One of Toronto’s “newest” neighbourhoods is also one of its oldest with Irish roots dating back a thousand years to the old country.

Even though Toronto’s Corktown (South Shuter St. to the north, the Lakeshore to the south, River Street to the east and Berkeley St. to the

west) is named after County Cork in Ireland, a misconception still lingers that the area is so named because there were once a few cork bottle stoppers factories in the area. Not so.

Cork City, the major city of County Cork, is today Ireland’s third largest (after Dublin and Belfast) and has always been an important seaport beginning as an island in the swampy estuary of the River Lee. The name Corcaigh is Gallic for a marsh, hence Corc or Cork.

Cork City was founded in the sixth century by St. Finbarr, Bishop and patron of Cork, (b550, d623) and is buried in the cathedral he built where Cork City now stands.

In the early ninth century the Norse Vikings after raided and pillaging the place later settled in the town, establishing it as a trading post.

County Cork (one of six counties in the southern Irish province of Munster) was one of the worst affected areas in the Great Irish Famine that at its peak between 1845 and 1847 the county lost 200,000 people (about one-quarter of the total population) to the ravages of starvation after a virus systematically destroyed the potato crop.

In Cork 150,000 people were dead and with the graveyards overflowing and the streets besieged with the wandering sick, 50,000 men, women and children had no choice but to emigrate.

And so it was from this ancient Viking seaport that the majority of the 19th-century starving Irish refugees escaped the horrors of the potato famine boarding the steam ships or coffin ships as they were eventually dubbed that would take them to the new world. All told a million Irish would eventually die and another million would flee.

Upon arrival in Boston, New York, Detroit, Hamilton, St John’s, Philadelphia and Toronto these ragged, starving and emaciated Irish settled into neighbourhoods that were hence nicknamed Corktown after the home they left behind.

Detroit’s Corktown, with its Michigan Avenue main thoroughfare that’s now the site of the annual St Patrick’s Day Parade, was established in 1834 long before the famine (the same year the Town of York became the City of Toronto).

Detroit’s Corktown boundaries are defined as “anything within a 1-mile radius of the pitcher’s mound at Tiger Stadium? and is home to the Gaelic League (established in 1920 as an Irish cultural centre) and the historic Holy Trinity Catholic Church founded in 1834.

Philadelphia’s Corktown also established during the Famine years has gone from being an Irish stronghold to becoming that city’s leading African American neighbourhood but has managed to retain some of its former Gallic ethnicity in its Irish street names.

Hamilton’s Corktown established in the 1840s is located in the southeast corner of its downtown with approximately 7,500 residents and is the home to the famous Corktown Tavern.

So it’s not just in Toronto that there is a Corktown.

Today we still give neighbourhoods nicknames when groups of newly arrived immigrants arrive in Toronto and settle into a specific neighbourhood, i.e., Chinatown, Little India, etc. In my home town of Sudbury even though the majority of the population was of British decent there was still a small neighbourhood nicknamed Little Britain. Rightly or wrongly, stereotyped or not, it’s been a practise here in Toronto and elsewhere for centuries.

Toronto’s Corktown began during the era of mass immigration thanks in part to the railroad during the mid 19th century when Toronto was flooded with newly arrived Europeans looking for a better way of life. The majority of these immigrants arrived here with nothing but the clothes on their backs and in some cases disease ridden.

At the same time Toronto was experiencing a boom-and-bust economy making many of the working class vulnerable to malnutrition and relying on contaminated water, which in turn led to cholera outbreaks.

Teeming slums bursting with 1-room shacks holding 30 people each began to spring up in the back alleys of the newly nicknamed Corktown centering on King and Parliament streets. The city’s answer to these problems brought on by the new industrial age was to happen in two stages. The first was to expand already publicly supported institutions with the largest of these projects being the re-establishment of the Toronto General Hospital on Gerrard Street east of Parliament. The second tactic was to design and build new schools, hospitals and residential homes to be sponsored by various religious groups. Probably nothing illustrated this more than the House of Providence, a massive renaissance-styled multipurpose institution which sat in the middle of a huge park south of the still-standing St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church (Power Street east of Parliament) with which it was affiliated. It was through the doors of this majestic structure that many of Corktown’s early residents got their first true sense of Canadian benevolence and with its castle-like appearance designed to give comfort to the homesick immigrant thousands. Palatial or not it was demolished in 1960 to make way for the Richmond Street on/off ramp to the Gardiner Expressway and all that remains of the 16th-century revivalist French Chateau that at one time gave hope to thousands of destitute refuges are a few giant trees that still line Power Street (the institution however still lives on in Providence Centre on St. Clair Ave. E).

Inner-city Irish Catholics crowded in and around the east end were suffering the most. With their arrival, after fleeing the Great Potato Famine back home, Toronto’s population doubled.

One out of every three people living in Toronto was now of Irish background. Although some of Toronto’s wealthiest and oldest families were of Irish descent they were Protestant and the newly arrived Irish Catholics were not greeted warmly by the old guard. Just like back in Ireland, Protestant and Catholic Irish lived separately and often took to battling in the streets.

Not allowed to live anywhere near their Protestant forebears in the west end, they settled instead in the then largely unpopulated King and Parliament area and in doing so also created, with the planting of cabbages in their yards, Cabbagetown.

At the heart of Corktown where the Derby loft/apartment building now stands (393 King E. at Parliament) was once the site of the Derby Tavern.

Built in 1846 generations of mill workers on their way home from a long day toiling at the various factories and mills in the area would stop off at the Derby.

Once inside they would throw back tankards of ale and singsongs of the old country till they were green in the face. The Derby Tavern, which was torn down in the mid 1980s, was as much a part of our heritage as Fort York or St. James’ Cathedral. Its final years saw it deteriorate into just another dive in a city full of dives but for 180 years the shamrock-inspired Derby tavern served generations of dreamers.

To have heard an old Irish ballad sung decades ago in that tavern by someone who had just arrived from Ireland after leaving his home, his land, his mother, his brother and deliver it with such utter despair and hope for a better world beyond this one, must have been mesmerizing. Words don’t have to be recited within the walls of a cathedral to be deemed meaningful; a bar will do. The echoes of those Derby tenors, who never sung at the Massey Halls of this world, are slowly fading into the dust of time.

You can cry reading Angela’s Ashes or get misty eyed watching an old MGM movie about the Great Irish immigration that came to New York in the 1850s, but for my money give me the four corners of King and Parliament streets any day. It’s real and what happened there to those who came before us should not be forgotten.

However logical it may be to say Toronto’s Corktown is so-named because of a few cork-bottle stoppers factories that at one time sprang up in the area during the hey-day of the giant breweries is like saying Toronto’s Chinatown is so named because of the various china and porcelain shops that once dotted Spadina Ave.

Not only is it wrong it also does a great injustice to our past.

Don’t forget to check out my St. Lawrence Market Food and History Tour. Tours start at 10am Wed. through Sat.Meet me in the main foyer of South St. Lawrence Market, tickets are $20 pp and can be purchased in advance at the Souvenir Market just inside St Lawrence Market. For more info on this please call 416-392-0028 or visit my website www.brucebelltours.com