The Uncovering Toronto’s Lost Black Churches research project is a collaboration between ERA’s Interpreting Slavery, Trauma, and Heritage (ISTH) Initiative, led by Michael Otchie and Zeina Ahmed, and Camilla Minh Hoang, an emerging scholar and recent graduate from the University of Toronto, with the support of Catherine Riddell and other colleagues at ERA.
Camilla Hoang discusses how the research project emerged and describes recent collaborations and explorations. This project demonstrates how lost community assets and intangible heritage are relevant today.
The project began by studying a historic map of the City of Toronto that included several Black churches in an area formerly known as The Ward, which is now the site of City Hall. This provided an opportunity to utilize the expertise of heritage professionals to investigate various disparate resources and explore how design studio practices can help make Black history accessible and relatable to contemporary audiences.
This research process involved examining archives that document the early presence of Black individuals in Canada, which included drawings, maps, books, directories, and newspaper articles. We utilized the City of Toronto’s description of Toronto’s early Black population of
“enslaved women, men, and children, Black Loyalists, and African Americans escaping enslavement in the United States…rural Black Canadians moving from Nova Scotia or south-western Ontario, as well as people from the Caribbean and the African continent.”¹
Further, we defined Black churches in the 19th century as places of worship serving the Black community, and characterized them as such in primary and secondary sources. Most of the churches were located within the area formerly known as The Ward, now part of downtown Toronto.
Within the scope of this research, we studied the built and intangible heritage of seven churches constructed between 1834 to 1893, six of which share an established connection with the Black community in Toronto. Among the seven sites, the Church of the Holy Trinity, also known as the Holy Trinity Church, functioned as a control in the research process, serving as an example of a place of worship that has maintained continuity across the period under study. A direct linkage between the Black community and the Holy Trinity Church was not revealed during our research; however, further research may provide additional insight into connections, considering the church’s presence in The Ward during this time. The church’s enduring presence highlights the contrasting absence of the Black churches in their original locations.
Our team then explored ways to translate the findings into visual and interactive media, highlighting patterns of physical and cultural loss within the urban fabric that occurred throughout the 20th century. We ultimately opted to animate our findings using tactile, three-dimensional models and imagery, hoping to underscore the importance of play in fostering open-ended learning about Black history and its heritage assets. Given the nature of the content we’re representing, our research emphasized a collective acknowledgment of past hurts and the healing processes embedded within histories that shape the built environment.
The creation of physical models as playful artifacts facilitated discussions about how Black heritage can be shared in a multicultural context like Toronto. These engagement tools offer a distinct alternative to the formal, text-based sources typical in academic settings, which often focus on historical narratives from a singular perspective.
By exploring multi-sensory, interactive, and participatory methods of communicating Black heritage narratives, the project aims to overcome both tangible and intangible barriers to collective remembrance. Our vision is that this educational approach can spark new conversations about aspects of the built environment and cultural heritage that have been overlooked and their significance to people today.
Student Engagement Workshop at the University of Toronto and the Toronto Metropolitan University
In the fall of 2025, we presented our research and the interactive model in two engagement workshops with undergraduate students from the University of Toronto and graduate planning students from the Toronto Metropolitan University. These workshops were designed and coordinated with the support of Professor Jessica Mace and Professor Sneha Madhan, and this opportunity to share the model with a public audience allowed us to best observe the model’s performance as an engagement tool in an active setting.
In our first engagement workshop with the students of Professor Mace’s art history course at the University of Toronto, we asked the students to familiarize themselves with each church using the engagement boards and physical model. Then, using the model as an anchor, the students located the churches in present-day Toronto, discussed the evolution and erasure that they observed, and shared their thoughts on the tensions between preservation, transformation, and loss in the urban fabric. While most students noted that they were not familiar with the history or existence of these churches, the group was able to contextualize their critical observations on the displacement and erasure pattern after using the model to anchor their discussions with their peers. The students, overall, were very excited by the tangibility of the model, and most said this assisted with absorbing the information and discussing it in a group setting.
During our second engagement workshop with Professor Madhan’s planning students at the Toronto Metropolitan University, we invited participants to review selected archival materials alongside the physical model illustrating the formal evolution of the church sites. This sparked many discussions about both the research methodology and existing archived collections on the history of Black Canadians. Several students asked about the origin and context of certain photographs and newspaper clippings, and many were curious to learn more about other existing archival materials that could be used to expand research on Black heritage. These discussions highlighted the possibility of mapping other non-church sites that served Toronto’s Black community onto the existing model, prompting further engagement in the cultural dialogue between these locations.
To conclude the workshop, we invited the students to reflect on the engagement exercise by designing a mode of interpretation celebrating the heritage of one of the former sites of a Black church. In groups of four to five students, the class delivered a wide range of ideas and proposals, from an outdoor mural commissioned by Black artists to an installation that pairs public seating with an audiovisual display. One group of students also suggested an exhibition on Toronto’s lost Black churches at the Church of the Holy Trinity, highlighting the absence of the Black churches that existed in close proximity to the Holy Trinity church.
2025 National Trust Conference Presentation
At the 2025 Canadian National Trust Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the ISTH team presented our most recent work on the Uncovering Toronto’s Lost Black Churches project. We spoke about our research on the formal and cultural evolution witnessed on sites of former Black churches in Toronto and shared our approach to representing our findings in an interactive physical model that encourages critical and accessible engagement with this heritage. We also discussed the observations and feedback collected from our first student engagement workshop. The presentations and conversations that took place at the conference demonstrated a clear growing interest in spotlighting Black history at the national level, and our work complemented the host city, Halifax and its long-standing presence of the Black community. As the project advances, our team is actively working to further revise the design of the model and the mode of engagement based on the feedback received. We anticipate carrying out more engagement workshops using the model and, in time, collaborating with community members to deepen and expand the ongoing conversation on the cultural identity that Black churches embody.
If you’re interested in learning more or engaging with this project, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
ERA’s Interpreting Slavery, Trauma, and Heritage Initiative is a group of professionals at ERA Architects leading a subject matter exploration that considers how traumatic histories, particularly those related to Black communities, are interpreted in public spaces, built forms, and other representations both nationally and globally. Parallel discussions within the initiative involve abolitionism, immigration patterns, rebellion and protests, and other significant topics in this subject area. The initiative takes a multi-pronged approach toward actively engaging with heritage professionals through discussions, walking tours, research, writing, and the invitation of external speakers.
Top Photograph: A grand Jamaican Wedding was held at the St. James British Methodist Episcopal Church in 1926. Photograph courtesy of City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds 1266, item 8380
References
- City of Toronto Archives. (n.d.). Black history in Toronto. City of Toronto. https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/accountability-operations-customer-service/access-city-information-or-records/city-of-toronto-archives/whats-in-the-archives/research-by-topic/black-history-in-toronto/
