came before the Toronto and East York Community Council seeking leave to remove historic sets of bars from the facade of the Old Don Jail.

The health centre is maintaining the facade as part of a massive renovation and expansion of the health centre. And as a part of the agreement, the health care facility agreed to retain the historic elements of the famous - and infamous - Victorian-era jail.

But as the design proceeded, architects concluded that retaining the bars on the prison facade was not in keeping with the mission of the facility, which rehabilitates patients with longer-term illnesses and injuries.

The centre requested to remove iron bars on three storeys of the south side of the Don Jail, maintaining the bars on basement windows - about a quarter of the total frontage. Both city planning staff and the Toronto Preservation Board objected to the removal, because of the bars' historic significance.

So it was up to the Toronto and East York Community Council, and on Tuesday, the councillors there heard from residents, architects and the hospital redevelopment team itself.

Heritage architect Jane Burgess spoke in favour of preserving the bars.

"They're made of 1860 ductile steel - and it can't be replaced," she said. "It's self-healing, it creates a coat that doesn't rust and requires no maintenance. All that's happened is the lead seals around them have failed after 150 years. Whether the bars stay or go, the repair cost is identical. Given that no maintenance is involved in these bars, I don't know why Bridgepoint is taking such a stunner to them."

Others had less attachment to the bars on the historic jail - the site of Canada's last hanging. Ted Zwibell had been a patient at Bridgepoint.

"I was at Bridgepoint for three months and the staff there enabled me to walk and talk again," he said. "The view of the Don Jail I had from my bed disturbed me every single day. It's a place of incarceration. I didn't feel that I was being incarcerated - I felt as though I was being liberated."

The Bridgepoint team of architects and administrators, meanwhile, argued that the architectural significance of the building, which will face a new public park at Broadview Avenue and Gerrard Street, is not informed by the bars but by the facade itself.

Bridgepoint President and CEO Marian Walsh spoke to the community council personally.

"Bridgepoint and I feel very, very strongly that prison bars on the face of not just a transformed jail, but on the public face of Bridgepoint Hospital and on the streetfront space is fundamentally anti-ethical to all the efforts put here to create a hospital - and change it from a place of sickness for people going to die, to a place of health and wellness for people who are living with chronic illness," she said. "What Bridgepoint promised to do was not to restore the Don Jail. We agreed that we would take this important heritage building, and adaptively reuse it. We agreed to meaningfully integrate it into the hospital and that is what we've done."

Councillors finally agreed with Bridgepoint. But Ward 20 (Trinity-Spadina) Councillor Adam Vaughan, who sits on the preservation board, argued the bars are an integral part of the jail's history, and more windows ought to have them.

"At some point, at the face of the jail, the history of the jail must be spoken to," he said. "It predates Confederation and it comes at a time when we were rethinking how we deal with inmates. This will always be referred to as the Don Jail, and parts need to be spoken to as a jail."