Why a Leslieville laneway is being named for Luella Price [Video]

There is a narrow, easy-to-miss unnamed laneway north of Gerrard Street East and east of Greenwood Avenue, in Leslieville. The Redwood Theatre, an Indigenous restaurant called Tea N Bannock and a Buddhist temple back onto its south side. On the north side, where it intersects with Redwood Avenue, stands an apartment, built more than a century ago, by Luella Price, one of Leslieville’s early Black residents. 

Luella moved to Toronto from post-Civil War Washington, D.C., around 1875, with her husband, Grandison. She made a name for herself as a dressmaker, rooming house operator and restaurateur, and he as a barber, railway porter and, eventually, conductor on the Canadian Pacific Railway.