History
The parcel of land now known as Spadina Crescent first appeared on maps of Toronto as early as 1835, originally named “Mansfield's Old Gardens” and then Crescent Garden. There was the intention for the city to turn it into a park after Dr. Baldwin's death, however the conditions for this were never met and his grandchildren sold the land in 1873 to the hon. J. McMurrich of the Presbyterian Church for $10,000.
The building was originally the home of Knox College, a theological college of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Knox College became affiliated with the University of Toronto in 1887, and in 1914 moved to its current location on the west side of King's College Circle. During the First World War, the building became barracks, and shortly afterward the Spadina Military Hospital. For a period in 1918, Amelia Earhart worked as a nurses aide at the hospital. It remained a veterans hospital until 1943 when it was acquired by the University of Toronto's Connaught Medical Research Laboratories, which became one of Canada's main centers for the development and manufacture of pharmaceuticals. The building was in disrepair at this point and needed substantial renovations. It was also around this time that the basement was excavated. It became an academic building again in 1972 with the sale and relocation of the laboratories.
It was the site of a professor's murder in 2001 that remains unsolved. Until 2007, the building's location inside a roundabout made it inaccessible by foot without jaywalking; the issue was resolved with the installation of stop-lights on the east side of the circle.
On 10 September 2009, a woman fell to her death from the third floor roof while allegedly on a "ghost hunt" in the building.
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—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
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—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)