St Lawrence Hall
Corinthian-columned Victorian hall that once hosted abolitionist lectures and grand opera nights.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Elgin & Winter Garden Theatres
Stacked Edwardian theatres with hand-painted garden walls and real dried leaves hidden for decades.
Roy Thomson Hall
Glass-domed concert hall reengineered with movable wooden canopies for orchestral acoustics.
Sankofa Square
Fountain-lined plaza and video-screen gathering spot, renamed for a West African symbol of memory.
Allan Gardens Conservatory
Domed glasshouse of exotic palms, rebuilt after a fire and freshly restored under its glass dome.
Guild Park & Gardens
Bluff-top sculpture park displaying rescued facades, columns and reliefs from demolished city landmarks.
St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica
Gothic Revival cathedral crypt holding the bishop who died tending famine-era typhus victims.