Short answers, pulled from the story.
Fort York is an early 19th-century military fortification in the Fort York neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It housed British and Canadian military personnel and defended the entrance to Toronto Harbour. Today it forms part of the 16.6 ha Fort York National Historic Site.
The first permanent British garrison in Toronto was established at the site on the 20th of July 1793, under lieutenant governor John Graves Simcoe. That original fort was destroyed by American forces after the Battle of York in April 1813. The rebuilt fort standing today was completed around 1815.
British commanding officer Roger Hale Sheaffe judged the battle lost and ordered a silent withdrawal. He had the fort's gunpowder magazine rigged to explode rather than let it fall into American hands. The magazine held 74 tons of iron shells and 300 barrels of gunpowder. The blast killed more than 250 American soldiers, including Brigadier General Zebulon Pike.
Fort York is a retronym. The fortifications were originally called the Garrison, the Garrison at York, or the Fort at York. After new fortifications were built in 1841, residents began calling the older site the Old Fort. The name Fort York for it emerged during the 1870s.
Toronto's municipal government restored Fort York to its early 19th-century configuration between 1932 and 1934. It reopened as a museum on Victoria Day in 1934. The site had already been designated a National Historic Site of Canada on the 25th of May 1923.
Fort York contains eight historical buildings, including two blockhouses, and seven of them date to the fort's 1813-15 reconstruction. The eighth is a reconstruction of a barracks that previously stood on the site. Together they form the largest surviving collection of War of 1812-era buildings in Canada.