off the grid: ghost city 660 broadview avenue (william peyton hubbard)
This installment of my "Ghost City" column for The Grid was originally published on February 12, 2013. Portrait of William Peyton Hubbard, 1913, by W.A. Sherwood. When William Peyton Hubbard was born in 1842 it’s doubtful his father, a freed slave who had arrived in Toronto two years earlier, imagined that the infant would become one of the city’s most powerful politicians. The road to that accomplishment took time: Before Hubbard entered politics in 1893, he baked cakes and drove a horse cab, occupations that were the norm for the city’s small black population.