From behind ornate railings on a deck high atop fishermen’s homes within sight of the Atlantic, bereft widows are said to have walked back and forth scanning the horizon and pining for long lost, never-to-return husbands.
The unromantic fact of the matter is that those “widows' walks” had a very mundane purpose. A chimney fire in the middle of the night could be doused by pouring down a bucket of sand but it was a hard climb up the pitch of a snowy roof in slippers and an ankle-length nightshirt while lugging a 15-pound pail. The so-called widows’ walks solved the problem by providing a rooftop platform that could be reached from inside the attic simply by climbing a ladder and opening a hatch.
Victorians in Toronto bought into the widows’ walk myth and put cast-iron replicas on top of fancy houses on Jarvis Street but Corktown, closer to the old shoreline of Lake Ontario, can keep up with them. Some of the 140-year-old houses on much-photographed Bright Street had their own widows’ walks, but they were only 14” high and on bay windows where if the owner did venture out, there was a good chance of falling off and adding to the myth.
The walks were mass-produced in cast-iron and were as decorative as the back street foundries of the mid 19th century could make them. While only ornamental when installed in 1867, the occupants, probably workers in the Dominion brewery just up on Queen Street, would have seen the masts of sailing ships in Toronto Harbour then just a stone’s throw away. In a 1942 painting by George D. Pepper the walks can be seen, high above the heads of kids playing games in the middle of the street. Not a car in sight.
Clumsy roofers with no artistic sensibility or appreciation for history broke these priceless pieces of old Toronto and threw some of them out. The owners led by Radford Cook, had a feeling for Corktown’s past and looked for a way to repair the damage and restore the streetscape. The originals were fragile and difficult to replicate but an Ontario foundry used an old section and cast enough pieces in aluminum to be able to bolt them together as they were originally constructed. After countless hours of work, cooperation and expense the widows can walk again. It was worth it. For the best view take a stroll down the east side of Bright Street.
A painting of Bright Street in 1961 in the Toronto archives shows the same features
Similar features can be seen on a house at the corner of Richmond Street and Berkeley.
The original walks from which a foundry managed to copy in aluminum.
The final casts painted and ready for installation
