The Rupert Hotel

Part of Louise Cornish's neighbourhood

Almost invisible under the slush of a cold February morning, there is a plaque embedded in the sidewalk at Queen and Parliament Streets. It marks the death of ten men in the location of what once called the Rupert Hotel.

Prince Rupert was the first governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It’s unlikely he ever stayed in such a hotel, if you could have called it that: flophouse, dive, rooming house are more accurate descriptions. The ten who died are now almost truly forgotten, though during their grim lives they simply existed as forgotten men in Toronto’s lower east side.

The Rupert Hotel burned down two days before Christmas in 1989. Ten names are engraved on that plaque, but in all the years I’ve lived in the neighbourhood, the thousands of times I walked over it, I think I might be the only one who ever stopped to look down and actually read it.

Torontonians, as the joke goes, are always looking down – money might have fallen out of someone’s pocket. In this neighbourhood, in between what are now the remains of Regent Park and the dump that is Moss Park Apartments, you couldn’t blame the poor for hoping to find a quarter on the sidewalk. Yet no one ever stops to read the plaque.

Maybe people don’t realize that the ten dead men had far more impact in death than they ever did in life. The fire, the speed with which it consumed the building, the ten dead -- two days before Christmas -- made City Hall reconsider fire safety regulations in rooming houses, apartments, condominiums, and hotels.

People drive past the plaque, walk over it, chat on their cell phones on the Queen streetcar, oblivious to the tragedy that killed ten men. Toronto is a city of forgotten history, of obscure monuments, people who made a difference in our city that no one knows about.

While some might find this sad or even pathetic, I find it an opportunity. Every time I go out walking in our city I can learn something new about our history.