When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Rob Ford meets the press on November 26, 2012.

The Star‘s investigation of Mayor Rob Ford’s history of possible substance abuse has only been on newsstands for a few hours, but already Ford’s political allies are well into damage control, phase one: deny.

The article, which you should read, cites several unnamed sources, some close to the mayor and some not-so-close, most of whom allege that Ford has struggled with excessive drinking. The Star‘s sources say Ford’s staff members have been concerned about the mayor for more than two years—that they’ve even urged him to go to rehab. The article also recounts the details of two specific times when Ford’s behaviour supposedly resulted in him being asked to leave public places. One of those incidents was in February.

Earlier this morning, the mayor’s brother, Councillor Doug Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North), went on AM640′s John Oakley Show, where he denied the Star‘s version of events, saying:

“You notice with the Star, Johnny, it’s always hearsay, hearsay, hearsay. Not only myself—you can call the deputy mayor or anyone. I’ve never seen Rob drink at any event, ever.

(You can listen to the full interview here.)

Throughout the interview, Doug Ford calls the Star‘s credibility into question without actually contesting any of the allegations in detail.

The Globe has a similar quote from Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday, who said the following:

“We do know with Rob Ford there’s a lot of people that are either for him or against him and they feel strongly no matter what side they’re on…And some people are prepared to say and do things to him to detract from him being the mayor. We’ve seen this time in, time out.”

Which, like Doug’s AM640 interview, appears to stop just short of a flat denial.

The definitive pro-Ford reaction to the news came around 11 a.m., when Ford made a scheduled appearance in the City Hall members’ lounge, to present boxer George Chuvalo with a key to the city.

After a speech from Ford about Chuvalo’s many accomplishments (ironically, he runs an organization called Fight Against Drugs, which he started after losing his wife and three sons to substance abuse) and some personal reminiscence from the boxer about his Toronto childhood, a visibly sweaty mayor deflected questions from the press. He said:

“You guys are liars. It’s about George Chuvalo today. Have some respect.”

And then he gave the mic to Chuvalo, who quickly found himself in an awkward position. As a friend of Ford’s family, he was obliged to come to the mayor’s defence—which he did, with these words:

“Listen, the mayor is a good guy. Just keep trucking the way you do. That’s all I can say to him.”

And that, for the time being, is the last word from the Ford camp.

CORRECTION: March 26, 2013, 5:25 PM This article originally said that Doug Ford, during an interview on AM640, didn’t explicitly deny that Mayor Rob Ford has a substance problem. In fact, host John Oakley did specifically ask Doug whether he denied that allegation. The councillor’s response was: “Absolutely.” The article has been corrected to reflect this.

Source: the News, January 31, 1913.

How to sell Scotch a century ago: hire a pitchman with Cheshire Cat grin to hide in a dark room. (The disembodied head and mutton chops flying out like long whiskers only add to the feline effect.)

While it’s conceivable that this man might have charmed Scotch drinkers into investing in a bottle of Black & White in 1913, nowadays this ad might suggest a psycho killer preparing to pounce on his victim. Sinister smile lit by candlelight, bottle clenched in hand, no other parts of the body visible, possible Lewis Carroll obsession accompanied by purring voice: the stuff cinematic nightmares are made of.

Perhaps the ad agency should have stuck with the drink’s traditional black and white terrier mascots. Launched as Buchanan’s Blend by James Buchanan in 1879, corporate legend has it that the brand earned its name when customers in dimly-lit drinking establishments asked for “that black and white whisky,” based on its dark bottle and light label. An animal lover, Buchanan added the terriers to the label a few years later. “Some people believe it was these lovable Scotties that made the whisky so famous,” a 1968 ad noted. “But those who have tasted this classic Scotch know it’s really the other way around.” Either way, grinning disembodied heads didn’t factor in.

Additional material from the July 19, 1968 edition of Life.

Source: the Globe and Mail, June 29, 1951.

Bow to your partner. Bow to your corner. Take a little swig. Do a little jig. Do-si-do, but don’t heave-ho.

We suspect these calls weren’t in Brading’s guide to square dancing, but they might have been a useful warning to anyone planning to down one too many Brading’s beers before engaging in another “Canadian Way to Good Health.”

During the postwar era, square dancing rose in popularity across North America as both a social activity and as a component of school physical education programs. Even Bugs Bunny called a dance or two. Thumbing through Toronto newspapers from the month today’s ad was published, we found a classified ad offering weekly sessions at a Lake Rosseau resort, a weekly half-hour showcase Saturday nights on CBC radio (Let’s Square Dance), and, lighting up the screen at the Mount Pleasant Theatre, comedienne Vera Vague, in Square Dance Katy.

Tracing its origins back to 1865, Ottawa-based Brading Breweries was business magnate E.P. Taylor’s gateway to the beer business during the late 1920s. Via acquisitions of regional brewers like Carling and O’Keefe, Taylor’s Canadian Breweries controlled half the Canadian beer market by the mid-1950s. The Brading’s brand gradually do-si-doed into the sunset.

A Toronto-penned carol from 1887 you can play at home this season. The News, December 24, 1887.

In some ways, the holiday season that brought 1887 to a close was similar to today. People rushed around the city to pick up their Christmas gifts. Plenty of booze was downed. Discussions and editorial pages focused on the future of Toronto’s mayoralty. Digging beyond the surface, similarities via the city’s legion of newspapers shows a season that was equally celebratory and cringe-inducing.

Mail columnist H.H. Wiltshire (aka “The Flaneur”) provided the best-written observation of the state of Christmas:

Latterly the question has been often asked as to what is the meaning of the tendency everywhere during the last few years for a much more general observance of the Christmas festival. In some quarters it is attributed to increased reverence, in others to sentimentality, while we are also told that it is only seized upon as an excuse for idleness and gluttony, under the cover of hospitality. Without staying to consider how far any of these views are correct, may we not suppose that one very natural reason is the necessity we all feel for a little rest and enjoyment! Unquestionably there is more work done now in a shorter time than was ever the case before; this must cause a reaction in some form, and this season of the year has appeared most convenient because it is the nearest approach to a recognized universal holiday-time throughout the civilized world. A simple answer to the enquiry is given in the fact that that overworked humanity wants rest.

All of us with healthy minds in healthy bodies enjoy holidays and amusement, and custom, if nothing else, has made both seem especially appropriate to this time of the year. One of the best associations of Christmas undoubtedly is the increasing fondness for family and friendly re-union, when many feuds are healed and words and acts of temper are forgiven; also the inculcation and practice of the truth that there are none of us so poor in ability or in purse but that we can, by merely doing “the duty nearest hand,” make the load lighter and the day more bright for some among those whom sickness or sorrow, misfortune or folly, entitle not only to our kindness and sympathy, but also to be the unsoliciting recipients of practical and generous aid.

Advertisement, the Globe, December 23, 1887.

The rest Wiltshire extolled wasn’t present on Christmas Eve 1887, as downtown streets filled with shoppers in a rush. Though shop windows were filled with joyful displays, those entering stores to purchase gifts were, according to the Globe, hardly in a celebratory mood. “Almost everybody one met seemed to have a parcel or to be in a hurry to get one,” the paper noted. “To judge by the expression of face and the words caught in passing, the getting of the parcels seemed rather to hinder than to help the feeling of joyousness.”

The papers were filled with holiday-inspired doggerel and Christmas stories which would not be published under any circumstances today. The worst offender was a lengthy illustrated tale published in the News on Christmas Eve whose anonymous author reminisced about the glorious celebrations enjoyed by plantation slaves in the southern United States prior to the Civil War. Every imaginable derogatory term was used in a story filled with pidgin English, stock stereotypes, dancing galore, and “the wild hilarity of a negro gathering.”

Because Christmas Day fell on a Sunday, good upstanding Torontonians were expected to observe the usual pieties that created Toronto’s reputation as a place not to have any fun on the Lord’s Day for decades to come. Not that the day was devoid of pleasure—when evening rolled around, carollers hit the streets, along with impromptu brass bands playing tunes on battered instruments.

There was a sad note Christmas morning when the body of Maria Green was found in a stable behind 40 Elizabeth Street. Rather than provide any sympathy for her death from exposure, the press went into full moralizing mode. The Globe depicted Green as “an elderly woman employed as cook in a house of ill-fame on Albert Street,” while the Mail described her as “a woman of about fifty years of age, and the greater part of her life had been spent in infamy. Christmas brought to her not peace but an excess of drunkenness and debauchery with her tragic death as a wind-up.”

Left: Cartoon, the News, December 24, 1887.

The delay of most public Christmas activities to December 26 appeared to create a pent-up thirst among Torontonians, as people went wild when the bars reopened that morning. “’Moral’ Toronto Spends a Very Liquid Christmas” screamed a headline above the World’s account of “the drunkenest day that Toronto has seen for years.” Sleighs overflowed with “more young men than is allowed by the law regarding cruelty to animals.” People who claimed to have never touched a drop of alcohol were among those found in packed saloons. Some establishments closed early to avoid a steady stream of barroom brawls and police visits. “The ordinary drinking public dropped into their usual haunts and were surprised and disgusted at what they saw,” the World reported. “By 6 o’clock there were so many places closed that a usual question was ‘well, where can we go to get a drink?’” Police handled the chaos by making arrests only when necessary. The Globe theorized that the drinking orgy was due to liquor vendors attempting to demonstrate that tougher temperance laws would increase the abusive effects of booze, especially a set of bylaws on the upcoming municipal election ballot.

Alcohol control played a key role in the mayoral campaign that holiday season. On November 3, 1887, Mayor William Holmes Howland announced he would not run for a third term. While Howland spoke to Christian and temperance groups in other cities to extol the effects of his campaigns to reduce the availability of alcohol, the question arose as to who would continue his moral crusade and efforts to curb corruption at City Hall. The favoured candidate among the reformer set was rookie alderman Elias Rogers, a Quaker pro-temperance activist who was one of Toronto’s largest coal merchants.

Two other candidates emerged. Edward Frederick Clarke was a rookie Conservative member at Queen’s Park who published the Orange Sentinel newspaper. Unlike many Orangemen of the era, Clarke was seen as a broadminded man due to actions like allowing Irish Catholic activists to speak at the organization’s hall. Because he wasn’t a fervent temperance advocate, he was depicted by opponents as a friend of the saloon. Daniel Defoe was a veteran alderman who touted his long council experience but was handicapped by his Catholic faith in a very Protestant city—the best he could hope for was a spoiler role. Whoever became mayor needed to be, according to a Globe editorial, “a level-headed, painstaking, conscientious man of marked business ability.”

The campaign was well underway when official nominations were made during a raucous meeting at City Hall (now incorporated into the south St. Lawrence Market) on December 26. The loudest members of the overflow crowd were Clarke supporters, who jeered the other candidates and their nominators. Rogers received most of the verbal abuse, some of it deserved. Female electors were still a new concept—Ontario had granted spinsters and widows the vote in municipal elections in 1884—so Rogers pointed out those in attendance and indicated they were on his side. When a heckler yelled “How do you know they are?,” the Telegram noted that Rogers “knew they were on his side because the ladies were always on the right side.”

More troubling for Rogers were reports that he was the head of a “coal ring.” A series of exposes in the News written by Clarke ally and York West MP Nathaniel Clarke Wallace portrayed Rogers as the leader of a cartel who artificially inflated the price of coal in Toronto, failed to pass savings onto consumers after the federal government removed tariffs on the heating fuel, and conspired to drive competitors out of business. Rogers painted himself as a victim via a complicated explanation involving American coal combines, merciless railway companies, and forming his own ring as a protective measure.

Cartoon depicting Elias Rogers and Edward Clarke, the News, December 31, 1887.

Despite increasingly lengthy explanations about the coal ring which convinced few voters, city churches and most of the press endorsed Rogers. Endless ink was devoted to depicting him as the best man to uphold Howland’s policies and continue the moral crusade against corruption and liquor. Papers like the Telegram were smug in their certainty of a Rogers victory, declaring that the defeat “will simply be extraordinary.”

The extraordinary happened. As the votes were tallied on January 2, 1888, Howland waited for the results at Rogers’ HQ and kept the crowd pepped up. When the early results showed Clarke in the lead, Howland urged people not to leave. By 9 p.m. the race was over—Clarke defeated Rogers by nearly 1,000 votes. Clarke appeared at the window of the News’ newsroom and gave his victory speech, where he declared his win as “not a triumph of the saloon, but a triumph of the moderate over the intemperate party.”

Clarke captured two key groups that Rogers’ backers had looked upon with condescension: labour and women. He pointed out his participation in and arrest during the printer’s strike of 1872 and utilized female canvassers. There were also signs that Torontonians were tiring of heavy-handed, puritanical laws enacted by the Howland administration, such as preventing the hiring of horses on Sundays. In his recently launched paper Saturday Night, E.E. Sheppard observed that people were exasperated by the increasing self-righteousness of Howland’s allies and by “sumptuary laws more arbitrary and intolerant than those which already exist and have been found unworkable.”

Besides Rogers, voters rejected the temperance bylaws on the ballot. They also rejected a ballot proposal to fund construction of a trunk sewer to improve city sanitation, a vote which falls into the great Toronto tradition of balking at spending money on needed infrastructure projects.

Additional material from Mayor Howland The Citizens’ Candidate by Desmond Morton (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973), Mayors of Toronto Volume 1 1834-1899 by Victor Loring Russell (Erin: Boston Mills Press, 1982), and the following newspapers: the December 23, 1887, December 26, 1887, and December 29, 1887 editions of the Globe; the December 24, 1887, December 26, 1887, and January 3, 1888 editions of the Mail; the December 24, 1887 edition of the News; the December 10, 1887 edition of Saturday Night; the December 27, 1887 and December 29, 1887 editions of the Telegram; and the December 27, 1887 edition of the World.

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

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This week, Tory leader Tim Hudak promised that if he were premier, liquor sales in Ontario would be privatized. The idea has been floating around for decades, of course, and is often trotted out when a politician wants to assert their non-socialism or is just suffering from a lack of attention.

The government booze monopoly has been abandoned in many North American jurisdictions—to say nothing of Europe, where baby formula and table wine are pretty much equally available. Should we do it here?

Change can be good. Ontarians of a certain age may remember a time when LCBO stores were cheerless Soviet-style warehouses where customers reviewed short lists of options before completing application forms for their purchases. The documents were reviewed by grim-faced apparatchiks with facial expressions that conveyed appropriate amounts of disapproval for customers’ moral turpitude. These clerks would disappear into the back, eventually returning with the booze.

We’ve come a long way since then, not just in terms of product variety and access, but also in terms of customer experience. Modern LCBO outlets have bright lights, Vivaldi on the PA system, and cheery Aussies pitching kangaroo-flavoured Chardonnay samples. Would privatization serve us better?

Well, let’s consider what a liquor distribution system needs to accomplish.

PR flacking about “social responsibility” notwithstanding, the main job of the LCBO is to raise money for the government. If the industry were opened up to competition, prices could drop, sales could increase, and more tax dollars could flow to government coffers. However, a 2011 report from the Parkland Institute says that the per-capita government revenues from alcohol sales in Alberta have dropped steadily since liquor sales were privatized in 1993, and that those revenues were lower than in both B.C. and Saskatchewan (where some and all liquor stores, respectively, are government operated).

We also want to provide buyers with decent price, convenience, and selection. LCBO stores today are able to offer a broad array of product, from fancy gift liquors, to imported wines and beers, to the full panoply of “Hold-Ashley’s-hair-back-while-she-pukes” coolers.

This is possible in part because the LCBO has the resources to deal with a variety of vendors, both large and small. But it’s also because, unlike private enterprise, the organization isn’t driven entirely by profit. Where a private operator might stock shelves with cheap, high-margin beers and sweet, disgusting wine-based product, the LCBO can afford to take risks on unusual items. (If you doubt this characterization of private alcohol sales, visit the liquor section at Walmart next time you’re in Buffalo.)

Price-wise, the conventional wisdom is that we pay too much for our alcohol here in Ontario, and that we could do better if we had less monopoly. But in 2004, when the B.C. government first allowed private liquor sales, the predicted price drop didn’t materialize. A study [PDF] from the Consumers’ Association of Canada only two years later found that despite the rapid proliferation of private liquor retailers, prices were higher than in the remaining government-run stores (although it should be noted that all stores still have to buy their product from the government, with large markups). The Parkland study referenced above arrived at similar conclusions.

Finally, the goal of a government booze monopoly is to better protect us from ourselves—to keep us away from the silly sauce when we’re underage, or when we’ve already reached the government-approved level of boozy dementia. While private retailers may comply with the law for fear of punishment, a greater number of stores would increase the probability of there being a few opportunistic owners willing to take a chance and sell illegally.

This isn’t just an assumption. A study this year from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that public liquor stores in B.C. are twice as likely to turn away kids and drunks as private stores. So this category is definitely a win for Big Bartender.

In any case, telling us what to do is what government excels at. The LCBO, in particular, does it well (apart from their controversial policy of selling booze to underage teens in burkas).

And everything else notwithstanding, Ontario has never demonstrated all that much enthusiasm for dismantling the LCBO. Even Mike Harris couldn’t get six-packs into his corner store.

So why change? We have a system that does more or less what it’s supposed to do, and to which the population is basically indifferent. Not a ringing endorsement, but that’s how we roll here in Ontario.

Protesters rally in support of the Schoolhouse shelter yesterday on Yonge Street. Photo by Desmond Cole.

The Schoolhouse Shelter, a 55-bed facility on George Street, is moving away from a special service it once provided to homeless, alcohol-dependent men. For many years, Schoolhouse has functioned as a “wet” shelter, where residents could bring in and consume their own alcohol, and where many resided for long periods of time. A decision yesterday at the Community Recreation and Development Committee approved the site’s transition to a more conventional emergency shelter—a small victory for the former residents and community advocates who feared the facility might close altogether. If city council endorses yesterday’s decision, the new Schoolhouse will operate with 40 beds instead of 55 (the current capacity is cramped, especially as far as washrooms are concerned), and the current alcohol allowance policies will be discontinued.

Until the early 1990s, the policy around alcohol in Toronto shelters was to confiscate it from residents seeking a bed. But as researchers and advocates began urging shelter operators to introduce harm-reduction approaches—approaches that focus more on limiting risky behaviour than on total abstinence—some facilities implemented new rules. Staff at Seaton House, a large shelter in the same Cabbagetown area as Schoolhouse, began labelling and storing alcoholic beverages, returning them to their owners the next morning instead of pouring the drinks down the drain.

Seaton House later expanded this approach to include supervised consumption of alcohol on site, an ongoing initiative where residents are provided a quantity of alcohol each hour. The idea was to keep residents from leaving the shelter and putting themselves at risk to find a drink, and to reduce the consumption of harmful alcohol-based products like hand sanitizer and mouthwash.

Schoolhouse was unique in that residents brought in their own drinks and paid a $7 per night fee to stay at the shelter. In an interview, a former resident named Brian shared his memories of the “camaraderie” he shared with other men, most of whom would wake up early every morning to line up for manual labour jobs at local temp agencies. “The great part was that we could come back after work, and we could have a few beers,” Brian told us during a breakfast and rally hosted by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. “You had a little more say in how the place was run…we helped each other out more. In the bigger hostels, you’re just another person.”

Of course, not everyone approves of the provisions at Schoolhouse and other harm-reduction facilities. Many fear the approach merely gave residents a place to maintain their alcohol addiction without providing tools to overcome it. Toronto Sun columnist Sue-Ann Levy summarized this concern in a column earlier this year: “While I’m not at all a fan of harm reduction programs, at least the Seaton House Annex, which also allows its clients to drink, helps them use alcohol safely or tries to get them off the bottle.”

But Geitan Heroux, a longtime support worker and activist, insists that, “we know that this kind of shelter, where men are allowed to drink inside, actually saves lives.” Addressing the crowd at yesterday’s rally, Heroux reminded people that, “in the winter of 1996, we had three men freeze to death on these streets.” An inquest into those alcohol-related deaths recommended a wet shelter as one way to keep alcohol-dependent people from putting their lives at risk.

David Reycraft, the director of housing and homeless services at Dixon Hall, which currently runs Schooolhouse, says their openness to harm-reduction approaches has spread across the city. “I think that the flexibility of the shelter system has increased over the last few years,” he told us in an interview at City Hall. “We have a broader harm-reduction approach to men and women dealing with addictions,” said Reycraft, adding that Toronto shelters have curbed the practice of turning away intoxicated people seeking a bed.

Many of the Schoolhouse residents remained in the facility for two or three years at a time, and must now find another place to live as they deal with addiction issues. (Since the shelter is shifting from a transitional to an emergency shelter, many current residents will not be able to stay.) Reycraft told us the process of moving current Schoolhouse residents to permanent housing is ongoing. But he stressed that “we also need to be talking more about support and supportive housing…we know that the men that we’ve housed are successful, and we want to continue working with them.”

The Peacock Hotel, on Dundas near Annette Street, in 1912. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1106c.

In 1878, the federal government passed the Canada Temperance Act, drafted by Liberal Senator Richard William Scott. Sometimes known as the Scott Act, this legislation granted individual municipalities the right to put alcohol sale to a plebiscite, and to enforce a ban on its sale should the majority of voters favour one. Implementing such a ban on alcohol sale was generally known as exercising “local option,” and over the years several Ontario communities chose to take advantage of this right. One such community was Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood, which banned the sale of alcohol in 1904, while still an independent municipality.

In 1903, the Junction was the town of Toronto Junction; its reported population in October of that year was just shy of 7,000. Convenient rail access, low tax rates, and a local customs office had served to attract many factories to the area, which in turn spurred commercial growth, particularly along Dundas Street. These amenities, coupled with the Junction’s six hotels, served to make the town a popular stopping point for those going to and from the city of Toronto. The local hotels did steady business, with each maintaining a barroom where the bulk of the profits were made.

The factors which brought enforced temperance to the Junction were many and nuanced. While the temperance movement was growing across much of Canada, there was local concern over the unfortunate reputation that the Junction was earning for itself.

Annette Street Methodist Church, as it looked in 1888. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.

Both Heydon House, located at the northwest corner of (Old) Weston Road and St. Clair, and Brown’s Hotel, located further north, had a reputation for fights and general rowdiness. For several years Heydon House, the Junction’s largest hotel in 1903, was also a regular venue for cockfighting, and sometimes the subject of police raids. On February 22, 1903, Rev. T.E.E. Shore gave a sermon at the Annette Street Methodist Church on “Some Needed Reforms in Toronto Junction.” Shore outlined several problems he believed to be plaguing the town, including the existence of gambling dens, to which he accused the local police of brazenly turning a blind eye. He reserved most of his ire, however, for the local hotels, the primary (legal) purveyors of alcohol in the Junction. The Star quotes Shore as saying “Many a poor fallen girl has told me down in yonder mission how she fell into sin and degradation in Junction hotels. Men do not go to those hotels merely for refreshments or to quench their thirst. They are cesspools, I say. Cesspools of harlotry, vice, and iniquity.”

The sermon ignited a debate over local option which raged in Toronto Junction throughout 1903. The town divided into those who saw alcohol as the root of the problem, and the moderates who argued that they could make do with more vigorous enforcement of the current laws and an investigation into the liquor licensing system. The pro-local option side was led by several prominent townspeople, in particular the Protestant ministers, who increasingly called for prohibition in their sermons. The cause was also championed by some members of the town council, particularly Councillors A.H. Perfect and future MPP William A. Baird. The “Antis,” as the opposition was known in the press, were understandably led by the local hotel owners, whose livelihood depended on alcohol sales; on the town council, their political champion was councillor and former Junction mayor James Bond.

That autumn, both sides held public meetings around the town, each believing their opinion to be that of the local majority. The issue was amplified by a fight at Heydon House that September. The fight is described in a 1987 family history by A.J. Heydon, who writes that the fight “was said to have been fought between some cattlemen from the Union Stockyards and a group of C.P. railway workers—the subject of disagreement having been the favour of one of the neighbourhood prostitutes… It was largely the result of this incident that public sympathy began to side with the prohibitionist cause.”

Heydon House, seen in 1927. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1110.

In the annual municipal elections held on January 4, 1904, local option was put to Toronto Junction voters as a plebiscite. Although both sides predicted a strong majority in their favour, it was those in favour of local option who emerged victorious, with 56 per cent of the cast vote. William Brown, owner of Brown’s Hotel, attributed the results not so much to local sentiment, but to the better organization of the local option campaign. John Harris of the Subway House blamed the result on the female vote, claiming that “they don’t know enough about hotels to vote on them.”

Despite the outcome of the vote, alcohol did not disappear from the Junction overnight. The ban did not go into effect until May 1, giving the hotels (and the one Junction liquor store) some time to exhaust their supplies and arrange new business plans. A few of the hotel owners are reported as having investigated a legal challenge to the vote, but nothing appears to have come of this. Instead, most of the owners vowed to remain in business for as long as possible to minimize their losses, and expected to close up shortly thereafter, believing the Junction hotel business to be unprofitable without liquor. The exception was Heydon House, which closed in early April when the proprietor abruptly left town, perhaps ahead of his creditors. For those who remained, Toronto Junction yielded one final opportunity for the bars to do some good business.

On Saturday, April 30, there was a minor election in the City of Toronto. Although Toronto had also had its municipal elections that January, some unexpected results and accusations of ballot-stuffing had called into question the results in the Board of Control returns, as Fred Richardson had been elected with unusually high numbers. Accusations of corruption persisted, and in mid-April, Richardson announced his resignation with an intention to immediately seek re-election in order to clear his name. The Toronto Star wrote that “what he wants to secure is a public vindication, and if his friends have told him, as they seem to have done, that he needs one, they are not far wrong.”

The Subway Hotel, at the southwest corner of Keele and Vine, in 1923. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 16, Series 71, Item 2619.

Torontonians, thus, returned to the polls on April 30. According to the laws in place, all the bars in Toronto were closed on election day. This practice was not unusual in North America at the time, designed to encourage voter turnout and, possibly, to discourage candidates from buying votes with liquor. The result was a perfect storm: all of the bars in Toronto were closed on the last day of legal alcohol sales in the Junction. For anyone in Toronto looking for liquor that particular Saturday, there was only one place to go.

Preparations began the day before. According to the Telegram, “all [day] brewers’ waggons [sic] were up and down to every hotel and every cellar is full. The police expect a general carousal… in fact one of the wildest nights the Junction has ever seen.” Junction Police Chief Josiah Royce swore in four additional constables to deal with whatever problems might ensue.

Beginning at noon, streetcars began arriving along Dundas, bringing the first revellers from the city. The streetcar stopped right outside the doors of the Peacock Hotel, located near where Dundas meets Dupont, which was normally a spot for farmers and market gardeners who were passing through town. This being the Junction’s easternmost bar, it became the first point of arrival for the Toronto crowd. According to the Telegram, “every car deposited its tightly packed cargo of thirsty Torontonians at the Peacock. Those who could be were accommodated there. The overflow wended their way further up, till every [public] house was surrounded by a huge crowd, waiting for their turn to order liquor.”

Image of the Peacock Hotel of the crowds on April 30, 1904. The Toronto Daily News, May 2, 1904.

According to the Toronto Daily News, the Toronto newspaper reporters endeavoured to stick together and forced their way into the Peacock to survey the scene, but “the phalanx of journalists was broken up before it got a yard inside the door, and the individual members fought their way through to the door on the other side as best they might.”

Newspaper accounts describe the confusion: floors covered in liquor and broken glass; crowds (and liquids) spilling out into the streets; customers attempting to make their orders heard over the yelling, singing, and din of cash registers. The Mail and Empire described it as “the wildest saturnalia the Junction has ever seen.” The Toronto World wrote “the event was the ushering in of the local option bylaw and giving a parting salute to King Bacchus and six of his satellites, the Junction bars. There is no doubt that the crowd made it a success, if debauchery, fighting, and ill-temper constitute features worthy of the term ‘celebration.’” The World also quoted Rev. Mr. Heston, of the Annette Street Methodist Church, as describing it as “a carnival of vice, in which the powers of darkness held reign.”

In order to make room for new customers, some of the hotels moved those already served outside, where people reportedly drank in stables and other outbuildings. “In one such place,” wrote the Telegram, “which seemed to have been quite lately vacated by poultry, quite an organized concert was being held and the erratic “encores,” which followed a somewhat thick rendering of ‘Bedelia’ in which everybody joined, could be heard a long distance up the road.”

At the Subway Hotel, located at the southwest corner of Keele and Vine, the group reportedly remained static, with drinks being passed over patrons’ heads towards their intended recipient. Proprietor John Harris spent much of the evening standing on the bar, shouting orders and warning his patrons to behave.

C.J. Herbert, who ran the Junction’s only liquor store, kept his establishment locked to protect the furniture, and only admitted small groups at a time, who would then drink their purchases in the streets, or in sheds, or back lanes.

The Avenue Hotel, located at the southwest corner of Dundas and High Park, was the Junction’s westernmost bar. On April 30, the crowd there was described by the Telegram as being “largely of mechanics and apprentices and workingmen,” and just as boisterous as that at the other hotels. “For over 100 yards, both on Dundas Street and High Park Avenue, past the hotel, dozens could be seen with bottles to their heads… One man stayed so long he had to be removed to the driving shed in a wheelbarrow.”

(Above: C.J. Herbert, proprietor of Toronto Junction’s liquor store in 1904. York Tribune, 1901.)

Rumours had circulated ahead of time that drinks would be given away for free, although none of the six major Toronto dailies at the time found any evidence of such; in the chaos it was presumably hard to tell. All the papers agree on a rough estimate of 10,000 Torontonians going to the Junction that afternoon and evening to patronize the five open bars and single liquor store.

Before too long, the teeming crowd was firmly in its cups. In an article bearing the headline “Drunken Orgy at the Junction,” the Mail and Empire wrote that “the streets were crowded with men in various stages of intoxication. There were jolly drunks, fighting drunks, noisy drunks, and stupid drunks.” The Daily News noted that “in the dense press, a man might be dead drunk comfortably, for there was no room for him to fall down.” Some grew belligerent; others were inclined to sing. Many passed out in out-buildings or stables.

Glasses grew to be in short supply; not only were many of them in use, but some chose to keep them as souvenirs. Others, as the Telegram reported, “suggested themselves as missiles to those who began to feel frolicsome.”

Charles Kelly, proprietor of the Occidental Hotel on Dundas near Indian Grove, had the police clear his establishment as early as 5 p.m., two hours before the stated last call. J.H. Leflar of the Avenue also closed up early, after he ran out of glasses. Shortly before 7 p.m., efforts were made by police to begin clearing out the remaining bars. After closing the Peacock and the Subway, a crowd of several hundred descended on the Occidental, evidently with a plan of rushing the prematurely closed venue and absconding with the remaining liquor; they were held back by the constables.

According to the Star, “once outside, with absolutely no chance of getting more liquor, the crowd commenced good-humouredly serenading Mayor Chisholm and singing drinking songs.” Chisholm maintained a clothing store on Dundas, and numerous papers mention groups from the crowd, evidently believing the Toronto Junction mayor to be responsible for the impending alcohol ban, putting their opinions to him through music. The Daily News wrote that “the roisterers leaned in a ridiculous circle against the lamp-post outside, and favoured him with the ditty ‘Glorious Beer’ in the most awful series of discords that alcohol could produce.”

(Above: J.R. Chisholm, Mayor of Toronto Junction when the town voted to enforce local option. York Tribune, 1901.)

Others remained outside the Occidental, the Telegram noting that “a hilarious party of English labourers succeeded in making the night hideous by howling incessantly for nearly an hour the following ditty:

“I am so dry, I am so dry;
Nobody knows how dry I am.”

Considering the reports, arrests and altercations were relatively few. For the most part, little force was necessary in dispersing the crowd, beyond shutting down the bars and evacuating the people into the streets, with the Telegram commending the police for their restraint in not dispersing the crowd by force and thus avoiding serious trouble. During one of the few arrests at Keele and Dundas, however, the crowd momentarily turned on Police Chief Josiah Royce, who in turn drew his pistol, proclaiming “I’ll shoot the first man who follows.” This proved effective, and Royce evidently endured no other rebellion from the crowd.

Although many of the newspaper accounts dwell on the arrests and handful of reported thefts, Royce told the Mail and Empire that “we have had comparatively little trouble, far less than we expected. It was largely due to the city contingent that we had as much as there was. You must have sent us fully 10,000 of your best drinkers, and these caused most of the disturbance.” All of the newspapers reported fewer than 10 arrests, with most of those arrested being Toronto residents under the age of 22.

The next week, Toronto newspapers reported on the Junction’s hangover. On Monday morning, wagons came to the Junction to take away what was left of the lager. The Peacock was still serving dinners, but most of the other hotels are reported as entirely closed. C.A. Kelly of the Occidental Hotel nailed boards and a piece of tin over his hotel’s windows and door. William Brown attempted to remain open one additional day, but was warned by the police about the law, and was forced to follow with the others.

On May 4, the Telegram noted that outside the Peacock Hotel, “the driving sheds are boarded up, and dealers who meet the farmers there are perched on empty boxes on the sidewalk, this being the only shelter they can get.” The Star noted that even not factoring in the already-closed Heydon House and its 80 rooms, closing the hotels meant about 50 people were without accommodation and over 100 would be losing out on meals.

(Above: Toronto Junction Police Chief Josiah Royce. The Toronto World, May 2, 1904.)

In the years that followed, there is evidence of bootlegging in the Junction, including at Heydon House, which soon got a new owner. Many of the old hotels became boarding houses. Local option remained in effect in the Junction for over 90 years, with the last section overturning it in 2000.

At the end of the revelry, the Telegram predicted that the Junction “for some time will not witness such debauch.” Once the streets were cleaned up, the Toronto World reported on life in Toronto Junction: “Sunday was a quiet day. It was the lull after the storm… The streets had less people on them than usual, and as the day was very bright, many people spent the afternoons in the parks and ravines about town.”

Additional material from: The Globe (May 2, 1904); A.J. Heydon, The Heydons and their Hotels: The first four generations of the Heydon family in Ontario (Pro Familia Genealogical Servies, 1987: Toronto); The Leader & Recorder’s History of the Junction, Diana Fancher, ed. (Coach House, 20047: Toronto); The Mail and Empire (May 2, 1904); The Toronto Daily News (May 2, 1904); The Toronto Star (February 23, March 21, April 7, September 9, November 23, December 14, December 21, December 28, 1903; January 4, January 5, January 7, April 30, May 2, May 3, May 4, 1904); The Evening Telegram (January 2, January 5, April 25, April 28, April 30, May 2, May 4, 1904); The Toronto World (April 27, May 2,
1904).

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

Source: Liberty, October 1955.

As with many cookbooks from the 1950s, print quality and the passage of time have not done wonders to the appetizing qualities of these special oven-roasted meals meant to be enjoyed with a cheap Canadian sherry. That this fine beverage’s economic benefits are touted as much as its palate-pleasing qualities tends to reinforce the poor image the Canadian wine industry enjoyed among serious oenophiles at the time.

We weren’t able to find much about the Canadian Wine Institute apart from its evolution into the Canadian Vintners Association. We do know that they offered a free home delivery service during the 1950s—newspaper ads published throughout the decade offered prompt service if you ordered three or more bottles over the phone from the nearest wine store. The organization also offered cooking guides rich in suggestions for using sherry in ways other than pickling yourself.

Source: the Mail and Empire, November 2, 1911.

While we doubt that Toronto’s cultural elite emptied bottles of PBR at their private clubs a century ago, we sense the local importer had a good feel for who this brew could be marketed to: germaphobes and health purists. The claims of cleanliness also make us wonder how lax local brewers were toward sanitizing their facilities, or if there was a subtle implication that Lake Michigan water was purer than Lake Ontario.

Despite advertisements such as this one, Pabst, along with fellow American brewers like Anheuser-Busch, failed to gain a toehold in the Toronto market during the early 20th century. Few drinkers appear to have switched over from local producers like Dominion or O’Keefe’s.

An odd fact we discovered while researching this piece: during Prohibition in the United States, Pabst survived by manufacturing cheese. Their most popular product was Pabst-ett, a processed product that was too similar to Velveeta for Kraft’s liking. Result: Kraft sued and won, which led the cheese giant to produce Pabst-ett under license for a while and then, once Prohibition was over, to acquire the product outright. Which leads us to wonder: what if the marketing gurus at PBR bought back the rights to the name and marketed Pabst-ett as a hipster snack (playing on the humour of its low dairy content) to be enjoyed while tossing back a can or pitcher?