St Lawrence Hall

This guide to St Lawrence Hall in Toronto opens on April first, eighteen fifty-one, when the brand-new hall's very first public event was not a ball or a concert but a lecture titled simply Slavery, delivered by British abolitionist George Thompson. It follows the voices that stood on that same platform afterward, including the escaped-slave-turned-orator Frederick Douglass, and the fifty-three delegates who gathered here that fall as the North American Convention of Colored Freemen, men who had crossed the border because Toronto would not send them back. Showman P. T. Barnum brought the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind here that same year, and for three nights the hall echoed instead with opera.