Broadway Methodist Tabernacle was a prominent Methodist church in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, Canada. That existed from 1872 to 1924. The congregation was founded in 1872 and was originally housed in a wood chapel at the intersection of Spadina Avenue

Spadina Avenue

Spadina Avenue is one of the most prominent streets in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Running through the western section of downtown, the road has a very different character in different neighbourhoods....

 and Dundas Street

Dundas Street (Toronto)

Dundas Street, also known as Highway 5 west of Toronto, is a major arterial road connecting the centre of that city with its western suburbs and southwestern Ontario beyond...

 (which was at that time known as St. Patrick St.) It was originally named the Spadina Avenue Methodist Church. Rapid growth in the congregation saw it seek a new home, and in 1876 a larger lot was purchased at the northeast corner of Spadina and College Street

College Street (Toronto)

College Street is a principal arterial thoroughfare in downtown Toronto, connecting former streetcar suburbs in the west with the city centre. The street is home to an ethnically diverse population in the western residential reaches, and institutions like the Ontario Legislature and the University...

. The wooden church was transported on rollers north to the new location. The old site would eventually become home to the Standard Theatre

Standard Theatre (Toronto)

The Standard Theatre was a theatre in Toronto that originated as the city's main venue for Yiddish theatre, and later became the Victory Burlesque, the only burlesque theatre in Toronto. It was located at the corner of Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street....

.

In 1879 work began on a new brick church that would be able to seat 900. The church was also renamed Broadway Methodist Church, as at that time the wide stretch of Spadina from College to Bloor was often known as 'Broadway.' That church also was too small, and in 1887 it was almost completely demolished and replaced by a third structure. This building was designed by E.J. Lennox, the most prominent architect then practicing in Toronto. At the request of the congregation he copied the basic floor plan and design of his earlier Bond Street Congregational Church, but at a larger scale. Rather than employing the neo-Gothic style, as he had with Bond Street, Lennox designed the church in the Romanesque Revival style. The building thus had many similarities with the similarly style City Hall

Old City Hall (Toronto)

Toronto's Old City Hall was home to its city council from 1899 to 1966 and remains one of the city's most prominent structures. The building is located at the corner of Queen and Bay Streets, across Bay Street from Nathan Phillips Square and the new City Hall in the centre of downtown Toronto...

 that Lennox was working on simultaneously.

The new Tabernacle opened in 1899 and became one of the major centres in the city that was sometimes dubbed the Methodist Rome

Methodist Rome

Methodist Rome was a nickname sometimes given to the city of Toronto, Ontario in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The moniker implied that Toronto was as central to Canadian Methodism as Rome, or more specifically Vatican City in Rome, is to Catholicism.Methodism was never the...

. Near to the large working class population of west Toronto and the textile mills of Spadina it became an important social centre. This was especially true under the leadership of Dr. Salem Bland

Salem Bland

Salem Goldworth Bland was a Methodist theologian and was one of Canada's most important Social Gospel thinkers.He was born in Lachute, Quebec the son of H.F.B. Bland, a Methodist preacher. As a child he lost the use of one of his legs, likely due to polio. He had the useless leg amputated at age...

, one of the leading Social Gospel

Social Gospel

The Social Gospel movement is a Protestant Christian intellectual movement that was most prominent in the early 20th century United States and Canada...

 advocates in Canada. He led the church from 1919 to 1923. However, the nature of the neighbourhood was changing. New immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, most notably a large Jewish population, were moving into the working class area and the Methodist English were moving north to other neighbourhoods. With the merger of churches that created the United Church of Canada

United Church of Canada

The United Church of Canada is a Protestant Christian denomination in Canada. It is the largest Protestant church and, after the Roman Catholic Church, the second-largest Christian church in Canada...

in 1924 the Tabernacle was thus closed. The building was demolished by 1930, and replaced by the four storey office building that stands on the site today.