Toronto's history is one of its people – those who founded the city, built it, and vowed to make it their own. Established by the British, it could have remained exclusive, elitist. Instead, from the moment of its incorporation on March 6, 1834, it opened its arms to newcomers, to the underprivileged, to the destitute – and in time, to the culturally and racially diverse.
And somehow, almost miraculously, over 175 years it has managed to stay that way.
Over the next several Saturdays, the Star presents turning points in the city's illustrious history that have helped bring it one step closer to the Toronto we know today.
We start with the first crisis the city faced, in the year it was born. The compassionate way Toronto dealt with the public-health crisis of cholera is a telling sign of the kind of city it would eventually become.
The disease arrived by ship on the shores of Lake Ontario in the summer of 1832, and within a day, the death toll began to rise.
Every morning, a few of the 5,000 inhabitants of Toronto, then the Town of York, fell sick with cholera, and by night, their bodies were collected by the cholera car to be buried in an isolated corner of St. James cemetery.
"This morning, the cholera car passed our door in the morning ... and again as we came out of meeting at noon, was it receiving the body of a man who had died in the house opposite," alderman Jessie Lesslie wrote in his journal in 1832. "How many cases may have been today, I know not."
The first outbreak ended in three months, leaving about 200 dead and the remaining population fearing that the disease, with its violent bouts of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea – and no known cure – would eventually return to a town where sewage flowed in the streets.
It did return, in the summer of 1834, the year Toronto was born.
Toronto was incorporated as a city on a cold spring day, with its first public-health crisis already underway.
It was a blessing in disguise.
The pressing fear of cholera led to a city-wide consciousness of public health. It propelled efforts to create a more sanitary city.
"Everybody involved in the new municipality of Toronto had a fresh memory of how terrible it was two years before," said Logan Atkinson, an associate professor of law at Carleton University in Ottawa, who has written on the impact of cholera on Toronto's early bylaws.
"There was a sense of the urgency in dealing with it," he said. "People lived in fear of another outbreak."
During the 1832 epidemic, in the belief that cholera was passed from person to person, the York hospital at King and John Sts. – the city's first – was converted into a cholera hospital to quarantine the afflicted.
The two-storey brick building could hold 100 patients, but smaller cholera sheds were set up near the hospital and on Parliament St.
"Anti-contagionists" maintained the disease could be transmitted through the air, and pushed to keep the streets clean and remove garbage, human waste and standing water. They were on the right track: cholera spreads through a bacterium ingested in contaminated water and food.
So poignant were these concerns that three of the nine bylaws passed in the city council's first year were directly related to public health.
One dealt with the disposal of garbage; one established the board of health; and one included plans to construct proper sewers. No longer could you throw your garbage or waste into the streets or Lake Ontario, or leave it unattended on your property. Residents were now responsible for proper disposal.
"The council said: We are going to compel you to do this, under penalty, and fine you if you don't," said Atkinson. "It was a step towards promoting the public good over individual right.
"It was quite the shift."
Many of the city's initial efforts were in response to the inaction of the provincial government during the 1832 outbreak.
Despite being warned by no less than King William IV about the impending outbreak, Upper Canada failed to pass any regulation to prevent the spread of cholera.
"Upper Canada was embarrassingly late in its development of a legislative and regulatory regime to prepare people for the arrival of the disease," Atkinson said.
When the city of Toronto was created, the province downloaded the burden of dealing with cholera, forcing it and other towns to create their own health boards, raise their own funds for hospitals, and manage the growing epidemic.
"It was a complete transfer of authority from the central government to a local municipality," said Atkinson.
"Today we hear about it all the time ... but at the time, it was highly unusual."
By the end of Toronto's first year, cholera appeared to have left the city – for good. Other diseases would threaten the people of Toronto – typhus, smallpox, polio, and, decades later, SARS.
But the cholera epidemic had led to a fundamental change in the way the city viewed itself and its citizens' interests.
In next Saturday's Star: Educating Toronto's citizens.