Results tagged “historicist”

It is just one instance of what has become an enduring theme in Canadian culture: animosity towards Toronto. We All Hate Toronto—which the Star of June 19, 1948 called "a malice-edged bit of spoofing" when it was reprinted in Sinclair's A Play On Words & Other Radio Plays (J.M. Dent & Sons Limited, 1948)—was certainly not the first to poke fun at Toronto's quirks. But, giving expression to an existing sentiment, the play was broadcast at a significant moment in the city's—and the country's—artistic and economic development. It was one of a number of anti-Toronto cultural artefacts that appeared at the same time as Toronto assumed a greater role at the leading edge of the country's post-war economic boom.

The success of Battle of the Blades has brought Maple Leaf Gardens back into the national spotlight. The show’s mix of glamour and excitement fits some of the visions Conn Smythe had for the building when it opened its doors to the public seventy-eight years ago this week. Built in an almost unimaginable span of five months, the building that became a temple for generations of hockey fans is a testament to the executives who used their persuasive skills to raise the necessary funds during the Great Depression.

On September 10, 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King officially declared war on Germany. Toronto was impacted by the war almost immediately. Drawn by patriotism, adventure-seeking, or just the lure of a job after nearly a decade of the Great Depression, thousands of young Torontonians spilled into recruiting stations and from there into manning depots. In Bill McNeil's Voices of a War Remembered (Doubleday Canada Limited, 1991), Torontonian Ella Trow recalled how every family was touched by the Second World War. "My brothers and my husband went into the services," she wrote, "and most of my friends were in the same boat."

Halloween has long provided an excuse for Torontonians to relax and cut loose their stiffer qualities for at least one day. Whether it’s infants dressed as garden vegetables and insects or downtown revellers dressed in outfits that can’t be mentioned in family publications, Toronto has long loved assuming disguises and participating in all of the accompanying rituals that go along with today. A flip through old local newspapers shows that pranks played a large role in past Halloweens, from harmless showoffs to destructive blazes. For better or worse, tricks were as equally important as the treats.

University College has long been one of Toronto's most admired buildings. Its Gothic Revival style, inspired in part by the Romantic poets, impressed such distinguished nineteenth-century visitors as Anthony Trollope, Governor General Lord Dufferin, and Oscar Wilde. In Landmarks of Toronto (1893), John Ross Robertson called the University of Toronto building "the crowning architectural glory of Toronto." Perhaps befitting its moody architecture, University College is also home to one of the city's best-known ghost stories. Versions of the story differ, but each follows the same basic plot.

Though the smell is more grilled sausage than ham and some of the lettuce may be shipped in from faraway destinations, the atmosphere evoked by this description of St. Lawrence Market from a 1976 Toronto Star profile still rings true. At the time those words were written, the market neared the end of a decade of rehabilitation that reflected changes in attitude towards historic properties in the city. The north side saw the old knock-it-down attitude at play, while the south was spared a date with a wrecking ball in favour of renovation. Otherwise, you might have enjoyed this morning’s mustard sample or peameal bacon sandwich in a building that lacked more than 150 years of history.

In the name of reform, nineteenth-century politician Robert Baldwin was a thorn in the side of more than one governor of Upper Canada. As a result, he has been called a lot of names. One governor, Lord Sydenham, dubbed him "the most crotchety impracticable enthusiast I have ever had to deal with." Another called him "such an ass." Neither seems especially fitting given that Baldwin always carried himself with an impeccable, gentlemanly demeanour in his dogged efforts to undercut the governor's power to govern without need to consult with the local parliament.

George McCullagh seemed to have it all: a rags-to-riches back story; a brash, cocky charm that appealed to financiers, politicians, and the public; a growing family; influence in the back rooms of government; and ownership of several Toronto daily newspapers. He even attempted to lead a crusade to change the nature of government that would enable him to fulfill his belief that he alone could improve the state of affairs for Canadians or at least the state of affairs for his friends in the mining industry. Ultimately all of this may have been too much for one body to handle.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of prominent women in temperance unions, religious associations, and welfare societies realized that a way to achieve their objectives in reforming society and achieving equality of status was to seek their right to cast a ballot on election day. Through the tireless efforts of suffragettes, and the impact of the First World War, during which women assumed a range of traditionally male roles in factories, offices, and on sales floors, the women's movement achieved a measure of success by the war's close. Ontario women became entitled to vote in provincial elections on April 2, 1917—and entitled to run for office on April 24, 1919.

For North York during the 1960s, the explosion in population and industry that the previous decade had seen showed no signs of stopping. By the end of the sixties, almost two hundred thousand people were added to the citizen roll. Quiet rural intersections saw farms and villages give way to apartment blocks, factories, schools, and shopping plazas. Traffic problems arose and required immediate solutions. The municipality's status changed from township to the more dignified "borough."

Often referred to as Canada's first photojournalist, William James spent more than thirty years documenting Toronto and city life in all its varieties. An ever present, silent observer of a changing city, he was there to record the construction of public infrastructure and new buildings. James photographed the first airplane flights over the city and, a few years later, captured the first bird's eye photos (and moving pictures) of Toronto from the back of a biplane. He recorded the changing landscape of the city's outward expansion. But he was far more interested in capturing the city's inhabitants in informal, unposed moments, such as workmen going about their toil and children at play. He entered the drawing rooms of the elite and photographed the city's destitute.

What were the ingredients needed to produce a Labour Day weekend in Toronto eighty years ago? A visit to the CNE? Check. Tourists crowding local highways? Check. A day at a beach? Check. Union members proudly marching in a parade wearing white suits and straw hats? Check. Controversy in the sporting world? Check. Rumours of a provincial election in the offing? Check. Economic worries? Not yet (wait a few weeks). Thieves with a penchant for stealing trousers? Check...?!?

After a building boom altered the Toronto skyline over the course of the late 1920s, construction ground to a standstill during the Great Depression. Annual spending on construction, which had peaked at $51.5 million in 1928, dropped to a mere $4.5 million in 1933. The few projects that weren't cancelled or disrupted were initiated mostly by banks and insurance companies seeking symbolic structures that emphasized institutional stability through turbulent times and faith in an economic turnaround.

Anyone crossing Adelaide Street between Jarvis and University on the morning of March 31, 1972, would have noticed a slow procession moving in the opposite direction of the street’s normal traffic flow. A crowd had gathered to follow the move of Campbell House, a century-and-a-half-old building that was spared a date with a wrecking ball that other historic buildings in Toronto had experienced during the preceding decade. The relocation was due, as Joni Mitchell might have said, to one company’s desire to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

It's often been suggested that the Canadian National Exhibition—since its founding in 1879 as an instructional exhibition to promote the development of agriculture, industry, and the arts—has reflected the social development of an ever-changing country. As the CNE website notes [pdf]: "Developments brought on by new technology, changing values, and even Canada’s role in international affairs, have been well represented at the CNE." Its populist entertainments have similarly evolved. In its first twenty-five years, according to historian Keith Walden in Becoming Modern in Toronto (UTP, 1997), there was competitive tension between the instructional agricultural and industrial demonstrations and the more popular entertainments of the midway—which, in less enlightened times, included carnival sideshows with freaks, fake levitators, and exotica aimed at a more adult audience. In the years that followed, there continued to be no shortage of eclectic attractions—although with a greater emphasis on family entertainment.

As he neared his sixtieth year, Roy Thomson had reached a crossroads. The newspaper baron’s publishing empire was entering the United States and Great Britain and he held the presidency of the Canadian Press. These accomplishments were tempered by the emptiness in his life created when his wife succumbed to cancer and by a sense that he had reached the limits of what he could do in the Canadian media business without repeating himself. As he noted in his autobiography After I Was Sixty:

Taking to the stage on May 28, 1961, Cup Cake Cassidy punctuated the end of another of Toronto's notoriously prudish Sunday prohibitions with every shake of her hips. Under purple spotlights, the buxom burlesque star performed the bump-and-grind on the Lux Theatre's runway to the accompaniment of live musicians. In celebration of a new law, passed by council on May 23, that allowed theatrical performances on Sundays, the operator of the Lux, Elliott Abels (or Abells), flew Cassidy, one of the continent's most popular stripteasers and a regular performer in Toronto, in from the States for a special one-day, four-performance engagement. By her second show, a crowd of four hundred—including, the Globe reported, "a number of couples and more than a dozen women who entered individually and were well past 40." The whistling and stomping, the journalist added, reached "deafening proportions" as, bit by bit, the six-foot-tall brunette seductively shed her elaborate, jewelled gown.

If you were a retailer looking to launch a new department store chain in the early 1960s, the discount market appeared to be the way to go. While Toronto did have one-off discounters (Honest Ed's) and lower-priced annexes of existing retailers (Eaton's), businessmen looked at the prosperity of American discounters like E.J. Korvette and saw potential for setting up similar chains in Canada. For several years after Towers opened its first store in Scarborough in the fall of 1960, discount chains with varying degrees of longevity made their debut around Metropolitan Toronto. One of the splashiest openings belonged to Sayvette, who promised to shake up the department store sector. In its two decades of retailing, Sayvette went from grandiose dreams and promising new retail approaches to dead weight on the balance sheet of one of the country’s largest food merchants. Along the way Sayvette experienced little profitability, speculation over its ownership, unrealized expansion plans, and a constant search for where it fit in the retail landscape.

In 1921, the Ontario Department of Education selected Charles William Jefferys to illustrate George M. Wrong's Ontario Public School History of Canada, a textbook being published under Lorne Pierce's Ryerson Press imprint. Upon their first meeting, the English-born artist—whose family had bounced around the northeastern U.S. and Ontario before settling in Toronto around 1880—and Pierce, a former Methodist minister, hit it off immediately despite a gap in age of twenty-one years. In Pierce, Jefferys found a kindred spirit who shared his ambition to excite nationalist sentiment among Canadians. He wanted to popularize Canadian history as an epic and romantic story by bringing historical characters to life through his illustrations. The long friendship and collaboration between artist and publisher, which resulted in a number of books, proved so successful that Jefferys's images became instantly recognizable, Canadian icons that shaped more than one generation's understanding of Canadian nationalism.

To Sydney Newman, television drama was all about appealing to the common man. Described in an obituary as “brash and charmingly outrageous," Newman "shrewdly cast himself as the low-brow who punctures the pretensions of high-minded rivals.” In a film and television career that included major posts in Canada and Great Britain, the Toronto native used his hustling, straight-talking, frank approach to production to bring viewers down-to-earth dramas, time-travelling aliens, morale boosts during wartime, and even a hockey game or two.

As boys traded in their winter breeches for shorts at the end of the school term, the city became an enormous, open-air playground. Freed from the observant eye of parents and teachers, boyhood summers in the early twentieth century offered opportunities for exploring neighbourhoods until the streetlights came on. Streets, alleyways, and parks hosted games of marbles, hide-and-seek, and baseball. Summer days were anything but idle, and perusing a couple autobiographies offers insight into the many ways boys filled their times.

As the current municipal strike nears the end of its first week, garbage remains the talk of the town. As Torontonians break through the plastic wrap placed around bins and protest sites chosen as temporary trash depots, letter pages and website comment sections fill with gripes and suggestions on how to handle those responsible for ensuring our garbage is taken care of. Since the first container of local refuse was carted away, city residents have publicly aired in the press their praise and scorn for those collecting our trash.

In its early years, the Queen's Plate was a rather raucous and unpredictable annual event. Because the world's oldest thoroughbred race was nomadic for its first twenty years, moving from the Carleton racetrack at Dundas and Keele, to London, Ottawa, St. Catharines, and elsewhere according to the lobbying efforts of politicians, its organization was loose. Rules and the course length differed from year to year. The Plate, intended by Queen Victoria to encourage colonial breeders to strive to develop quality horses, was sometimes little more than a sideshow at county fairs. Names of horses were changed from one year to the next, and the colour of a horse's silks often differed from the description in the official program. There was hardly a running of the Queen's Plate that didn't provoke charges of fixed races, ineligible "ringer" horses, or illegal riding tactics. Confusion reigned. One classic example came in 1865, when the winning and second place horses were both disqualified. Nora Criena was reported to have won the run-off heat, but, months later and without explanation, Lady Norfolk was instead announced as the official Queen's Plate winner.

The 1982 Grey Cup game was not a pleasurable one for Toronto football fans. The major disappointment was not that the Argonauts fell apart in the second half and lost to the Edmonton Eskimos 32 to 16—it was the bone-chilling, rainy weather. Downpours caused fans in fully exposed sections of Exhibition Stadium to risk injury in order to find shelter. Among the fifty-five thousand people in the stands observing the miserable experience were Metropolitan Toronto Chairman Paul Godfrey and Ontario Premier William Davis. As the Globe and Mail observed, as Godfrey "surveyed the scene from his dry seat in Section 42 at the 55-yard line, the falling rain brought a twinkle to his eye. There must have been visions of a domed stadium dancing in his head.” While Davis sighed that the Argonauts "played well," Godfrey told a Star reporter that “if you ever needed proof of the need for a domed stadium, this is your day.”

Lou Turofsky's favourite photograph was a sedate shot of an exhausted newsboy curled up on a building's front steps. It's a compelling choice, yet surprising given the countless sports stars, celebrities, and royalty that Lou and his brother Nat photographed in Toronto over the years. Today many of their photos of sporting events and city life remain recognizable—frequently republished on this site and elsewhere—but the Turofsky name and their story are largely unknown.

A spring weeknight. A fan planning to go to that night's Blue Jays game flips on the radio to check on the traffic heading to the ballpark.

In the heady 1920s, Ontario was a dry province. After the war, the Ontario Temperance Act, which originally prohibited public consumption and sale of alcohol as a wartime measure, had been strengthened to close a variety of loopholes to become outright prohibition. It was, of course, a widely flouted law that gave rise to an underground economy of thriving bootleggers who supplied beer and whisky to blind pigs and speakeasies—as well as to Americans suffering through the decade-long thirst of the Volstead Act south of the border. Rocco Perri, an Italian immigrant to Hamilton, was one of many once-small-time crooks who were emboldened and enriched by the smuggling trade.

Dateline: Toronto, December 28, 1928, the corner of Richmond and Victoria streets. Over a thousand people gathered at the Tivoli theatre to attend a midnight screening of the first all-talking feature to play in Toronto, The Terror. The crowd was treated to a tale of an organ-tinkling homicidal maniac preying upon guests at an English hotel, with sound provided via the Vitaphone system of giant record-like discs synchronized with the film.

Union Station hadn't seen a crowd that size since the Prince of Wales had visited. A throng of more than five thousand men, women, and children crammed into every corner of the concourse on November 24, 1934. Waving red banners, they eagerly awaited of the arrival of the 9:30 p.m. train from Kingston carrying Tim Buck, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), who'd been released from the penitentiary mere hours earlier. Prison officials, hoping to avoid just such an uproarious welcome, had attempted to keep his release quiet. Buck didn't even know he was going home until an hour before boarding the train. But at the train station, Buck eluded his escort, who'd been under orders to keep Buck in the car until right before the train's departure, and managed a brief phone call to Toronto. His comrades alerted the press and hastily distributed leaflets among the public. As The Star reported, news of Buck's impending arrival "swept working class districts like wildfire," and the jubilant turnout at Union Station defied all expectations.

Late afternoon, Thursday, March 25, 1880. The front page of the 5 p.m. edition of The Evening Telegram bore breaking news occurring at a rival newspaper that had been the subject of quickly spreading rumours over the past hour.