New downtown park to honour Anglican doctor who treated Irish immigrants in 1840s

Construction is expected to begin next week on a small downtown park that will honour an Anglican doctor who treated ailing Irish Catholic immigrants in Toronto in the 1840s.

Dr. George Robert Grasett, who died in Toronto at the age of 36 on July 16, 1847, treated Irish immigrants even though he knew he was putting himself at great risk, according to the Ireland Park Foundation, a Toronto charitable organization that creates and maintains commemorative public spaces.

The park, which will be located at the southeast corner of Adelaide Street West and Widmer Street, is expected to open officially within a year. It will cost $2.2 million.

Robert Kearns, founder and chairman of the Ireland Park Foundation, says the park will commemorate not only Dr. Grasett, but also those infected by typhus in the summer of 1847. And it will mark a chapter in the medical history of Toronto. He said Grasett was an "exceptional" person. 

"He exemplifies all that is positive about getting out of the tribalism of sectarianism and saying what is the right thing to do," Kearns says in a video about the park. 

Kearns told Metro Morning on Tuesday that more than 38,000 Irish immigrants arrived in Toronto starting in June 1847. Some were sick with typhus, or "ship fever" as it was called. There was no cure for it at the time. Dr. Grasett, whose father and grandfather were doctors trained in Dublin, sought to treat these people.

He said Dr. Grasett, whose older brother, Henry Grasett, was the Dean of St. James' Anglican Cathedral, came from an established Anglican background. He was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1811, his family moved to Canada in 1815, and he came to Toronto as an adult in 1842.

"He had many generations of medical care in his family and he was a compassionate man," Kearns said.

"He had access to every smart dining room in the city but chose to lobby his brother to become the attending physician, as the title was, at the Emigrant Hospital," Kearns said.

Dr. Grasett got the position at the hospital on June 18 and was dead of typhus less than a month later, he said.

The park will commemorate his "extraordinary" public service, he said. 

Kearns said the park, 25 metres by six metres, will be a modern, contemporary and evocative piece of public space and architecture. It will have benches with the names of hospital staff who helped to treat the sick.

And there will be panels of glass with embedded images of cheese cloth, a material which was used in the 1840s to act as fly and mosquito netting in what was called the "fever sheds."

The "footprint" of the park will be black granite from Quebec and Cane's 1842 map of Toronto will be engraved onto the stone. The panels of glass, that will rise about 10 metres high, will be illuminated from below.

"It's the last handkerchief of land available to build anywhere of a commemorate nature on what was called a hospital reserve," Kearns said.

On Wednesday, the foundation will announce its plans for the park. The foundation built Ireland Park, near Lake Ontario on Éireann Quay at the foot of Bathurst Street, to commemorate victims of the Irish famine who came to Toronto in 1847.