A ninety-eight-room Gothic Revival folly built by a financier who lost it to unpaid taxes within a decade.
Sir Henry Pellatt made a fortune bringing hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls to Toronto and speculating in Canadian Northern Railway shares. Between 1911 and 1914 he spent around $3.5 million — an enormous sum then — building himself a castle on the escarpment above the city.
The architect was E. J. Lennox, who also designed Toronto’s Old City Hall.
It has 98 rooms, 3 bowling alleys that were never finished, an oven large enough to roast an ox, two secret passages, an 800-foot tunnel to the stables, and — unusually for 1914 — an elevator, central vacuum, and a telephone system with more lines than the city of Toronto.
The fall
Pellatt lived in it for less than a decade.
Canadian Northern was nationalised in 1917, and his hydro monopoly ended when Ontario took the utility public. He had borrowed heavily. By 1923 he owed the city around $27,000 in back taxes on a property costing an unsustainable amount to run, and he moved out.
The contents were auctioned. The house went to the city for unpaid taxes and stood empty, was briefly a hotel and a nightclub, and was taken over by the Kiwanis Club in 1937 as a tourist attraction. Pellatt died in 1939 in a friend’s home, effectively broke.
What to see
The Great Hall, 18 metres high with a hammerbeam ceiling.
The Conservatory, with a stained-glass dome and marble floors, heated by steam pipes so that Pellatt could grow tropical plants through a Toronto winter.
Sir Henry’s suite and Lady Mary’s suite, and the unfinished upper floors, which were left bare when the money ran out and are shown as they are.
The towers — the Scottish and the Norman — both climbable, with views over the city.
The tunnel and the stables, which are the highlight. The horses had Spanish tile floors and mahogany stalls with their names in gold leaf.
The gardens, open May to October, with terraces down the escarpment.
On screen
Casa Loma has been used in a great many films and series — X-Men, Chicago, The Handmaid’s Tale, Strange Brew, Scott Pilgrim — because it is a castle twenty minutes from downtown Toronto with parking.
Practicalities
Ticketed, and not cheap. An audio guide is included and worth using; the house has almost no wall text.
Allow two to three hours with the gardens. Dupont station is a five-minute walk, but it is genuinely uphill — the house sits on the old shoreline of glacial Lake Iroquois, which is the escarpment running across the middle of Toronto.
Evening events, escape rooms and a Christmas programme run at various times and can close parts of the house.
More Landmarks
CN Tower
553 metres of concrete built to fix a television reception problem, with a glass floor and an option to walk around the outside.
The Toronto Islands
Fifteen islands a ferry ride offshore, with no cars, a residential community that fought eviction for forty years, and the best view of the skyline.
Fort York
The garrison the town was founded around, where the Americans blew up the magazine in 1813 and started a chain of events that burned Washington.