160 Unusual Things to See in Ontario ~ Old City Hall Gargoyles, Toronto

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Old City Hall is a Romanesque-style civic building and former court house in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was the home of the Toronto City Council from 1899 to 1966 and a provincial court house until 2023, and remains one of the city's most prominent structures.

The building is located at the corner of Queen and Bay streets, across Bay Street from Nathan Phillips Square and the present City Hall in Downtown Toronto. The heritage landmark has a distinctive clock tower which heads the length of Bay Street from Front Street to Queen Street as a terminating vista. Old City Hall was designated a National Historic Site in 1984.

Old City Hall features a large, 103.6-metre-tall (340 ft) clock tower that is a terminating vista for Bay Street south of Queen Street West and is also prominently visible from Queen Street and Nathan Phillips Square. The clock tower was the tallest structure in Canada for 18 years from 1899 until 1917. The clock was made in Croydon, England, by Gillett & Johnston, for many years, A. G. Abernethy, clockmaker on Yonge Street, was in charge with repairing and maintaining the clock. Four garnished stone gargoyles sat at the upper corners of the clock tower; these ornaments were removed due to the effects of the weather on the sandstone carvings in 1938.

The clock functioned manually until the 1950s when it was automated. In 1992, the clock was stopped for the first time in more than a century to perform maintenance and repairs. The maintenance consisted of painting the metallic components of the clock: its bronze, brass, iron and steel. The room, at the top of the tower, enclosed on four sides by timepieces, houses the glass box in which the clock's mechanism sits. The room is accessible by stairs only; there are 280 steps to climb. The elevator that was built with the structure was taken out in the 1920s. The clock's face measures 6 metres (20 ft) in diameter.

In 2002, bronze casts of the gargoyles were reinstalled. The replicas are not duplicates as the original designs were lost. The gargoyles are similar to those on the Peace Tower in Ottawa.