Out of Service

The Dominion Orthopaedic Hospital opened in 1919, near the corner of Christie and Dupont Streets in Toronto, within a stone’s throw of the main Canadian Pacific rail line that still runs through the heart of the city. The building was not newly constructed; it was, in fact, a National Cash Register factory. Purchased by the federal government’s Military Hospitals Commission for $450,000 and soon renamed the Christie Street Veterans’ Hospital, it was a state-of-the-art facility. There was a rooftop “garden” where veterans with tuberculosis could bask in the healing sun, modern operating rooms, X‑ray machines, a huge dining hall, and workshops for such crafts as shoemaking and clay modelling. There was even a skating rink. In all, Christie Street was to be the nation’s main orthopaedic hospital for the wounded men of the First World War.

Kristen den Hartog’s book, oddly titled The Roosting Box (by analogy to the “communal space that provides ideal but...