This is one of my favorite venues. There's not many really excellent pictures online so I'll try to tell you about it. There are two rooms that you can be married in, and both have merit.
The great hall portion is huge with a vaulted ceiling and curiously, just about the worlds most perfect accoustics. You put a cello or a good quality human voice in there and the sound is just amazing. If this is the room that appeals, I'd say go for live music for your ceremony. String quartet. Or a singer with guitar. Or something like that. There's a piano in the room but I have no idea how often it's tuned. A piano in Toronto Ontario should be tuned twice a year at least. Srsly.Anyway, the great hall portion is a later addition to the schoolhouse and attached to the schoolhouse itself by a parlor area suitable for stand up receptions which contains a wet bar, access to the kitchens and curio cabinets with items of historical relevance.
The second room is the actual schoolhouse, dating from 1848 with low ceiling and narrow windows, very little light. It's dim, and there's room for about 100 guest to huddle into the reproduction school desks. Most of the furnishings and ornemantation are either reproduction or are antiques donated to the venue, but the school teachers desk that you sit on to sign your documennts is original and genuine. To sit at this gorgous, simple desk is to enter into your marriage in humility and this is half of what I love about this part of this venue - the quiet peace of the furnishings and room. The other half is that the building is made out of equal portions of brick and love.
Looking into the way back machine, here's a brief history of the Irish getting screwed in Toronto, as told by an undereducated wedding officiant fully expecting to be corrected. First the Irish Catholics came to Canada because they were getting screwed in their own country - unable to own certain things, unable to travel at certain times, unable to even own a horse over a certain height, that kind of BS. Then everyone in Ireland got screwed by the potato famine around about 1845. There was still a lot of food being produced but it was being shipped to England and places not Ireland, and it was just the potatoes that people were allowed to eat being affected over all. So people starved and struggled to get the hell out of Ireland. The US didn't want them and made a deal with England about the price of travel, so that to get to New York an Irish person would have to pay a lot of money and to get to Canada they'd have to pay very little, so a lot of them ended up here. Well, those who didn't, in their emaciated form, die either on the Atlantic or in the St. Lawrence river itself. There's mention of a couple of ships where people were sick, and rather than have the passengers be a burden or contamonate people on land they were just allowed to die within sight of it. No disembarking for them. This all pretty much sucked but was in keeping with what the Irish had begun to expect from the rest of the world, having been shipped off to penial colonies in Australia for being Irish and having been rounded up and sold at one point in history to the Carrabean. So what does the fresh hell of the mid 1800's have to do with a very attractive wedding venue?
When the famine victims did arrive they ran into the Irish Catholics they'd screwed over not a generation before, and it was awkward to say the least. Not a warm welcome. The rest of Toronto wasn't very kind eaither, George Brown writing in what was a pre-cursur to the Globe and Mail that they were lazy, violent, brutish and stupid. Irish by and large were considered a sub species at the time and the established Irish considered the new Irish imports to be assholes and hilarity insued.
So then this group of people got together and said "yeah, this isn't going to work unless they have some place to be, like a church and a school or something like that." This group included Bishop Strachan, brewer Enoch Turner, and the millers and distillers Gooderham and Worts. They raised funds and built a church, Little Trinity on King St. and from what I've read ran out of money. Enoch Turner, who had no children of his own but was pretty fond of them, determined that the life of the Irish wasn't going to improve without a school. Back in this time you couldn't go to school without paying for it and the famine victims were out of cash so he build them a school, out of his own pocket. and there it stands. Toronto's first free school, and given that it survived the great fire of the city years later it's the oldest standing one. Here's a blurb I wrote for the introduction of weddings I've done there, you can use it for your ceremony as long as you credit me and have a very nice day:
"We are, right now, within walls built by love in a very real sense. In 1848 brewer Enoch Turner founded this, Toronot's first free and longest standing school to provide basic education to the children of Irish immigrants. He was remembered in a period of grinding poverty as a generous and compassionate man. He had nothing to gain by this gift except the knowledge that he was helping build a better world. The world is changing with each moment, and each action and decision we partake in makes it what it is, and we learn from it. The most valuable lessons we learn in life, we absolutely learn from love."
There's a patch of gardens around it that look good in photo's and the interior of the great hall dresses up nicely. You don't want to dress up the schoolhouse, it's supposed to look the way it does and has a rustic charm you'd be hard pressed to replicate. The staff are friendly and renovations in recent years have ensured that there's a brides room the bathrooms are WAY nicer than they used to be. It's got an awful lot to recommend it and if your wedding is between 40-110 people it is, in my opinion, just about perfect.
