The Carrying Place
The Toronto Carrying Place Trail ran from Lake Ontario up the Humber River to Lake Simcoe, a portage shortcut to the upper Great Lakes, used for a very long time before Europeans arrived.
This is Mississaugas of the Credit territory, and before them Wendat and Haudenosaunee. The name comes from the Mohawk tkaronto.
The French built small trading posts here — Fort Rouillé in 1750 — and burned them in 1759 as the British advanced.
The Toronto Purchase and York
In 1787 the Crown acquired land from the Mississaugas in a transaction so defective it was disputed for two centuries and settled only in 2010, for $145 million.
John Graves Simcoe founded the town of York in 1793 as the capital of Upper Canada, with Fort York at its western edge.
In April 1813 an American force took the town and burned the parliament buildings; the British cited it when they burned Washington the following year.
Toronto
Incorporated as the City of Toronto in 1834, with William Lyon Mackenzie as first mayor. He led a failed rebellion in 1837 and fled.
The Great Fire of 1904 destroyed much of the downtown commercial district and led to stricter building codes.
Toronto the Good
Through the Victorian and Edwardian period the city was British, Protestant and strictly observant. The Orange Order dominated civic politics for a century, and Sunday closing laws were severe enough that playgrounds were chained shut. Professional sport on a Sunday was illegal until 1950.
Communities that did not fit — Black Torontonians from the Underground Railroad era, Jewish, Italian and Chinese immigrants — faced restrictive covenants, exclusion and, in 1933, the Christie Pits riot.
The change
Postwar migration transformed the city. Italians, Portuguese and Greeks from the late 1940s; then, after Canada removed racial criteria from immigration policy in 1967 and adopted official multiculturalism in 1971, migration from the Caribbean, South Asia, Hong Kong, China, the Philippines and a very long list besides.
The subway opened in 1954 — the first in Canada. Nathan Phillips Square and Viljo Revell’s City Hall opened in 1965, built on two-thirds of the demolished first Chinatown.
Toronto passed Montreal as Canada’s largest city in the 1970s, a shift accelerated by Quebec’s political situation.
The modern city
The CN Tower in 1976. The Green Bans-style resistance of the 1970s that stopped the Spadina Expressway from being driven through the city centre — a decision that shaped Toronto very differently from most North American cities.
Amalgamation in 1998, against a referendum. The SARS outbreak in 2003. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission reporting in 2015 on the residential school system.
Housing costs have risen enormously since around 2010 and are now the dominant political issue.