page_title: History of Toronto
section_title: 1939–1970
hierarchical_section_title: History of Toronto / City of Toronto (1834–1997) / 20th century / 1939–1970
caption_attribution_description: English: The opening of Toronto's new City Hall in 1965. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Français&#160;: L'ouverture de l'hôtel de ville en 1965. Toronto (Ontario, Canada).
context_page_description: The history of Toronto begins approximately 12,500 years ago at the end of the Ice Age with the withdrawal of the ice sheet from the area of present-day Toronto. Soon afterward small groups of Indigenous people moved into the area. Prior to 1000 AD, the Wyandot people were likely the first group to live in the area, followed by the Iroquois. When Europeans first came to Toronto, they found a small Iroquois village known as Teiaiagon on the banks of the Humber River. The Mississaugas, a branch of the Ojibwa, moved into the area, drove out the Iroquois and settled along the north shore of the lake.
  The French first set up trading posts in the area, including Fort Rouillé in 1720, which they abandoned as the British conquered French North America in the Seven Year's War. After the US War of Independence, the lands of the Toronto area were purchased from the Mississaugas to provide land for a new settlement. In 1793, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe moved the capital of Upper Canada to Toronto, which he named York, not wanting an aboriginal name.
context_section_description: During World War II, Toronto became a major centre for Canada's military. The Exhibition Place was taken over for military training and deployment. The Island Airport was taken over for training of the Royal Norwegian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force. Civilian manufacturing companies, such as Inglis, were converted to war-time production of armaments. At Malton Airport and Downsview Airport, new aviation factories built many fighters and bombers to be used in Europe.
  After World War II, a continuous influx of newcomers from Atlantic Canada and large numbers of immigrants from around the world contributed to the steady growth of Toronto. The large numbers of new Canadians helped Toronto's population swell to over one million by 1951, and double again to over two million, by 1971. The demographics of Toronto changed as a result also, as many immigrants were from countries other than Great Britain. The ethnic diversity grew and saw the development of enclaves such as Little Italy, Little Portugal and two new Chinatowns. In 1967, the first "Caribana" festival was held celebrating the culture of the West Indies.
  The provincial government created the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, a regional government that incorporated numerous local municipalities in 1954. The Metro Toronto government took over the construction and maintenance of region-wide infrastructure, building water treatment plants, roads, public transit and expressways, to facilitate the growth of the suburbs.
  In 1954, Hurricane Hazel swept through Toronto, causing significant flooding; 81 people were killed. As a result, building on floodplains was banned, new flood control works such as dams and flood channels were built, and the lands of floodplains were cleared of buildings, conserved as park lands and conservation areas.
  In 1954, the original stretch of the subway was completed from Union to Eglinton stations on the Yonge line (later numbered as Line 1). This was followed by the construction of the Bloor-Danforth and University Avenue subways, connecting the core to the suburbs to the east and west. The Metro Government built the Gardiner Expressway and the DVP expressways in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but plans to build a large network of expressways throughout the city died in 1971 with the cancellation of the Spadina Expressway. Metro proceeded to build the Spadina subway line north into North York and extended the Yonge line north into North York.
  The new "urban renewal" movement made its influence felt in Toronto. Large areas, deemed "slums", were cleared. This included the areas of Regent Park, Lawrence Heights and Alexandria Park. The streets and small homes were replaced by mega-blocks with limited streets and apartment buildings. The experiment in social housing would improve the number of affordable units available, at the expense of a large increase in the budgets of Metro and Toronto to maintain the buildings. By the 2000s, Toronto would be in serious arrears on maintenance, and in the 2000s, Toronto has started to dismantle the large projects and replace them with designs more resembling regular neighbourhoods.
  During the 1960s and 1970s, Toronto's downtown core was rebuilt with new, taller, skyscrapers. A new Toronto City Hall was opened; the Eaton Centre shopping and office complex; four new bank towers were built at the intersection of Bay and King Streets, the "MINT corners" and new towers along University Avenue. This was causing havoc with the city's old television and radio towers which were simply not tall enough to serve the city, so engineers and politicians decided that something had to be built taller than any other building in the city or anything that would probably ever be built. They decided to build a super-tall massive television and radio tower (the CN Tower), which was completed in 1976 on the railway lands south of downtown. Around the downtown core, which had been dominated by railway lands since the 1850s, new land uses were found for the railway lands. The St. Lawrence Neighbourhood project built a new c
caption: The opening for the fourth Toronto City Hall in 1965. The modernist design of the building have made it a landmark of the city.
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