
St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica
Gothic Revival cathedral crypt holding the bishop who died tending famine-era typhus victims.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica in Toronto follows Michael Power, the city's first Catholic bishop, who laid the cathedral's cornerstone in 1845 before sailing to Ireland to raise money and recruit priests. What he found there was the Great Famine, and the warning he sent home came true: tens of thousands of Irish refugees, many already sick, arrived that spring in a city of only about twenty thousand people. Fever sheds went up along the waterfront to receive them.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
The Cathedral Church of St. James
Gothic Revival cathedral with Canada's tallest steeple, rebuilt from ashes of a great city fire.
Toronto Necropolis
Non-denominational nineteenth-century cemetery holding rebellion martyrs and a Gothic Revival chapel among fifty thousand graves.
Trinity Bellwoods Park
Leafy downtown park built over a buried creek ravine, with hidden foundations of a vanished Gothic college beneath its lawns.
Cabbagetown
Working-class Victorian rowhouses named for the vegetables immigrants grew in front yards.