Chris Bateman on the odd history of Ontario’s fourth official home of the Lieutenant Governor:
Lieutenant Governor of Ontario Elizabeth Dowdeswell is one of four Canadian viceregal representatives to be (officially) homeless. Toronto pulled down its last government house, an astonishingly opulent mansion even among its Rosedale neighbours, in 1959 in the name of cost saving.
Just over a century ago, on 15 November 1915, the first official guests were welcomed inside the grand hall of Ontario’s million dollar palace. Twenty years later it was be derelict. Chorley Park is now largely forgotten, save for the small piece of it that remains on the edge of the Don Valley.
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The province, however, had other ideas. It rejected Gage’s offer and forged ahead with the Rosedale site, known as Chorley Park, after the town of Chorley in Lancashire, England, the birthplace of Toronto alderman John Hallam.
The final design for the grand residence was drawn up by Francis R. Heakes – the province’s official architect also responsible for the Whitney Block on Queen’s Park Crescent – in the style of a French Loire Valley château.
Heakes’ blueprint borrowed heavily from submissions to the 1911 design competition, including many of the exterior details and the floor plan, and was limited to a budget of $215,000.
Chorley Park in Rosedale
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The ongoing cost of maintaining the ostentatious mansion proved to be its eventual undoing. The Conservative provincial government found the cost even harder to justify as the Depression began to take hold in the 1920s.
Despite voices calling for the house to be abandoned, it lingered on as the official home of Ontario’s lieutenant-governor until 1937 when the fine furnishings and fixtures were stripped out and sold at auction.
When world war two began, the gutted interior was converted into a military hospital for wounded soldiers.
Chorley Park met its eventual end in 1959 when, with the last of the patients gone and a brief period as a refuge for Hungarian immigrants fleeing the revolution over, the Metro government under Fred Gardiner ordered the building torn down.
