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Urban Legends: The Mad Cows of Osgoode Hall
Legal myth has it that the unique gates of Osgoode Hall in Toronto aren’t meant just to keep lawyers in, but cattle out.
Osgoode Hall, at Queen Street West and University Avenue in downtown Toronto, is an edifice of distinction. Home to the highest courts in Ontario and to the Law Society of Upper Canada, it’s one of a few rare old Toronto buildings that have staved off the lapping tides of urban uglification. The plaque out front describes it accurately, if immodestly, as “one of the finest examples of Victorian Classical architecture in Canada.”
Like any historical building, Osgoode Hall has its myths. Part of its stately charm is the cast-iron fence that surrounds it and the unusual “kissing gates,” which mimic rural gateways designed to keep livestock from wandering. Long-standing tradition has it that the entrances were installed for just that purpose: to keep itinerant 19th-century cattle from gumming up the wheels of justice.
Is the legend true? Architectural drawings by William Storm, who supervised the 1860 expansion that included the fence, actually referred to the gates as “cattle guards.” And they work: in 1950 a group of students attempted unsuccessfully to bring a cow through one of the entrances, which is the kind of thing…
