Don Jail and Bridgepoint Health

Many people wonder about the relationship in Toronto between the old Don Jail and Bridgepoint Health Hospital (formerly Riverview Hospital). Why were a jail and a hospital sharing a site?!

In fact, the history of these two institutions dates back to the mid-1800s when Toronto was becoming aware that it needed to provide social supports for many of its marginalized citizens. And so came about the plans for both a “reform jail” that would help rehabilitate, rather than punish, criminals who convicted relatively minor crimes, and a House of Refuge for, in the words of the time, “the vagrant, the dissolute, and idiots”. At this time in Toronto social supports were not managed by the government, but rather provided by individuals and charitable organizations – often with a religious affiliation; the idea that the city should have some responsibility for these citizens was a relatively new concept.

In 1856 Toronto paid £10,000 to purchase 119 acres on the east side the Don River from the Scadding Estate to be used for the two facilities and farmland that would be worked by the prisoners and help make the two institutions self-sufficient. It is hard to imagine today, but when the site was purchased the Don River was clean, and this was an almost idyllic location far away from the polluted and crime-ridden city.

The House of Refuge opened in 1860 and the Don Jail opened in 1864. However it was quickly apparent that many of those sent to the jail were, in fact, people experiencing homelessness, mental illness, and/or alcohol addiction and would be better supported by the House of Refuge. Right from the beginning there were deep ties between the hospital and the jail.

Unfortunately for the city’s poor and struggling, just shy of 10 years after it was built, the 100-bed House of Refuge was converted into a hospital to deal with the 1869 smallpox epidemic. When that crisis passed the site never reverted back to a refuge. It now operated as the Riverdale Isolation Hospital focusing on infectious diseases including diphtheria, polio, measles and scarlet fever, as well as continuing to manage smallpox outbreaks. The original House of Refuge was torn down in 1894. Various buildings and different wings were added to the site over time, each dedicated to a specific illness, with the main buildings erected around 1904. Over time, with vaccinations and the reduction in epidemics, the hospital’s focus shifted to long-term care and rehabilitation. To reflect these changes, in 1957 the hospital dropped the word Isolation and simply became The Riverdale Hospital. It was renamed again in 2002, becoming Bridgepoint, a hospital that specializes in rehabilitation.

The 1963 modernist Riverdale Hospital structure was torn down in 2013-2014 to make way for the modern facility that is on site today. At that time, Bridgepoint also took over the old Don Jail, a heritage designated building which had been sitting vacant since 1977, converting most of the building into office space for the hospital while also preserving much of the heritage. The east wing of the Don Jail that had been constructed in 1958 and operated until 2013 was also demolished at this time.

And so, the two sites that once began as a tandem social welfare project for Toronto, are not only historically connected through their shared ideologically beginnings but they are now physically fused together. Perhaps a jail and a hospital on the same site is not as strange as it might first seem…