Unknown2008-05-162008-05-161860House of Refuge, c. 1860. Toronto Public Library, TRL, Historial Picture Collection, B 4-66b.http://hdl.handle.net/10315/1255Note: Established in 1860 on the site of today’s Bridgepoint Health on the east side of the Don north of Gerrard, the House of Refuge provided shelter for “vagrants, the dissolute, and for idiots.” It was used an an isolation hospital during the smallpox epidemics of the 1870s; a separate part of the building housed homeless elderly people during the 1880s and 90s. The original building was demolished in 1894, and a new structure operating under the name of the Riverdale Isolation Hospital became Toronto’s treatment and teaching centre for infectious diseases in 1904. As infectious diseases declined in the twentieth century, the building was renamed the Riverdale Hospital in 1957.House of RefugeDon Riverisolation hospitalsmallpoxImage