The Castle Built on Light Bulbs: Sir Henry Pellatt and the City That Did Not Need a Castle

Sir Henry Pellatt electrified Toronto and bet the proceeds of his private utility on a European-style castle the city had no use for. He lost the bet inside a decade. The city absorbed the castle in lieu of property taxes in 1933. The Annex neighbourhood that grew up around the Davenport ridge through the same years is the city Toronto actually wanted. Casa Loma is not an old castle. The phrase appears on tourist signs and in guidebooks, and every visitor who arrives expecting a medieval keep on a Toronto hilltop has misread the date carved into the masonry. The construction ran from 1911 to 1914. The opening was in the autumn of 1914, two months after the First World War began. The building is a hundred and twelve years old. It is younger than the Eiffel Tower by twenty-five years, younger than the Brooklyn Bridge by thirty-one, and contemporary with the early Model T Ford. It is the largest private home ever built in Canada, and it was lived in for less than ten years.

The reason this matters is that Casa Loma is usually told as a fairy tale: a knight built a castle, lost his fortune, and the city kept the building. All four parts of that telling are true. The fairy tale flattens the more interesting story underneath. The castle was the visible symbol of a fight over public infrastructure that Sir Henry Pellatt lost. The fight produced Ontario Hydro. The fight ended Pellatt's monopoly on Toronto's electricity. The castle is the ruin of his private-power business, not the cause of his bankruptcy. And the neighbourhood at the foot of the escarpment, the Annex, is what middle-class Toronto built while Pellatt was building the wrong thing on top of the ridge.

Pellatt's money

Henry Mill Pellatt was born in Kingston in 1859 to a family that had made its money as stockbrokers in the Canadian financial sector. He moved to Toronto with the family business and joined his father's brokerage. In 1883 he became president of the Toronto Electric Light Company, the private monopoly that had electrified the city's streetlights and a growing number of its buildings since 1884. The Electric Light Company was the dominant utility in Toronto for the next thirty-five years, and Pellatt's personal fortune was built on it.

In 1903, Pellatt was one of the founding directors of the Electrical Development Company at Niagara Falls, the private consortium that generated and distributed Niagara hydroelectric power into Ontario through the early 1900s. This was the period when hydroelectricity was being industrialized as a technology and Niagara was the most productive single source on the continent. Pellatt's bet was that he could move from being the monopoly retailer of electricity in Toronto to being a major shareholder in the wholesale generator that supplied it. The bet looked good through 1905. By 1906 the bet had been broken by the Ontario Legislature.

The actor on the other side of the bet was Adam Beck. In 1906 the Ontario government created the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario, a publicly owned utility chartered to generate and distribute electricity to Ontario municipalities at cost. Adam Beck was its first chairman and held the role until his death in 1925. The Commission's mandate was explicit: it would supply municipalities directly with low-cost power and undercut the private utilities. The Commission acquired transmission lines, built distribution networks, and over the next two decades absorbed the private utilities into the public system. The City of Toronto absorbed the Toronto Electric Light Company into Toronto Hydro in 1922 to 1923, ending Pellatt's revenue from the monopoly. Pellatt's biographer Bill Freeman (Casa Loma, 1998) is the strongest single source on the timing of this loss. Carl B. Denison's The People's Power: The History of Ontario Hydro (1960) and the Armstrong and Nelles study Wilderness and Waterpower: Alberta Energy and the Hydro Commission (1986) cover the public-power policy fight that Beck won and Pellatt was on the losing side of.

The castle was built during this fight. Construction began in 1911. The walls went up while the Hydro Commission was steadily acquiring market share. The castle opened in 1914 while the Commission was negotiating transmission rights with the City of Toronto. The Pellatts moved out in 1923 to 1924, the same years Toronto absorbed the Toronto Electric Light Company. The castle and the monopoly ended in the same period. The fairy tale calls this a coincidence. The record calls it a sequence.

The castle

The architect was Edward James Lennox (1854 to 1933), who had also designed Old City Hall (opened 1899) and the King Edward Hotel (1903), and who was Toronto's most-commissioned civic architect in the period. Lennox's brief from Pellatt was unambiguous: build a Scottish baronial castle on the Davenport escarpment, the largest private home in Canada, with the most advanced domestic infrastructure of its day. The castle has roughly ninety-eight rooms; the exact count varies by source because some inventories include closets and storage rooms and others do not. The building includes an Oak Room, a Conservatory, the Great Hall, the Library, secret passages, a pipe organ with approximately 3,000 pipes, suits of armour, rugs from Persia, tapestries from France, and an 800-foot underground tunnel from the main house under Austin Terrace to the stables.

The stables themselves are an Engineer's stop. The horses lived in better quarters than most Toronto factory workers of 1914 did. The stalls had Spanish tile floors, the building was steam-heated, and the carriage room was wired for electric light. The Hunting Lodge at 297 Austin Terrace, immediately west of Spadina House, was Pellatt's pre-castle residence from approximately 1903 to 1913, the small Tudor-revival house where he and Lady Pellatt lived while the castle was under construction. The Lodge is the dress rehearsal: a smaller version of the architectural ambition, built first, lived in for ten years before the Pellatts moved next door.

The first formal dinner at Casa Loma was hosted in the autumn of 1914. The First World War was two months old. The Great Hall was lit by electric chandeliers powered by Pellatt's own utility. The guests included the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and most of Toronto's banking class. The same banking class, ten years later, would not return Pellatt's calls.

The collapse

The popular telling compresses Pellatt's losses into a single phrase: he could not pay the property taxes. The actual record is more layered. Pellatt's losses in the early 1920s came from a stack of bad bets, of which the castle was the most visible but not the most expensive. He had assembled speculative land holdings west of Toronto, particularly the Lake Marie estate, in anticipation of suburban expansion that the postwar property bust deferred. He was a director and major shareholder of the Home Bank of Canada, which failed on 17 August 1923. The Home Bank failure wiped out approximately twenty million dollars in depositor funds and triggered the federal Bank Act amendments of 1924. Pellatt's exposure to the Home Bank, in addition to his land holdings and the loss of the Toronto Electric Light revenue, produced the cash crunch that ended his ability to maintain Casa Loma.

The Pellatts moved out in 1923 to 1924. The contents of the house were auctioned in late 1924 by a Toronto auctioneer; Freeman's biography names the firm but the specific attribution is one of the documentary details that remains uncertain in the sources. The pipe organ, the books, the suits of armour, the tapestries, and the rugs were dispersed to private buyers across Ontario and the United States. Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt rented a small apartment in Toronto. He was sixty-five years old in 1924 and had just lost the largest private home in Canada. Lady Pellatt died in 1924, weeks after the auction. Sir Henry lived for another fifteen years in modest accommodations, dying in 1939, by most accounts in the home of his former chauffeur in Mimico.

The City of Toronto took possession of the castle in 1933 in lieu of $27,303 in back property taxes. For four years the city did not know what to do with the building. The Kiwanis Club of West Toronto leased it in 1937 and operated it as a public attraction, in which form it has operated under various leaseholders since. Liberty Entertainment Group, the current operator, took the lease in 2011.

The Annex

Walk five hundred metres south from the Casa Loma forecourt and the cityscape changes register. The Annex (loosely St. George Street to Bathurst, Bloor to Dupont) is a residential neighbourhood platted from the 1880s through the 1900s and built up at exactly the period Pellatt was building Casa Loma. The Annex was the city Toronto actually wanted: gabled red brick, Romanesque arches around the front doors, wide porches, streetcar access on Bloor and Bathurst, walking distance to the University of Toronto's St. George campus. The houses are large but not enormous; most are two and a half storeys with a coach house in back. They sold to a rising professional and managerial class in the 1890s and 1900s, the same demographic that was filling the new federal and provincial bureaucracies and the expanding banking sector downtown. The Annex-style house has its own taxonomy in the heritage literature; Patricia McHugh's Toronto Architecture: A City Guide (McClelland and Stewart, 1985, revised 1989) is the standard architectural guide.

The two estates on the Davenport escarpment are the cleanest possible counter-evidence. Spadina House, built in 1866 by James Austin and expanded in 1898 and 1912, sits one property east of Casa Loma. The Austin family lived in Spadina House for 116 years before they left it to the City of Toronto as a museum in 1982. Four generations of the same family, one front door, 116 years. Next door, the Pellatts lived in Casa Loma for less than ten. Two estates on the same ridge, same view of the city, same era of wealth. One family stayed for a century and gifted the house. The other family was evicted and the city took the building.

The thesis collapses across the two front doors. Casa Loma is the spectacle that did not survive in a city allergic to spectacle. Spadina House is the version that did. The Annex below is the answer to the question "what should a wealthy Toronto neighbourhood look like?" that the city kept asking even while Pellatt was building his answer above the ridge.

What the corridor adds up to

Walk the seven stops of the Casa Loma tour and the argument plays out as a cinematic sequence. Spadina House forecourt is the control variable. The Hunting Lodge is the seed of the obsession. The castle's south forecourt is the cinematic cold open: stand in front of the limestone-and-Glen-Edyth-sandstone south facade and the autumn of 1924 is the dated scene. The stables and tunnel are the engineering boast. The Davenport escarpment edge is the ancient Lake Iroquois shoreline that explains why every wealthy house from 1900 was on this ridge: the view down across the city Pellatt thought he owned. The Annex residential core on Madison Avenue is the city Toronto actually built. Bloor and Bathurst is the streetcar city Pellatt's electricity was supposed to power, with the castle still visible on the ridge to the north, no longer his.

The argument is not that Pellatt was foolish, or that the castle is unworthy. The castle is a remarkable building. Lennox was a serious architect. The infrastructure was advanced for its time. Pellatt's losses in the early 1920s were not the result of childish overspending; they were the result of being on the losing side of one of the most consequential infrastructure policy fights in Ontario history, compounded by the failure of a major Canadian bank that took out many of its directors at the same time. The castle is the visible symbol of the loss, not its cause.

The deeper argument is about what kind of city Toronto was choosing to be. Pellatt's bet was that a city could be made by importing European spectacle. The Annex's bet was that a city could be made by building competent middle-class houses on a streetcar grid, walkable to a university. The Annex bet won. A century later, the Annex blocks south of the escarpment are some of the most desirable residential real estate in the country. Casa Loma is a tourist attraction operated by an entertainment company on a city lease. The castle is the strangest civic asset Toronto owns, and the strangeness is the part of the story that has held.