W-I-D-E on Wednesday

Today's our last full day in Toronto - the 2 weeks has flown by! This afternoon we visited Casa Loma ("Hill House"), an elegant castle with a fascinating history. It was built at a cost of $3.5 million from 1911-1914 by Sir Henry Pellatt, an enterprising but ultimately unlucky businessman who founded the Toronto Electric Light Company in 1883 and had a a monopoly on the supply of street lighting to the city of Toronto for some years. In 1902, Pellatt and his partners won the rights to build the first Canadian hydro-generating plant at Niagara Falls.

Sadly things went badly wrong for Sir Henry soon after the place was built, partly due to the consequences of WW1, so that he had to auction off his possessions and vacate the castle in 1924. From 1926-29 it became a hotel and was a popular nightspot. However it was then a victim of the Great Depression and in 1933, the City of Toronto took ownership of the property for $27,303.45 owed in back taxes. It lay vacant for a few years and could easily have been demolished but fortunately it's been run as a tourist attraction since 1937, run by the Kiwanis Club of West Toronto until 2011 when the Casa Loma Corporation took it over. It's currently owned by the City of Toronto.

The main blip shows an aerial view of Toronto (including the CN Tower) taken with the fisheye lens from a window at the top of the Scottish Tower of the castle. The 1st extra is a fisheye view of the front of the castle; the second is the conservatory (an HDR vertical panorama shot), the 3rd is Lady Pellatt's "Solarium Room" (another fisheye shot) and the last is one of many relics of old electrical equipment.

Thanks as always to Bobsblips for hosting the Widwed challenge.