With
a few bricks Joshua Beard turned a cabbage patch into a hotel, a
tailor’s shop, a printing office and a grocery store. Beard was
helped by the 1826 economy which was alive with entrepreneurs. His
clever selection of a central property lot, on the southeast corner of
King and New (now Jarvis) Streets, was also paramount to his success(1). Though initially he built the small frame building to be a store, it soon took on a less modest role.
Thomas
Moore was the first to see promise in the site. By 1830 he had opened a
hotel on the site called the Crown Inn, with a crown as its symbol(2). Moore also relocated his tailoring business to it, which had been on the northeast corner of King and Princess Streets(3). The Inn had no stables, and was probably patronized by local tradesmen.
The Crown Inn was open for business for about 10 years(4).
In that time several other businesses had space in the building. The
printing office of George Gurnett’s (1792?-1861) Courier of Upper
Canada was upstairs of the Inn from 1829 until 1837(5).
Gurnett had been in the newspaper business for many years, and retired
only when elected Mayor in 1837. In all he served four terms as Mayor
of Toronto(6).
After Moore closed the Crown Inn, William Henderson’s Grocery Store occupied the main floor of the building(7). Dunlevy, in the footsteps of George Gurnett, printed his newspaper, the Mirror, above Henderson’s store(8). A decade earlier the Mirror sign in the picture likely read Courier, with a second sign beneath it of a crown. |
Notes
- Firth, p.87.
- Robertson, I, p.393.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- W. Stewart Wallace ed., The MacMillan Dictionary of
Canadian Biography, 3rd ed. (Toronto: The MacMillan Company of Canada
Ltd.,1963), p.287.
- Ibid.
- Robertson, I, p.393.
- Ibid.
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