Italian Toronto grew from a few hundred laborers in the 1890s into the city’s largest postwar immigrant community. Historian Robert Harney counts about 400 people from the Italian peninsula in Toronto in 1891, and sociologist Franc Sturino writes that the Italian population reached about 300,000 by 1981, more than 10 percent of the metropolitan population. The community moved through three main centers: the Ward downtown, College Street, and a belt along St. Clair Avenue, Dufferin Street, and Jane Street.
The page on Little Italy on College Street covers that district in detail. This page follows the wider community across the city and across a century.
Laborers and fruit sellers, 1890s to 1914
Harney’s essay “Chiaroscuro: Italians in Toronto, 1815-1915,” abridged in Polyphony in 1984, gives the early numbers. About 400 residents from the Italian peninsula lived in Toronto in 1891, and the number roughly doubled in the following decade. The 1911 census counted 2,200 men and 800 women of Italian descent, but Harney notes a significant undercount because seasonal workers left the city before enumeration. Of about 4,400 Italian males entering Canada legally in 1906 and 1907, more than 3,800 were classified as laborers.
Many early arrivals were navvies who found work on railways, sewers, and streets and later settled in the city. Harney writes that settlement grew around the rail yards and wholesale market and then in the Ward, the downtown immigrant district north of the railway station, where Jewish residents outnumbered Italians. By 1912, at least half of Toronto’s fruit stores were Italian-owned. Harney also notes that the 1904 fire brought building and demolition work that drew more navvies into permanent city residence. The Ward itself, he argues, was not a tenement slum, because over 70 percent of its area was owned by absentee landlords before the First World War.
Parishes and societies
Harney lists the first institutions. Our Lady of Mount Carmel was the first Italian parish, in 1908. The Umberto Primo Italian Benevolent Society, a mutual aid group, petitioned City Council in 1897 to mark Italian unification. Other bodies included the Italian National Club, a Dante Alighieri Society branch at Central Neighbourhood House, a Methodist mission, and the newspaper La Tribuna Canadese. By the end of the First World War the St. Agnes parish in the west end had become nearly as important as the Ward, and many families moved out of the Ward after the war.
The postwar wave
Sturino’s 1984 essay in Polyphony, published by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, covers the period after 1950. He writes that Italians were the second-largest postwar immigrant group to Canada after the British, with over half a million arriving by 1981. Postwar arrivals made up 70 percent of the roughly 750,000 Canadians of Italian ethnic origin. Metro Toronto held about 40 percent of them. Harney adds that in the early 1950s the number of Italians arriving in any two-year period exceeded the number already in the city.
Chain migration drove the flow. Sturino explains that legislation allowed immigrants to sponsor relatives as distant as cousins, and that earlier arrivals gave newcomers information, loans for passage, help with paperwork, housing, and introductions to jobs. The Toronto Transforms maps, based on the Toronto Star’s census series, show Italian settlement running northwest from downtown along Bathurst toward Woodbridge in the 1950s and 1960s, with immigration from Italy declining rapidly in the 1970s.
Work and small business
Most newcomers arrived with little schooling and a rural background. In 1971, Sturino writes, almost a third of Italian immigrant men in Toronto worked in construction, a share well above the national rate for Italian men. Others worked in textile, food processing, and furniture factories, and women formed workplace networks in textile firms. Many immigrants opened family businesses such as bakeries, fruit markets, and barbershops, and a middle class of notaries, travel agents, lawyers, and doctors developed alongside a smaller wealthy upper class.
Neighborhoods from College Street to Jane Street
| Area | What the sources say |
|---|---|
| The Ward (Elm, Gerrard, Centre, Chestnut, and Elizabeth streets) | Early downtown center before the First World War (Harney) |
| Coxwell-Danforth | Major postwar center in the east end (Sturino) |
| The Junction | 40 to 50 percent Italian by 1961 (Sturino) |
| College Street | Main reception and commercial hub of the 1950s (Sturino) |
| St. Clair Avenue area | Overtook College Street by the late 1950s and 1960s; by 1961 over twice its size, with Italians nearly 54 percent of the core area (Sturino) |
| Dufferin Street and Jane Street | Settlement continued northwest; by 1971 Italians were 30 to 45 percent or more along the Jane Street corridor (Sturino) |
These are the figures given in the sources, and the boundaries of each “area” in the original studies may differ from today’s neighborhood names. The pages on Toronto neighborhoods and North York give context for the northward spread.
When did most Italians arrive in Toronto?
After the Second World War. Harney states that most of Toronto’s Italian population arrived after the war, and Sturino places the main flow in the 1950s and 1960s.
Where did Italians first settle?
Harney describes early settlement near the rail yards and wholesale market and then in the Ward, with a west-end colony around St. Agnes parish by the end of the First World War.
Is Little Italy the same as Corso Italia?
No. College Street was the main reception area of the 1950s, and the St. Clair Avenue area overtook it in the late 1950s and 1960s, according to Sturino. The sources read for this page do not use the name Corso Italia, so the name is not explained here.
How many Italians lived in Toronto in 1981?
Sturino gives about 300,000, which he puts at more than 10 percent of the metropolitan population.
Related reading
- An overview of Toronto’s history
- Little Italy on College Street
- Immigration and communities in Toronto’s history
- Kensington Market: history
- Toronto neighbourhoods
Last verified: October 2026
Sources
- Robert F. Harney, “Chiaroscuro: Italians in Toronto, 1815-1915,” Polyphony, vol. 6, 1984, pp. 44-49, Multicultural History Society of Ontario
- Franc Sturino, “Contours of Postwar Italian Immigration to Toronto,” Polyphony, Summer 1984, pp. 127-130
- Edward Relph, Toronto Transforms: maps of sources of immigration to the Toronto region, from the Toronto Star census series
- Canadian Council for Refugees: immigration policy timeline, 1950-1999
Cite this page
APA: History of Toronto. (2026, October 23). Italian Toronto: A Community from the Ward to Jane Street. https://historyoftoronto.ca/blog/italian-toronto-history
MLA: “Italian Toronto: A Community from the Ward to Jane Street.” History of Toronto, 23 Oct. 2026, https://historyoftoronto.ca/blog/italian-toronto-history. Accessed .
Chicago: History of Toronto. “Italian Toronto: A Community from the Ward to Jane Street.” Last modified October 23, 2026. https://historyoftoronto.ca/blog/italian-toronto-history.
The pages have no named author, so the site is given as the author. Add the date you read the page if your style asks for it.