Item - 2025.TE20.54

The Toronto and East York Community Council recommends that:

1.  City Council waive the signature requirement of the City of Toronto Street Naming Policy by accepting the signatures gathered pre-Covid regarding naming the laneway running north of Gerrard between Greenwood Avenue and Redwood Avenue as Luella Price Lane.

2.  City Council direct the Director, Engineering Support Services, Engineering and Construction Services to report on formally naming the laneway to the April 3, 2025 meeting of the Toronto and East York Community Council.

Since 2017 the Leslieville Historical Society, the East York Historical Society and the Gerrard East neighbourhood have been working to name the laneway running east of Greenwood Avenue to Redwood Avenue about 50 metres north of Gerrard Street East. They have proposed the lane be named “Luella Price Lane”.  By 2020 there were sufficient signatures from property owners to initiate the new name but the Covid epidemic ground these efforts to a halt.

The initiative to name the lane after Luella Price remains active and the sponsors would very much like to have this name recognized during Black History Month in 2025.

 In 1910, Luella Price welcomed a handful of women to her home at 6A Redwood Avenue to form the Eureka Club. The Eureka Club was never more than 18 dedicated and compassionate women. Many of the spouses of the Eurekas were railway porters. It was their goal to offer aid to low-income Torontonians, quietly, on a one-to-one basis. Their motto was “Not for ourselves, but for others”.

In 1980, at its 70th anniversary, the Eureka Club was the oldest Black women’s organization in Ontario. The naming of the laneway recognizes Luella Price and her contributions to our neighbourhood and city.

Luella Cooper was born on June 30, 1858, in Maryland. Maryland stayed in the Union during the Civil War although many supported slavery. Because it stayed in the Union, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to Maryland. Many moved from Maryland to Washington, D.C. to be free or to escape violent racism. In 1864 Maryland voted to free its enslaved people. Luella married her husband Grandison Price in June of 1875.

The Prices moved north to Toronto. They lived on York Street where Luella worked as a dressmaker and Grandison worked as a barber. He later found work as a porter on the CPR railroad. Luella ran a boarding house where prominent Torontonians, such as Elisha Edmunds and John Hubbard, lived. By 1893 Luella had her own restaurant. But the wealthy landowners of York Street cleared the houses and businesses to build offices and factories. The Prices then moved to Morse Street in Leslieville.

In 1905 the Prices built their cottage at 6A Redwood Avenue. The Gerrard Greenwood area had a small but significant Black community.

Grandison Price passed away on April 10, 1921. He had a stroke some years earlier and was partially paralyzed. Luella continued to live in her apartment building on Redwood Ave. until she died on June 15, 1935. She was 76 years old. She was buried beside Grandison in the St. John of Norway Cemetery, on June 18, 1935.

On her death certificate the neat handwriting of her foster son Robert J. Lynch has her “racial origin” as “Canadian”, but an official has crossed this out and written in “Coloured”.

This proud Canadian deserves to be remembered.