Then
Now
Provincial Lunatic Asylum. Photograph attributed to John Hollingsworth, ca. 1861. From Toronto Public Library, Toronto Reference Library, Special Collections (T 30333)
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Queen Street Site. Photograph, 2008. © Toronto Public Library
The Provincial Lunatic Asylum, the first permanent mental health facility in Canada West, was officially opened on January 26, 1850. It was located on a 50-acre site, part of the Garrison Reserve, near the city limits on the south side of Queen Street West opposite today’s Ossington Avenue. Architect John Howard planned a technically advanced building with central heating, mechanical ventilation and indoor plumbing designed to treat patients in a humane environment.
Overcrowded from the beginning, the Provincial Lunatic Asylum experienced declining standards, particularly in the decades following the First World War. The introduction of new community-based rehabilitative programs in the 1950s began a period of revitalization. To underscore the change, the facility was renamed Queen Street Mental Health Centre, the street address was renumbered from 999 to 1001 Queen West, and the old asylum – called "one of the outstanding monuments of neo-classicism in Canada" by architectural historian William Dendy - was demolished in 1975-76, despite impassioned protests from heritage advocates. The present Centre for Addiction and Mental Health was completed on the site in 1979.