Toronto Central Prison Chapel, Prison chapel in Liberty Village, Toronto, Canada.
The Toronto Central Prison Chapel is an 1877 Roman Catholic prison chapel and the last remaining building of the Toronto Central Prison complex, which stood south of King Street and west of Strachan Avenue. The chapel was built by prisoners of the prison. A wall of the prison's paint shop also survives on the east side of the Liberty Storage Warehouse.
The structure was built by inmates in 1877 and served as a place of worship at the maximum-security prison until the facility closed in 1915. After the prison ceased operations, the site was repurposed for military storage purposes.
The chapel was built by the prisoners themselves in 1877, so its brickwork is the work of the men it served. It later stood inside the Inglis factory complex, and in 2011 it was slated to become a Miller Tavern restaurant, a plan that never opened. The grounds around it are now Liberty Village Park.
The building has been vacant and inaccessible since 2015, showing signs of exposure to the elements over time. The surrounding area is now a public park that provides a vantage point to view this heritage structure from outside.
Along with a section of the paint shop wall, this chapel represents the only physical traces remaining from a prison complex that once housed roughly 336 inmates. The inmate-built construction tells the story of a facility where prisoners worked on site.
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