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.
John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, chose this harbour in 1793 as a defensible naval base and founded the town of York beside it. The fort came first; the town followed.
Toronto exists because of this piece of ground.
The Battle of York
On 27 April 1813, during the War of 1812, an American force of around 1,700 landed west of the fort and advanced on it. The British garrison, heavily outnumbered, retreated east — and detonated the grand magazine as they went.
The explosion threw stone and debris across the battlefield, killed around 38 Americans and wounded over 200, among them Brigadier General Zebulon Pike, who died of his injuries. Pike’s Peak in Colorado is named after him.
The Americans occupied York for six days and burned the parliament buildings and the government house.
The British cited that burning as justification when they burned the public buildings of Washington, including the White House, in August 1814. The chain of causation is direct and it started here.
What survives
The fort was rebuilt after 1813 and the surviving buildings are largely from then — seven original structures from the 1810s, the largest collection of War of 1812 buildings anywhere.
The officers’ brick barracks and mess, the blockhouses, the stone magazine of 1815 with walls two metres thick, and the earthworks.
Costumed interpreters run musket and artillery demonstrations, and the Fort York Guard performs fife and drum in summer.
The kitchen produces historically accurate food, which is more interesting than it sounds.
The visitor centre
Opened in 2014, cut into the escarpment with a weathered-steel front, and containing a good exhibition on the fort and on the shoreline — including how far the water used to come in.
Around it
The Bentway, opened in 2018, is a public space built underneath the Gardiner Expressway beside the fort — a skating trail in winter, events and installations otherwise. It is an unusually good piece of urban design and it is free.
Garrison Common is the open ground north of the fort.
Practicalities
Ticketed and inexpensive; part of the City of Toronto’s museum system, and a multi-site pass exists covering this, Spadina Museum, Mackenzie House and others.
Hours are reduced in winter. Streetcar 511 along Bathurst stops nearby, or walk from the CN Tower in fifteen minutes.
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.
Casa Loma
A ninety-eight-room Gothic Revival folly built by a financier who lost it to unpaid taxes within a decade.
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.