At the Sign of the Greenland Fishery: Schooner Days MCCLII (1252)

by C. H. J. Snider

A PROMISE is a promise and before this year ends we must tell how the Greenland Fishery that stood for three quarters of a century at the northwest corner of John and Front streets, across from the third Parliament Houses of Upper Canada, got its name.

When it was built in 1825 Toronto was still York, population under 8,000. When it was torn down Toronto had near 200,000. In 1825 the Western Gap below Fort York was the only harbor entrance. There were five steamers on Lake Ontario, the Frontenac, Queen Charlotte, Queenston, Toronto and Niagara, and forty sailing vessels, all of which carried passengers as well as freight but no better. No railways yet, and the roads were terrific.

Perched high on the Front street bank above Toronto Bay (pellucid and potable for another generation) the new clapboarded two-story hotel would be the first hostelry passengers would sight. If ice or weather prevented entrance to the port it was the nearest hotel for passengers forced to land at the Garrison. It was also convenient for stagecoach passengers from Niagara or Hamilton at first a three-day journey away.

When the new Parliament buildings were opened it was popular with the Solons. John Sheridan Hogan, member of the old Parliament of Canada, murdered by the Brooks Bush gang in the covered bridge over the Don in 1859, was one of its customers. He did not live there, but at the more fashionable Rossin House. Hogan was a brilliant Irish journalist and editor of the British Colonist almost up to the time of his murder.

York's principal travelers' inns were near the foot of Church street and St. Lawrence Market. One was called the Steamboat Hotel, after the new means of transit ... They all had big signs. This new one away west of town needed something striking to offset such advertising. It had it.

The John street corner of the hostelry was nipped off in a neat diagonal to make a bar entrance though the main door, fanlighted and sidelighted, was on Front st. Over the bar entrance, opposite the street gas lamp was a swinging signboard that would knock your eye out if you came too close. It was painted by a stranded and much traveled sailor, who had thereby solved this problem of the winter grub-stake.

Who he was history knows not does it record any early Toronto tars who went whaling. Several Pultneyville sailors though, from across Lake Ontario, joined Pacific whaleships out of New Bedford and San Francisco. But this lad knew northern whaling, and on one side of the sign he painted green and white icebergs cruising the dark blue waters of the Greenland seas, with polar bears, seals, walruses and Northern Lights thrown in. On the other side square-riggers, with main topsails aback, watched the outcome of a battle between boat loads of whalemen and a black leviathan.

That was why the hotel was called the Greenland Fishery for years, though the sign on the front said "BEACHAM HOUSE." Edward Wright, the landlord prospered and became an alderman of the new city of Toronto.