Photo by Rick McGinnis / t.o.night Newspaper

By RICK McGINNIS – for t.o.night Newspaper

There’s a long stretch of sloping earth at the edge of the parking lot by Fort York in the shadow of the Gardiner Expressway where, 200 years ago, Lake Ontario used to lap at the shore by the unfinished walls of the fort.

If everything had gone according to plan, this would be the site of Fort York’s new Visitor Centre, where workmen would be busy rushing to get the building ready for its opening later this year.

That hasn’t happened, and right now it looks like 2012 will come and go before the Visitor’s Centre opens its doors.

Stephen Otto is a historian and the co-chairman of the Friends of Fort York, the volunteer organization that helps run activities at the fort, and he explains that while it’s disappointing, it isn’t a fatal blow to the city’s commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812.

The Visitor Centre is apparently a victim of the city’s success.

Just over two years ago, the winners of a competition to design the building were announced – a partnership between Vancouver firm Patkau and Toronto’s Kearns Mancini Architects, which produced a long, tiered structure built into the shoreline, bordered with grasses and featuring sloped walls that evoke defensive fortifications.

Otto says that after funding from private donors and all three levels of government were in place, a call for construction tenders went out last year, which closed in September but produced no bids that matched the $23-million budget.

“It was a busy year for building in Toronto, I guess,” Otto says. “We need to find contractors who are hungry enough for business or a particular package of design requirements that will allow us to build the Visitor’s Centre and finish the landscaping for $23 million. It’s as simple as that.”

It will be, everyone agrees, a spectacular building, and the first real step in reclaiming the largely unused land that sits under or adjacent to the Gardiner.

Its opening would have been a real highlight of the year’s anniversary festivities, but Otto is quick to point out that the War of 1812 in North America lasted three years, and the Battle of York, in which Toronto and Fort York were the battleground, didn’t take place until the spring of 1813.

Sandra Shaul has been living with the Battle of York for a long time.

She’s in charge of the 1812 commemoration activities for the City of Toronto’s cultural division, and while she says it would have been nice to see ground broken for the Visitor Centre last fall, “it’s better to get it done right, and that’s what we’ll be doing.”

“For me,” Shaul says, “working on this project has gone from being a piece of forgettable Grade 8 history to something that I can actually feel and taste and have become very passionate about. I’ve learned more about war on this project than on anything else in my life, because one of the interesting things about the War of 1812 is that it took place where we live.”

Shaul launches into a narrative description of the battle, based on landmarks and buildings we know today.

The Americans arrived off the shore of Toronto – then called York – late in the evening of April 26, 1813, and came ashore in the fog the next morning where corporate logos are currently landscaped into the grass next to the GO train lines near Parkdale.

The defence of the town, under the command of Major-General Roger Hale Sheaffe, the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, was in shambles – Fort York was being rebuilt, Sheaffe was unable to muster all his troops, and thanks to miscommunication, the militia were sent into the woods, away from the advancing Americans.

First Nations warriors allied with the British were swept aside, and the first British defences near what’s now the western edge of the Exhibition grounds were overwhelmed.

Fort York was abandoned, but not before retreating troops blew up the ammunition magazine, debris from which killed General Zebulon Pike, the commander of the American infantry.

Pike was a romantic figure, loved by his troops, and his death probably contributed to the savage, six-day occupation that followed, during which Elmsley House, home of the lieutenant-governor – located where Roy Thompson Hall is today – was looted, and the Parliament Buildings on Front Street were burned down.

There was sabotage by militia and reprisals by the occupiers and nearly 500 casualties, Shaul says, with 170 left dead when the Americans finally retreated.

Ontario Heritage Trust owns part of the land where the Parliament buildings once stood – a former Porsche showroom that they’re reopening on Feb. 17 as a centre, to feature “engaging, interpretive exhibits and displays that will promote the history of the site and its significance in the War of 1812,” according to a statement from a Trust spokesperson.

For her part, Shaul is grateful that the province will have the facility ready and open, since the absence of anything on the site “was making it a little difficult to tell the story.”

According to Otto and Shaul, there’s no formal organization overseeing the bicentennial’s activities.

The city and the fort’s volunteers have their own agendas, of course, and Shaul tells me that the province has seven “1812 regions,” not to mention exhibits and celebrations going on across the border in places like Sackets Harbor in upstate New York.

Ottawa has designated October as a heritage month, and everyone is hoping that all of this combined effort will draw in tourists, especially school groups – the prized demographic – and hopefully they come away with some sense of the war and its lasting importance.

“I think we were lucky to have had the War of 1812,” Otto says, “because it’s quite possible that we’d have drifted away from where we’ve ended up – the creation of a sovereign nation on the north end of the continent.”

Shaul sees the war, and York’s survival when it was all over, as vital to Toronto’s eventual success.

Fort York was built, she points out, because it was in such a strong strategic position – the same reason why it’s hemmed in today by streets, railway lines and freeways, still in sight of the lake and just a short walk from an airport. And the infrastructure built by the defenders of the city – military roads like Yonge and Dundas and a sheltered harbour – were the key to Toronto’s later rise as a manufacturing centre.

“The analogy I always use is Sackets Harbor,” Shaul says, “which was a centre of the U.S. Navy on the Great Lakes during the War of 1812 and has the same sized population today as it did in 1812; while we’ve grown from 700 people then to 2.7 million today.

“We’ve been the way we are since Day 1; we were built in anticipation of war, and we grew because of the successful outcome after the war. So I say we may have lost the battle but we won the war.”