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A Lament for Lost Toronto Buildings

By Hamutal Dotan


In the wake of last week’s report on the worrying state of heritage building preservation in Toronto, this video tribute to buildings from the city’s past feels especially poignant. Though we’d have liked to have seen more information included about each building, the archival photographs included here are powerfully evocative, and the cumulative effect of seeing so many significant buildings that have been taken down is equally powerful. A vision of a different Toronto emerges—part memory, part projection of how the city might look had we retained more of these buildings—and with it some important questions about the extent to which we as a City have valued and should value these historical outposts.
People are fond of saying that Toronto is a young city. It’s true, but it’s also self-fulfilling: it’s by thinking of ourselves as so young that we come to be careless of the history we have.
Hat tip to Deconstructed City.
[UPDATE, March 1, 8:48 AM: We just learned the name of the creator of this video—we had emailed the YouTube user account several times without hearing back, and weren't previously sure. Credit for creating this video goes to Nicholas J. Thompson. Our thanks to one of our readers for letting us know.]

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  • jrmiv

    Toronto used to be pretty ugly – especially near the waterfront. Most of these buildings are where they belong – in the archives.

  • drybrain

    Wrong…

  • g026r

    “No, you're wrong!'

    “Nuh uh!”

    “Uh huh!”

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=733255383 Edmund O'Connor

    It's a great pity that the Provincial Lunatic Asylum building wasn't reused, as it was a gorgeous building, and a lovely bit of neoclassicism. The CAMH as it is now is nice enough, but it's nothing much to its predecessor.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=733255383 Edmund O'Connor

    It's a great pity that the Provincial Lunatic Asylum building wasn't reused, as it was a gorgeous building, and a lovely bit of neoclassicism. The CAMH as it is now is nice enough, but it's nothing much to its predecessor.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=733255383 Edmund O'Connor

    It's a great pity that the Provincial Lunatic Asylum building wasn't reused, as it was a gorgeous building, and a lovely bit of neoclassicism. The CAMH as it is now is nice enough, but it's nothing much to its predecessor.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=733255383 Edmund O'Connor

    It's a great pity that the Provincial Lunatic Asylum building wasn't reused, as it was a gorgeous building, and a lovely bit of neoclassicism. The CAMH as it is now is nice enough, but it's nothing much to its predecessor.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=733255383 Edmund O'Connor

    It's a great pity that the Provincial Lunatic Asylum building wasn't reused, as it was a gorgeous building, and a lovely bit of neoclassicism. The CAMH as it is now is nice enough, but it's nothing much to its predecessor.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=733255383 Edmund O'Connor

    It's a great pity that the Provincial Lunatic Asylum building wasn't reused, as it was a gorgeous building, and a lovely bit of neoclassicism. The CAMH as it is now is nice enough, but it's nothing much to its predecessor.

  • iSkyscraper

    The original comment was obviously provocative, but there is some truth to the statement that Toronto was never a “pretty” city. It was a provincial town in a backwater region, by far the little sibling to grand, civic, cosmopolitan Montreal. Yes, there were some lovely old buildings that should have been preserved (Melbourne, Australia is an example of a similar colonial city with a better-preserved past) but let's not kid ourselves. Toronto was a dump compared to such belles as Buffalo and Cleveland for most of its existence and its rapid climb both into the sky and onto the list of global cities in only fifty years was nothing short of astonishing. The modern buildings symbolic of that growth may actually be the ones that need more attention now as they become threatened with demolition.

  • Functionalist

    I don't agree with your denigration of Toronto at all. While Toronto was more conservative and less cosmopolitan than Montreal in the 19th century, there is ample evidence that downtown's streets were comparable to the best development at the time. Toronto was smaller and younger, but already achieved a great deal of beauty. Look at Toronto street: it wouldn't look out of place in a European capital. There not just “some lovely old buildings” but literally thousands of fine buildings that could have

    Do you think that Montreal or New York didn't have vast area that were ugly? Of course they did. But being the most powerful, they fashioned themselves as the best, in the process Toronto did not receive its due respect. Now we've simply accepted how the powerful have fashioned themselves: that only they were sophisticated and beautiful. We were none of that? That's a pathetic and unrealistic conclusion that any one who takes a glance at the city's online database of photographs can disprove.

    Today, we might think that our greatness has only been recent because of how dramatically the city has risen. In the late 19th century, however, we were no backwater; we were a smaller and more conservative place, but one that achieved great things in terms of city-building.

    How could Toronto have been a backwater? It was home to some of English Canada's elite (Montreal was supreme in this regard, but not absolute), it was thriving on industry and banking.

    But with these buildings gone, it's too easy to think of Toronto as insignificant in the 19th and early 20th century. We've destroyed the evidence and now we think little of our history and allow ourselves to believe that we were nothing until after WWII. At least by digitizing our archives and allowing people to see the evidence of our achievements, we can hopefully move past such ignorance.

  • http://facebook.com/mikesmallmikesmall Michael Small

    The General Post Office (seen at 4:30) is still standing. It's on Toronto Street, just north of King Street, with a plaque calling it “Toronto's First Post Office.”

  • http://everythingisterrible.com M S

    The General Post Office (seen at 4:30) is still standing. It's on Toronto Street, just north of King Street, with a plaque calling it “Toronto's First Post Office.”