Editor’s Desk

Visitors are being welcomed back to the fort. While the musicians and infantry of the Fort York Guard have turned in their fifes, drums and muskets for the season, the full-time staff at the fort is now conducting hour-long tours of the grounds and historic buildings. Groups are limited to four people each and tours are normally available Wednesday to Sunday from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. The tours need to be booked beforehand on the City’s web site (click here).

These tours do not include the award-winning Visitor Centre and its stunning multi-media experience of the Battle of York. The building’s static displays are already five years old and include, for example, the discredited Beaver Wars narrative of Indigenous warfare in Ontario (see this summer’s F&D). Toronto Museums staff are hoping to create fresh displays that will give people a new reason to visit when full operations resume. There’s no budget for this, however, and the Friends of Fort York (my publisher and many subscribers) will no doubt be involved in the fund-raising.

Only those with tour tickets are allowed inside the walls of the fort. The Canteen – with its rich stock of books, wooden toys, quills & ink, Blue Willow china, First Nations crafts and local souvenirs – remains closed. Plans are building for an online shop for all of Toronto Museums, but (apart from a “Coming Soon” promise on a web page) we’ve seen nothing about it. We’re hoping it’s running by Christmas.

The benefits normally enjoyed by members of the Friends, meanwhile, are being extended throughout this period so that no one is paying for advantages that, for the time being, don’t exist. Simple donations are more welcome than ever; see www.fortyork.ca.

But there’s great news on the capital works side: the travesty of the cheap siding on the Bentway’s addition to the Visitor Centre, and the eroding escarpment behind it (a separate issue) has been resolved. Led by the Waterfront Secretariat of the City’s planning department, funding has been assembled mainly from development charges to install the necessary 15 Corten steel panels. This will complete the façade of the Zamboni garage and extend the dramatic steel escarpment eastward. Design work over