09/18/2026
Most Torontonians have no idea that September 17th is the anniversary of the single deadliest event in our city's history: the burning of the SS Noronic.
The luxury liner was built in Port Arthur in 1913, the heyday of the Great Lakes cruise years, when one could find “more people asleep on boats on the Great Lakes than on any ocean in the world.” She was commissioned by Grand Trunk Railroad president Charles Melville Hayes, who was never able to see the ship completed, as he was lost in the sinking of the Titanic. Perhaps this is a foreshadowing of what was to come.
The “Queen of the Great Lakes” was one of the largest ships to ply the tourist trade. At 110 meters long, she could accommodate 600 passengers as well as 200 crew members. This ship had all of the creature comforts you could ask for on a “modern” cruise, including a ballroom, library, beauty salon, kids’ playroom, and an entire orchestra for live music.
Her final doomed voyage began on September 14th,1949, by picking up passengers in Detroit, Michigan. The week-long cruise was scheduled to hit multiple ports before doing a tour of the picturesque Thousand Islands, then turning around and heading back to the United States. When the Noronic docked at Pier 9 at the base of Yonge Street near the current-day ferry terminal, her manifest listed 574 passengers, mostly American, and an entirely Canadian 113-member crew. Many onboard disembarked for the evening to attend the bars and restaurants Toronto had to offer.
By the time a whisp of smoke was discovered in a linen closet at 2:30 am, almost everyone was sleeping peacefully, tucked into their bed for the night. It was not to remain so. A bell-hop opened the linen closet door to investigate and fire burst into the hallway, hungrily lapping at the ornate hardwood hallways that had been polished to a gleam with almost 40 years of lemon oil. There were no smoke alarms or sprinklers. The onboard fire hoses didn’t even work.
The distress whistle began shrieking 8 minutes later, but the ship was already half ablaze. When the first firetruck arrived 3 minutes after that – flames reached all the way up the mast. A mere 20 minutes after the fire was discovered, the SS Noronic was an inferno burning at the pier, her decks white hot and beginning to buckle. Firemen poured over 6 million liters of water into the burning ship, but it wasn’t until 5 am that the fire was out. Not long after began the grueling task of finding the dead.
The Noronic was built in such a way that only the lowest of the 5 decks had access to the only two functioning gangplanks. As the fire raged, passengers in the upper decks were forced to break their way out of portholes, jumping to the water or the deck below. Most who jumped or were lowered into the harbour were rescued by boats. One poor soul jumped and hit the pier. As the authorities searched the burned out wreck, it became obvious that many passengers had never even left their beds, suffocating in their sleep, their bodies turned partially to ash in the heat intense enough to incinerate bone.
All human remains were removed to a makeshift morgue in the Horticulture Building on the Exhibition grounds. (Think: Musik nightclub). Officially, 118 passengers, all Americans, perished in the blaze. A single Canadian crew-member died weeks later from injuries sustained on that fateful night. Many remains were so badly burned that coroners had to rely on dental records to make identifications – a first in forensic history. Those remains that were not claimed were buried in a memorial plot in Section 29 of Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
The burning of the SS Noronic had one huge and final death blow left. Safety protocols were put into place and enforced in all sectors of the Great Lakes cruise ship industry. The changes proved to be too expensive to implement on the decades old ships and the entire multi-million dollar industry folded soon after.
