Friends and supporters gave this home to William Lyon Mackenzie and his family in 1859, and he lived here until his death in 1861. Plaques are to be seen to the right of the doorstep, in the front garden, in the wall of the entranceway and in the garden wall.

Those in the garden are the remains of the historic Clifton Gate Pioneer Memorial Arch at Niagara Falls. The Arch remained there from its unveiling in 1938 until 1967-68, when it was dismantled to make room for traffic. The Arch was built to honour the early pioneers who laboured to break the forests and till the land and also to the memory of martyrs of the Rebellions of 1837-38 in Upper and Lower Canada. One of the panels shows Mackenzie presenting his historic Seventh Report of Grievances to the House of Assembly. Names of those executed during a regime of terror that followed defeat of the Rebellion appear on one of the panels, as do profiles of the two rebels who met their death on the scaffold in Toronto, Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews.

A rare early reproduction of the Clifton Gate Pioneer Memorial Arch in place at Niagara Falls is shown. Public revelation in 1974 that the historic panels designed by C.W. Jefferys and sculpted by Emanuel Hahn were stored in a Parks Commission yard led Toronto City Council to take action under then Mayor John Sewell. They were repaired in the workshops of one of the original carver-sculptors Louis Temporale and found their place in the Bond St. garden wall. The full story is told in the book by Mark Frank, The Mackenzie Panels: The Strange Case of Niagara's Fallen Arch (Red Robin Press, 1987).