Group at statue of Queen Victoria, Queen’s Park, ca. 1912. From the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 2211.

The Golden Jubilee, celebrating Victoria’s 50th year on the throne, prompted an outpouring of patriotic fervour in Toronto in 1887. So large was the crowd attending a special Jubilee church service, with representation from most of the city’s denominations, that they couldn’t all fit in the Metropolitan Church. After a series of effusive speeches by the lieutenant-governor, premier, and mayor, the proceedings closed with a song—composed especially for the occasion by F.H. Torrington—”sung with great spirit and feeling” by all assembled, according to one in attendance.

The next day, a grand procession—composed of civic officials, school trustees, members of the city’s charities and societies, military units and veterans, all carrying banners and flags—marched past throngs of cheering spectators to festivities in the beloved monarch’s honour at the exhibition grounds. It was said that the procession was so long that it took an hour to pass a single point. Of the parade in the beloved monarch’s honour, Conyngham C. Taylor wrote in Toronto “Called Back” from 1888 to 1847 (Toronto: William Briggs, 1888): “The grand event so long anticipated was one to be long remembered as perhaps the most remarkable and the most thoroughly delightful day in the history of Toronto.”

Such was the loyal adoration Torontonians held for Queen and Empire. Yet, despite Victoria being the most commemorated British monarch, with statues in her honour scattered throughout the expansive British Empire, it took over 30 years of desultory efforts before Toronto erected a permanent Victoria statue of its own.

Photo of Queen Victoria monument at Queen’s Park, 1870, by Arthur R. Blackburn. From the Toronto Public Library Digital Collection.

Queen’s Park was originally intended, Mark Osbaldeston writes in Toronto 2 (Dundurn, 2011), to feature a statue of Victoria—the queen of the park’s name—in a place of honour at the head of University Avenue. When the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) officially opened the park on September 11,1860, he laid the cornerstone for the base of a statue for that very purpose.

A statue of Victoria, however, wasn’t added to Queen’s Park until April 1871—and then only temporarily. At that time, city council gave permission to Marshall Wood to install his bronze depiction of a young Victoria, standing regally, on a tall wooden pedestal. It was almost an exact duplicate of the statue erected the same year in Montreal’s Victoria Square. When the proficient English sculptor—who did a brisk trade in selling his statues of the queen to communities across the Empire—travelled to Canada for the Montreal unveiling, he brought with him an assortment of other Victoria statues he hoped to sell around the country. Installing the statue in the urbane setting of Queen’s Park was part of his sales pitch. It worked.

Soon Toronto’s municipal committee on walks and gardens recommended that the statue be purchased by the city for $3,000. City council debated the expenditure at great length in the fall of 1871 but never quite reached a final decision. Some aldermen balked at the cost. Others, Osbaldeston writes, went as far as questioning whether Wood’s statue even looked like the queen. At long last, in the spring of 1873, council finally formally voted against purchasing the statue—which had remained right where Wood had left it in the interim—and asked Wood to remove his sculpture in 1874. After years of neglect in storage, Osbaldeston’s research revealed, the statue Wood had placed in Toronto was eventually installed in Quebec City’s Victoria Park in June 1897.

There were efforts in the mid-1880s by the St. George’s Society to commission a statue of Victoria for Queen’s Park, with a sketch of the proposed monument prepared by English sculptor Percy Wood for presentation to the membership at a June 1886 meeting. And, in the 1890s, there was a proposal to create a grand public square—named for Victoria and centered upon an immense statue—adjacent to the new City Hall then under construction at Queen and Bay streets. Neither proposal was ever completed, making the city’s most noteworthy commemorations of the queen during her lifetime the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children, which opened in 1892, and the university that relocated to the University of Toronto grounds the same year.

The proposed Victoria Square at Queen and Bay streets, January 1898. From Wikimedia Commons.

It was therefore a source of mild embarrassment for a city with claims to imperialist enthusiasm when, upon Victoria’s death in January 22, 1901, the only public representation of Victoria in Toronto that could be draped in black as a sign of mourning was a patriotic column in honour of the Boer War that had stood in Eaton’s department store until being installed in the main corridor of Old City Hall.

The Toronto Star (January 23, 1901) bemoaned this conspicuous lack of a public monument to Victoria:

The city of Toronto has grown from a little place in the wilderness to its present proportions as a great city during the time that Queen Victoria has occupied the throne, and probably no people in the Empire have been quicker to assert their loyalty and to declare the love and respect they bore to Her Majesty, yet to-day, at the end of the Queen’s long reign, there is not in this city a public statue of Her Majesty.

It was unsurprising then that, within days of the queen’s death, Premier George William Ross committed to seek appropriations during the coming session of the provincial legislature for the purposes of erecting a suitable statue of the Empire’s longest-reigning monarch.

At this, the Star quickly shifted tack and argued that no public funds should be expended on a memorial. “What we hope to see,” the editors opined on January 24, 1901, “is not a statue erected officially, for such actions are sometimes perfunctorily done, but one set up by the voluntary act of the people as an unmistakable manifestation of the popular regard for that good Queen whose marvellous hold upon the hearts of the Canadian people nothing could over-emphasize.” The Hamilton Times concurred: “In our opinion monuments to the Queen, in Toronto or elsewhere, ought to be paid for by subscription, or not erected at all. If the people want to show that affection and esteem which they profess for their late Sovereign, the money will be produced without the intervention of the tax gatherers.”

Right: Queen Victoria Monument, Queen’s Park, after 1903. From the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1568, Item 203.

One interested Torontonian, S.F. Walker, suggested to the Star that funds raised through public subscription be limited to $1 per person so that “all would feel that they had an equal share in Toronto’s loving tribute to the memory of ‘Victoria the Good,’” and even the city’s poorest might contribute to the cause. Nevertheless, the provincial government committed $10,000 to acquiring the Queen’s Park statue, including the cost of a granite base.

At the municipal level, City officials convened public meetings to debate what would be best suited “to commemorate the memory and noble qualities and acts of our late Queen Victoria,” as a resolution passed at one public meeting read.

While everyone could agree that something ought to be done in Victoria’s honour, the trouble became that—besides a statue—no one could agree on what tribute would be most fitting. Speaking on March 1, 1901, Mayor Oliver Aiken Howland felt strongly that while a statue—”a monument of the living image of the great departed”—for Toronto was essential, it would be “inappropriate, unusual, and unprecedented” for the city to duplicate provincial efforts and erect a second statue.

Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1901, the Star published dozens of ideas and proposals for alternative tributes penned by prominent and unknown citizens alike. One Torontonian suggested a Home for Old Men; another amended the idea to be a Home for the Aged because the queen was a friend to all sexes and creeds. While one citizen proposed a home for consumptives, a doctor called for a sanitarium. There were advocates for a museum of history, an art gallery, or a reference library being built and named in her honour. The Women’s Canadian Historical Society of Toronto pressed for a Memorial Hall, perhaps constructed at the University of Toronto. Finally, several Star readers argued that the failed Victoria Square proposals of a few years earlier ought to be revived and pursued.

Left: Queen Victoria monument at Queen’s Park, 1910. From the Toronto Public Library Digital Collection.

Meanwhile, in July 1901, the Ontario government chose to purchase an exact replica of a Victoria statue in Hong Kong designed by Mario Raggi. An Italian sculptor who trained at the Accademia Carrara and Rome before relocating to England in 1850, Raggi worked under Matthew Noble until setting up his own North London studio in about 1875. Until his death in late November 1907, Raggi was known for his memorial busts and statues of famous personages such as Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Swansea, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone, and others in the United Kingdom and around the Empire. On news that his work had been selected for Toronto, the Star (July 24, 1901) reported that Raggi was “considered a sculptor of the first rank.”

Commissioned to provide Hong Kong a statue of Victoria in the wake of the Golden Jubilee, Raggi completed the work in 1890, but it would not be unveiled on the reclaimed land of Statue Square until May 28, 1896. The bronze statue depicted Victoria as an older figure, crowned and seated on a throne, holding an orb in her left hand and a sceptre in her right. Grander than what was later installed in Toronto and elsewhere in the Empire, the original monument in Hong Kong included a carved stone cupola covering the statue atop Corinthian columns. However, Victoria was among a number of Hong Kong statues looted as scrap metal by the Japanese during the Second World War. Repatriated a few years later, the statue was reinstalled in Victoria Park—without the domed enclosure.

Statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at head of University Avenue, looking south from Queen’s Park, August 1, 1914. From the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1274.

“Those who have seen the Hong Kong statue, of which that in the Queen’s Park will be a replica, say it is the best of Queen Victoria extant,” the Globe (July 31, 1902) proudly asserted, noting Raggi’s particular skill at capturing the queen’s features and stern expression, as well as the realistic draping of her robes.

No sooner had the statue for Queen’s Park been selected, than controversy arose over the placement of the statue. In the absence of a Queen Victoria monument, the prime place of prominence at the head of University Avenue had been occupied since 1894 by Hamilton MacCarthy’s statue of Sir John A. Macdonald. The premier recommended relocating the former prime minister in deference to the crown, while opponents of this idea were adamant that Macdonald should remain right where he stood. Still others proposed compromises, like placing the queen in the centre of a new University Avenue median near College Street, or placing her in the centre of a widened King Street West near Simcoe Street.

The only ones seemingly unconcerned about this debate were Mayor Howland and city officials. Exasperated by the necessity of negotiating with an unresponsive city, Attorney General Sir John Morison Gibson carried out a war of words on the newspaper page. He complained that the mayor was purposely “violat[ing] the rules of courtesy” by dragging out responding to the government’s overtures. “Oh, I do not know,” Gibson wearily responded to journalist questioning in the Star (August 20, 1901), “but unless Sir John is moved, I suppose we will have to put the Queen up nearer the building in some secondary place.” That’s exactly where she ended up—to the east of the main entrance to the Parliament building.

Although the press was optimistic in early 1902 that the statue might be installed and unveiled by Victoria Day, by the early summer Raggi’s cast had still not been shipped from England. On the morning of June 13, an official sod-turning ceremony was conducted by provincial treasurer and acting premier Richard Harcourt, and D.T. McIntosh of the McIntosh Granite Company, who would build the substantial stone pedestal. A large crowd had turned out for the 9:30 a.m. ceremony, but by the time Harcourt showed up over a half-hour late, the number of spectators had dwindled significantly. “The acting Premier took the spade in hand like a master,” the Star (June 14, 1902) reported, “drove it into the earth and deftly raised and turned the sod and thus commenced the work of preparing the spot on which is to stand the statue of the late Queen.”

Right: Fall cleaning of Queen Victoria statue, Queen’s Park, ca. 1920. From the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 3033.

By the end of July, the McIntosh Company’s work on the nearly nine-foot-tall pedestal was finalized, save for the installation of two bronze bas-reliefs by J.L. Banks—depicting the queen’s first council meeting at Kensington Palace in June 1857 and the deceased queen lying in state—which would adorn the statue base. On one side of the six-ton pedestal was a bronze wreath of oak and maple leaves containing the letters V.R.

After numerous false reports of the statue’s arrival in Toronto in mid-September 1902, it finally arrived on September 22, encased in a wooden packing crate. That same afternoon, a derrick that had been waiting beside the stone pedestal in Queen’s Park for weeks raised the Raggi’s 5,600-pound bronze Victoria and swung her into place. Premier Ross and other interested officials looked on, but no speeches were made. “It is perfect in likeness and beauty of detail,” the Globe (September 23, 1902) assessed of the nearly 10-foot-tall statue, “and bears out all that has been said of Raggi’s ability to execute an appropriate monument to so great a Queen.”

“The statue was left unveiled after being put into position,” the Globe added, “and it is understood that a formal unveiling ceremony will be dispensed with.” Indeed, the Star and Globe contain no record of any official unveiling the following spring. Given that the statue of Sir John Graves Simcoe was unveiled at Queen’s Park in May 1903 by a governor general and the band of the Royal Grenadiers, and the unveiling of the Robbie Burns statue at Allan Gardens was afforded a half-page article in the Globe, it seems a strange slight to not provide a formal occasion after the decades of effort it took to finally (permanently) install a statue honouring the Queen’s Park namesake.

Sources consulted: Gerald Utting, Toronto the Good: An Album of Colonial Hogtown (Bodima Books, 1978); John Warkentin, Creating Memory: A Guide to Outdoor Public Sculpture in Toronto (Becker Associates, 2010); and articles from the Toronto Globe (June 5, 1886; June 13, July 11, 22 & 31, and September 23, 1902; May 23 and June 2, 1903); and the Toronto Star (January 23, 24, 25, 28 & 29, February 1, March 2, 16, 18 & 20, June 14, July 24, and August 20, 1901; January 22, June 14, and September 23, 1902; May 27, 1903; and May 17, 2008).

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

Cartoon, the Telegram, August 21, 1958.

As we’ve witnessed this week, city councillors have no qualms about promoting public transit schemes in their wards regardless of whatever makes sense across the entire city. Elected representatives from Etobicoke and Scarborough who back contentious new subway lines fit within a long tradition of suburban politicians thinking within their fiefdoms. Back in the 1950s, their predecessors in Metropolitan Toronto were among the loudest opponents of the construction of the Bloor-Danforth and University subway lines out of belief that their constituents would be slammed with tax bills for infrastructure they would never use.

While leaders in inner suburbs like East York, Leaside, and Swansea embraced a new east-west subway to relieve congestion, their western counterparts were less enthusiastic when the TTC posted signs in March 1957 promising a future line along Bloor Street. Objections were mainly financial, with fears that the costs associated with building a new transit line would force cuts to other public works projects. Some officials, like reeves H.O. Waffle of Etobicoke and Chris Tonks of York, felt Metro needed to finish ongoing infrastructure projects before proceeding with a subway. In the small lakeshore communities of Long Branch, Mimico, and New Toronto, officials resented the extra cash commuters paid to travel downtown thanks to the TTC’s fare zone system. “I will never support a Bloor subway until the TTC institutes a single-fare system,” declared Mimico Mayor Gus Edwards. “The outer zones are paying double fares for the present [Yonge] subway and they never use it.”

A group shot of the 1962 Metropolitan Toronto Council, featuring several players in this week’s story. Back row, left to right: Kenneth M. Ostrander, David Rotenberg, Alex Hodgins, Walter Saunders, Laurie T. Simonsky, Charlie H. Hiscott, William C. Davidson, William Dennison, Donald R. Russell, Harold Menzies, Frederick J. Beavis, George W. Bull, W. Frank Clifton, True Davidson. Front row, left to right: H. O. Waffle, Marie Curtis, Donald D. Summerville, Dorothy Wagner, Nathan Phillips, William R. Allen, Norman C. Goodhead, Albert M. Campbell, William L. Archer, Margaret Campbell, Hugh M. Griggs. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 4999.

Funding a subway was challenging, as the federal government refused to offer any money and the province gave little hint of subsidies. Metro Council settled on a formula to split the cost between taxpayers and the TTC, the percentages of which caused months of rancorous debate before settling on 55 per cent Metro, 45 per cent TTC. When Metro council voted to request the necessary permissions from the provincial government, especially from the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB), to proceed with the new subway lines in February 1958, the local councils in Long Branch and New Toronto unanimously passed resolutions to lobby Queen’s Park to ignore Metro’s requests. Long Branch Reeve Marie Curtis felt residents would be hurt by a tax increase of roughly $7 per year. “I fear we are being bamboozled,” Curtis observed. “I am afraid these taxes will tie people up so tightly it will make them move out of here, the same as some of us moved from the city.” Over in Mimico, councillors declared that the new lines would be “of doubtful benefit to our municipality.”

Over the next few months, other suburban leaders doubted the wisdom of financing a subway. Some were riled when Metro Council rejected a monorail system study championed by Tonks and Waffle. During a marathon 13-and-a-half-hour meeting on July 3, 1958, Metro Chairman Frederick Gardiner urged his colleagues to “show vision and courage,” citing the Fathers of Confederation and the signatories of the Declaration of Independence for displaying the foresight to support large projects which benefitted all. Toronto Mayor Nathan Phillips felt the “pulse of the people” favoured a subway. Metro Council voted 16 to 8 in favour of commencing work on the subway, with all of the dissenting votes coming from the suburbs. Among the extreme responses was Tonks’ belief that his children and grandchildren would curse him for the debt legacy a subway might impose on York. “Don’t be misled by visionaries who would lead you to believe they see things the rest of us don’t,” he noted.

Metro councillors attempting to catch a few winks during a 13-and-a-half hour meeting. Left picture: H.O. Waffle (in shades) and Donald Summerville (head resting). Middle picture: Chris Tonks. Right picture: Albert Campbell. The Toronto Star, July 4, 1958.

One by one, six opposing suburbs announced they would oppose the subway during the OMB hearing in August 1958. Despite having discussed subway plans for three years, lawyers representing the suburbs requested a two-month delay to prepare their case. OMB Chairman Lorne Cumming refused. The hearings devolved into shouting matches between the suburban lawyers and a belligerent Gardiner. Beyond taxation issues, subway opponents argued that the project was the first since the formation of Metro in 1954 which didn’t offer “equality of service” to all of its municipalities.

The suburban case suffered a setback on day two when lawyers representing Etobicoke, New Toronto, and Scarborough withdrew, citing lack of time to digest lengthy reports. York’s lawyer went on vacation, leaving only Long Branch and Mimico to carry on. The two tiny municipalities dragged the hearings on for as long as they could, employing filibusters and stalling tactics like subpoenaing TTC officials. Newspaper editorials criticized the suburbs for their obstinacy. Mimico lawyer George Gauld admitted he had “a hopeless task,” but insisted the little guys had to fight on. Within the opposing suburbs, councils voted to ask the OMB to force a Metro-wide public vote on the subway, a power the OMB lacked. Frustrations among subway proponents grew to the point that Toronto alderman Philip Givens sponsored a Metro Council motion to force the amalgamation of the three lakeshore communities into Etobicoke to eliminate their opposition, a move which would happen in 1967.

Source: the Telegram, August 19, 1958.

On September 5, 1958, the OMB ruled in favour of the subway, giving permission for Metro to spend $102.2 million and the TTC $98.6 million to fund the project. They had no qualms with Metro’s plan for a two mill property tax increase over the next 10 years. Metro wanted shovels in the ground by year’s end. While newspaper editorials urged officials to get on with it, opponents fumed. Doomsday scenarios about the state of public works and threats of local plebiscites abounded. Edwards believed Toronto taxpayers weren’t as enthusiastic about a subway as generally depicted—“There is only a small percentage of the people who are inconvenienced at the intersection of Bloor and Yonge.”

The lakeshore communities, along with Etobicoke and Scarborough, went to the Ontario Court of Appeals to reverse the OMB’s decision. When their attempt was turned down in November 1958, they attacked the local media for politicking in favour of the subway. Scarborough Reeve Albert Campbell felt that past Toronto mayors didn’t act on major issues until they consulted with supportive papers. “This kind of ‘government by the press’ may suit Toronto,” he told the Star. “It is of no interest to us in Scarborough.” Curtis believed the media was out to destroy Long Branch and other small municipalities who opposed the subway.

In municipal elections that December, all of the opposing suburban leaders were re-elected. While Campbell soon switched sides on the subway debate when he saw no further alternatives, Curtis, Edwards, and New Toronto Mayor Donald Russell pressed on. They threatened to go to the Supreme Court of Canada if a flat transit fare wasn’t enacted. The TTC laughed. Councillors in the lakeshore communities continued to resist paying for the line, insisting that their residents had nothing to gain and that full funding should come from the fare box. Lawyers who suggested they should raise the white flag were ignored.

Marie Curtis gets the boot, while the new Metro Executive Committee smiles for a group shot. The Telegram, January 14, 1959.

On January 7, 1959, Long Branch, Mimico, and New Toronto filed a Supreme Court appeal against Metro Council, the OMB, and the TTC to halt the subway. Curtis felt assured of victory. A week later, she left a Metro Council meeting in tears after she was voted off the executive committee, on which she had served for three years. Pro-subway suburban councillors, including Campbell, were voted in. Applying the 1950s equivalent of Godwin’s Law, Curtis bitterly observed that “Hitler also tried to stamp out people for what they believed, but he didn’t succeed.” Edwards dubbed her “Saint Marie, the Martyr.”

When the Supreme Court assembled to hear the subway case on February 9, 1959, it considered both the suburban appeal and a Metro motion to quash it. The lakeshore communities, by now admitting the project was all but inevitable, pressed for the project to be financed by 30-year debentures, a move Metro claimed would add $90 million in costs. Suburban lawyers claimed the OMB’s decision to allow a special 10-year tax levy was illegal, that Metro could not force future councils to levy taxes unless they paid off debentures. They charged that Metro could become an “evil godfather.”

The court gave its verdict on February 11, 1959, ruling 3 to 2 in favour of Metro on both actions. There was one slight window of opportunity for further action from the suburbs, as Metro and the TTC had not yet signed an official contract, which could be contested once signatures were applied. Edwards and Russell vowed to fight on, promising to meet with the other lakeshore communities for their next move, including further Supreme Court cases. The TTC used the ruling to give utilities the go-ahead to begin relocating their lines underneath University Avenue.

Headline: the Telegram, February 11, 1959.

When Metro Council voted on one of the last obstacles to construction, a new expropriation bylaw, in April 1959, only the lakeshore communities voted against it. Curtis still seethed that Metro won the Supreme Court case on technicalities involving monetary amounts, while Edwards continued to warn the $200 million cost was an illusion. Edwards also opposed early discussions about the Spadina line, sticking to his line that suburbanites were subsidizing subway passengers.

The three lakeshore leaders proved sore losers when they refused to show up for the groundbreaking ceremony for the new subway lines on November 16, 1959. Edwards boycotted the ceremony because “when the people in my municipality are paying two mills a year and a double fare to subsidize subway riders, I don’t feel like celebrating.”

While the transit file didn’t go Marie Curtis’s way in 1959, she left a positive enduring legacy that year. On June 5, Marie Curtis Park was officially opened, on former residential land which had been destroyed during Hurricane Hazel. At the ceremony, she noted that the park showed that “we can go a long way if we pull together. Long Branch couldn’t have done this alone. We needed Metro.” She had also proven the lakeshore communities could pull together, even if they fought a losing cause.

In the end, the provincial government offered a $60 million loan to build the Bloor-Danforth and University lines, which shortened the 10-year construction window. The University line opened in 1963, the first phase of the Bloor-Danforth in 1966, and a Bloor extension into Etobicoke in 1968. The fare zone system was scrapped on New Year’s Day 1973.

We’ll give the last word to Toronto resident Alfred Carswell, whose letter to the Star in September 1958 on the craziness surrounding the subway issue may reverberate with those frustrated with our current city council.

When election time comes around, voters in the suburbs which oppose the subway project should remember the farce their representatives are now putting up in opposition to progress. They state they know they are fighting a losing battle but they will go on with it. It has been obvious for some years that the main transit routes were inadequately serviced, especially Bloor-Danforth and almost to similar degree Queen. One wonders if any of Curtis, Edwards, and Co. have had the experience of literally being pushed into a streetcar with the doors trying to close behind your back. Not once, but most mornings and evenings of the week this jostling, pushing and trampling on people’s feet has been going on for a long time.

Additional material from the June 18, 1958, September 6, 1958, February 10, 1959, and April 22, 1959 editions of the Globe and Mail; the March 5, 1957, February 27, 1958, July 4, 1958, August 21, 1958, September 2, 1958, September 6, 1958, November 11, 1958, November 13, 1958, December 10, 1958, January 14, 1959, February 11, 1959, February 12, 1959, June 5, 1959, September 23, 1959, and November 16, 1959 editions of the Toronto Star; and the July 4, 1958, August 19, 1958, August 20, 1958, August 22, 1958, August 25, 1958, January 14, 1959, February 9, 1959, February 10, 1959, February 11, 1959 editions of the Telegram.

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

CORRECTION: May 12, 2013, 3:45 PM The article originally said that Long Branch Reeve Marie Curtis believed residents would be hurt by a tax increase of roughly $70 per year, when the actual amount was $7 per year, as this story now reflects.

Rosen with the Brooklyn Dodgers from the National Baseball Hall of Fame Photo Archive.

“I’ll always remember that season,” Goody Rosen, Toronto-born star of baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers, would later recall of his career year in 1945. Having already begun to establish himself as a premiere defensive fielder, that summer Rosen found his bat. Heading into the final few games of the season against the poor pitching of the last-place Philadelphia Phillies, he found himself in a neck-and-neck race for the National League batting crown.

Then he slumped at the wrong time. “I was makin’ contact,” he later explained. “Just kept hittin’ the ball right at somebody.” His .325 batting average, however, was still good enough for third best in the league, and earned him a nomination to the All-Star team.

One of the few Jewish major leaguers of the 1930s and ’40s, Rosen credited his success with “coming up the hard way.” He had to overcome anti-Semitic classmates and countless coaches telling him he was too small for sports before enjoying a 16-year career in professional baseball, split between the minors and the majors.

Born in 1912, Goodwin George Rosen was the fifth child of eight born to Samuel and Rebecca Rosen, who’d escaped the oppression of czarist Russia. They arrived in Toronto from Minsk as part of a massive influx of Jewish immigrants to the predominantly Protestant city in the decade following the turn of the century.

(Right: Toronto Star, February 25, 1941.)

Try as the Rosens might to observe Orthodox Jewish beliefs, Peter Levine writes in Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (Oxford University Press, 1992), it was a constant struggle and non-kosher foods were sometimes a matter of survival. Goody’s father worked as a machinist but, almost every night of the week, he rode his bicycle across town to play softball in city parks. He was said, according to local newspapers, to be an outstanding outfielder.

Such active participation in organized sport could be consciously used by Samuel Rosen—and countless other Jewish immigrants to North America—Levine suggests, as “a mechanism of Americanization”—a means of interacting with the dominant culture and of “shaping their own identities as Americans and as Jews.” This was particularly true of the first generation’s children, like Goody.

As a child, Goody first wanted to be a hockey player and idolized Aurèle Joliat of the Montreal Canadiens, but he was dissuaded because of his diminutive stature. Instead, he turned to sandlot baseball. “There used to be a lot of playgrounds in the city and because most of the kids seemed to be poor, that’s where they went if they wanted to take part in sport,” Rosen once explained.

Beginning at age 11, Rosen spent his teenage years playing baseball with St. Andrew, St. Francis, and several other playground teams—on top of selling newspapers to help his family make ends meet. At the same time, he played softball in the Jewish Fraternal Softball League, based out of Trinity Bellwoods Park, starring for clubs like Judeans and Pride of Israel. He sometimes skipped school to be batboy or shag flies during batting practice for the Toronto Maple Leafs. A natural athlete, Rosen played soccer, hockey, and football during his years at Givens Street School and Parkdale Collegiate Institute.

At 15, Rosen joined Bob Abate’s Elizabeth Street Playground team, nicknamed the Elizabeths or Lizzies. The team was among the best in the province, consistently winning city and provincial championships, and playing before hundreds—even thousands—of spectators each week. “I learned something from him I never forgot,” Rosen later said of his two years playing under Abate, who emphasized character more than winning. “He said never walk when you can run. I used to race to first base even when I drew a base on balls.”

Rosen slides home. Image from the Toronto Star (April 23, 1938).

The legendary coach also embraced the city’s growing ethnic diversity on his baseball teams. “‘Ours was a melting pot of nations,” Abate, who was of Italian descent, explained years later. “If a lad couldn’t get along with his teammates, we soon eased him out. The person, not his nationality, religion, or color was the important thing.” Not all Torontonians agreed, however. Rosen and his Jewish teammates on the Lizzies and in the Jewish league sometimes had to play through spectators’ anti-Semitic taunts. Such harassment of Jewish players and teams during and after games could lead to post-game fisticuffs, and would ultimately culminate with a race riot after a softball game at Christie Pits in August 1933.

Although Goody did not participate in that particular event, like many Jewish kids who learned to fight in the streets as a matter of survival, he started boxing as a teenager, and squared off in the mid-1920s against the likes of future welterweight champion Sammy Luftspring. Rosen brought the same pugnacious tenacity to the baseball diamond. As baseball historian William Humber once remarked: “Goody wouldn’t take crap from anyone. That’s probably a reflection of his youth.”

Once, in the mid-1920s, ham sandwiches were served at a party celebrating some of his school’s achievements in sports. When Rosen politely declined the snack, one of his teammates exclaimed: “You’ll eat this ham and like it.” Goody again refused and only a teacher’s intervention prevented the argument from escalating. On the way home, five schoolmates caught up to Rosen with a piece of sandwich ham, eager to teach him a lesson. When Rosen defiantly stood his ground, they jumped him, holding him down and shoving the ham into his mouth, and forcing him to swallow. They pulled his pants down to add to the insult. Although he ran home in tears that day, Goody took two-fisted revenge on each of his attackers. “I got every one of them,” he later said. “Every day at recess I took one out back.” Despite never having actually Bar Mitzvahed, Rosen retained a strong sense of Jewish identity. “I’ve always,” Rosen told Levine, “since I was a small kid, walked proudly that I was a Jew, and never took any crap, pardon the word, from anyone.”

Rosen aspired to professional baseball, but was turned down for a try-out by his hometown Maple Leafs. So he and long-time friend Bobby Medline, a pitcher with a mean curveball, scrapped together some savings and, in December 1930, set off for Tampa to catch on with a winter league team. When they arrived in Florida, they discovered that—due to the Great Depression—there was no baseball being played that winter.

When they received word of try-outs with a team in Little Rock, Medline’s granddaughter recalled in the Ottawa Citizen (October 26, 1996), they hopped a freight train with a hundred other hobos, and made their way to Arkansas. In one version of the try-out, Goody put on such a zealous display chasing flyballs in the outfield that when it was his turn to bat, he was too tired to be effective. In another account, the Little Rock manager took one look at the pint-sized outfielder and chuckled: “Go home boy, you’re too tiny.”

Rosen and Medline eventually earned a few weeks’ pay in the spring of 1931 from the Class-A Memphis Chicks. When they were inevitably cut, Medline accepted an offer to play on a local semi-pro team while Goody returned home to Toronto. Suiting up for the Pals of the Jewish league, and the St. Mary’s senior league club, Rosen’s superlative play soon earned him an invitation to try out for the minor league Rochester Red Wings. Once again, although Rosen impressed the club’s manager with his skill—managing two hits for Rochester in an exhibition game against the New York Giants—he couldn’t overcome the club’s scepticism about his size. “You never will be a ballplayer, because you’re not big enough,” Red Wings president Warren Giles told him. Having heard the same thing all his life, the 135-pound player refused to be discouraged.

That winter Rosen added size and strength by chopping logs in his backyard. In the spring of 1932, he caught on with the Stroudsburg (Pennsylvania) Poconos of the short-lived Class-D Interstate League. Goody was hitting .378 when the league disbanded less than two months into the season, but—after being spurned by the Maple Leafs once again—he had to resort to playing with a semi-pro club. The next season, on the strength of newspaper clippings Rosen had saved of his career thus far, the undersized outfielder earned a tryout with the Class-AA Louisville Colonels and impressed them enough to be offered a contract.

(Right: Toronto Star, November 30, 1937.)

“Rosen was more or less a sensation in the American Association,” the Star proclaimed at the end of his first season in Louisville, “and but for his size undoubtedly would have been taken on by some big league club. He is a streak in the field and on the bases and a near idol with Louisville fans.” With a strong arm in the outfield, he was touted by some reporters “as the best flyhawk in the [American] Association,” as well as its best leadoff batter. In five seasons in Kentucky, Rosen batted over .300 four times. As one of the team’s most popular players, he would be presented with a gold watch, a silver set, and an automobile by appreciative fans and sponsors.

In the winter of 1937, Rosen—by then a husband and expecting father—requested his release from the Colonels so he could join the Maple Leafs and play closer to his off-season home. His request was denied, but his willingness to play another season in Louisville paid off when, late that summer, a 24-year-old Rosen was promoted to the major leagues. At the behest of Brooklyn’s new manager, Burleigh Grimes—who’d been Goody’s manager in Louisville—the Dodgers purchased Rosen’s contract.

Rosen catches a ball from his son, Jackie, while his wife, Mildred, looks on. Image from the Star Weekly (July 30, 1938).

He quickly impressed after taking over centrefield for the lacklustre Dodgers that September, hitting .312 in 22 games. “De boy is an absolute bold,” Grimes told reporters in his distinctive patter. “He’s been slapping the apple like a veteran and he’ll improve. The one bobble he’s pulled on a fly was excusable. D’sun got him. Can’t see how he’ll miss a regular spot next year.” When a reporter characterized the now-155-pound Canadian as a “good” prospect, Grimes added with emphasis: “He’s a lot better than pretty good. He’s a whatchamacallit of an outfielder and a good hitter.”

Later that fall, Rosen was welcomed home to Toronto as a celebrity. In October, Goody met Mayor William D. Robbins and the board of control, and his public appearances in support of Lionel Conacher and John J. Glass helped secure the Liberal candidates’ election to the provincial assembly. Finally, on December 1, prominent citizens and sportsmen of Toronto—the organizing committee was a mixture of Gentile and Jew—hosted a banquet at the King Edward Hotel in Rosen’s honour for having “brought some glory to his native city,” as the Star put it.

Though it might seem premature to so celebrate a player who thus far had only seen 77 at-bats at the big-league level, the local newspapers had been closely following his minor league exploits for years, and this was far from the first Toronto party thrown in his honour.

What’s striking about the celebration and the ongoing local newspaper coverage of the ballplayer was that Goody was not singled out for being Jewish. In the 1930s, it was very common for athletes like boxer Sammy Luftspring to be regularly referred to as a “Hebrew,” a “Hebe,” or a “Son of Israel.” Such language provided an ever-present reminder that while their presence in the city might be tolerated by the Protestant majority, the Jewish population was not quite of Toronto.

In contrast, Rosen—a Yiddish-speaking ballplayer who never hid his Jewish heritage—was nicknamed the “Toronto Tidbit.” He was consistently referred to as a “Toronto boy,” “Toronto’s gift to Brooklyn,” or even “the perky popper-offer from Dundas St. W.” In fact, usually only in wire stories culled from American newspapers was Rosen’s religion was even mentioned.

Goody’s rise was fashioned as a “local boy makes good” Horatio Alger tale. “It is something of a thrill these days,” read one typical story, “for Toronto sportsmen to read of the exploits of an athlete who learned his early baseball in this city; who played for Toronto’s well-known Lizzies and who battled adversity and the handicap of lack of size to first gain a regular position with the Dodgers and then become their star.”

“I’m here to stay,” Rosen confidently professed to reporters at the outset of the 1938 season. “I knew I would be up here the first day I ever hustled bats for Toronto.” By mid-May, Rosen was hitting .385 and had broken up two no-hitters, before sliding into a mid-season slump. He finished the year with a respectable batting average of .281. But he really shone in the field, leading the National League with a .989 fielding percentage and 19 assists.

(Left: Toronto Star, March 23, 1938.)

When Grimes was dismissed by the Dodgers after the 1938 season, it didn’t take long for tension to develop between Rosen and the new player-manager. Leo Durocher doubted that there’d be space for such a small player on the roster come spring. Simmering with determination, Rosen showed up to training camp in peak physical shape—ready to prove himself once again—and earned the starting job in centrefield over journeyman newcomer Tuck Stainback.

“During the 1939 season I was leading the league in hitting when I tore leg muscles sliding into a base,” Rosen recounted to sportswriter Al Sokol. “The club doctor said I should rest for two weeks at least.” But Durocher insisted that “he couldn’t be without his ‘team leader’ for two weeks,” Rosen added. “So I took a needle before each game and played. And my average dropped.” In June, despite playing through discomfort without complaint, Rosen was sent down to the Royals, the Dodgers’ minor league affiliate in Montreal.

The demotion was a career setback without doubt, but it wasn’t all bad, because he finally had a chance play professional ball in Toronto—even if it was with the visiting team. The crowd was larger than usual at Maple Leaf Stadium—and included many of Goody’s friends and relatives—when the Royals played Toronto on July 20. In a pre-game ceremony, the reigning Miss Toronto and the City’s director of playgrounds presented Rosen with an assortment of gifts: a Bulova watch, a Tip Top suit and Brill dress shirts, a radio, a floor lamp, and flowers for his wife Mildred among them. Like the earlier testimonial banquet, it was another opportunity for Torontonians to fete Rosen as a favourite son.

After the 1939 season, Rosen—healthy and optimistic about getting back into the major league lineup—received his new contract from the Dodgers organization. Disagreeing with its terms, he returned it unsigned—a common negotiating tactic for players against all-powerful owners during the reserve clause era. He had done the same with Louisville and after his first, abbreviated season in Brooklyn. The press perceived Rosen not as greedy, but as a fighter “sticking up for his rights,” trying to be paid what he thought he was worth.

(Right: Globe and Mail, July 25, 1939.)

But on this occasion, Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail had had enough. Upon receiving Rosen’s unsigned paperwork in the mail in February 1940, the executive promptly sold the outfielder’s contract to the Columbus Red Birds, a St. Louis Cardinals farm team. Rosen was livid. In his telling, the Dodgers didn’t even formally tell him about the trade. After butting heads with the Red Birds coaches, he was shipped to the Syracuse Chiefs of the International League after only 10 games in Ohio.

Goody’s offensive numbers dipped during his three-season stint with the Chiefs, but he became a league all-star and a fan favourite. As team captain, he helped lead Syracuse to the Little World Series in 1942 and 1943, losing both times to the Red Birds. Once again, Rosen tried to engineer a trade to the Toronto club, and when the Chiefs refused to entertain offers, he began pondering retirement.

For baseball players who’d been designated 4-F or unsuitable for military service—like Rosen, historian Alex Tepperman writes—the Second World War opened new opportunities to play in the major leagues while many regulars served overseas. It was under these circumstances that, prior to the 1944 season, Brooklyn re-purchased Rosen’s contract.

Goody, second from left, with fellow Dodgers outfielders. Image from the Toronto Star (March 20, 1946).

Goody was reluctant to rejoin the Dodgers outfield. He was satisfied in Syracuse, where he made a big-league salary and kept reasonably close to his family in Toronto. However, because Goody’s contract included a clause that gave him 10 per cent of his purchase price, he’d receive an extra $7,000 just by showing up in Brooklyn. Off he went.

In 1945, spring training was held at Bear Mountain, New York, instead of Florida due to wartime travel restrictions, and Durocher had Rosen lined up as a utility player coming off the bench. Stubbornly determined to make the starting lineup, Goody worked closely with coach Charlie Dressen to make adjustments in his batting stance and his swing. When one of the starting outfielders got a sore stomach, reportedly from eating bad fish, Rosen never looked back.

Although Rosen’s stellar 1945 season, worth 4.8 WAR, earned him a spot on the All-Star team, no actual game was played that year due to wartime travel restrictions.

Rosen felt that he should have won the batting crown that year, and would have if he hadn’t worn down. “With about two weeks to go,” Rosen told baseball historian William Humber in Cheering for the Home Team (Boston Mills Press, 1983), “I was still hitting .350, but Dixie Walker was in right and Augie Galan in left and they both had bad legs. I think I just wore out chasing fly balls.”

In New York, Rosen was a bona fide baseball star, and embraced by the Jewish community as much for his on-field heroics as his off-the-field charity work. “He was recognized as a Jewish hero in Brooklyn,” Levine writes. “He was not one to mask his identity. He was proud to be a Jew.” On a joint Goody Rosen-Marty Marion Day at Ebbets Field on August 11, 1945, a lucky fan was chosen to present Rosen with a gold watch.

“After the season,” Rosen explained to Humber, “Branch Rickey called me into his office and said, ‘I know you’ll ask for a lot of money and I’ll have to give it to you.’” But the Dodgers’ general manager hinted that Rosen might be expendable with two promising young outfielders, Carl Furillo and “Pistol Pete” Reiser, expected to return from military service. Nevertheless, the aging fielder held firm to his demands. “This is the year I’ve got to make the money,” Goody reasoned to sportswriters. “I haven’t got many more to get it in.” He stuck to his demand for a raise. “I’m not going to argue with you, but I’ll trade you the first chance I get,” was the reply.

(Left: Rosen with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Image from the National Baseball Hall of Fame Photo Archive.)

A handful of games into the season, Rosen was sent to the Dodgers’ cross-town rivals, the New York Giants. Since the mid-1920s, the Giants had been seeking talented Jewish baseball players in order to increase the club’s box office appeal among New York’s Jewish population. With Goody’s arrival, the Giants now had five Jewish players on the active roster.

Rosen was aboard a subway, on his way to an April 28 double-header against the Giants at the Polo Grounds, when he learned news of the trade from a newspaper headline. Arriving at the park, he went to the visitors’ locker room, gathered his gear from the Dodgers and crossed over to the Giants clubhouse to suit up. “We played a doubleheader that day and, if I say it myself, they couldn’t get me out,” he recalled to Milt Dunnell of the Star (July 21, 1980). “By the time the two games are over, I had muscle spasms in my legs. You should of heard that Durocher givin’ it to me.” With Durocher screaming “Stick it in his ear!” every time Rosen stepped to the plate, Goody got five hits, a walk, and a three-run home run that afternoon as the Giants won both games of the double-header.

Already among the fiercest and longest-standing rivalries in sports, the Dodgers-Giants games became particularly bitter that season. Durocher never relented in his dugout heckling, leading Rosen to remark: “Durocher never liked me—even when I was playing for the Dodgers.” And the first time Rosen slid into second base against the Dodgers, his friend and former roommate Eddie Stanky violently—and intentionally—tagged him out across the mouth, leading to a scuffle on the field. After the game, a reporter asked the second baseman what had prompted their friendship to end. “Nothing,” Stanky replied. “I got nothing against Rosen,” he added. “He’s just another ball player on a club we’re trying to beat.”

Rosen in his restaurant’s kitchen. Image from the Toronto Star (January 10, 1947).

Although the Giants finished in last place that year, they beat the second-place Dodgers seven times; Rosen was in the lineup for six of the victories. Brooklyn fans criticized Dodgers management about trading the centrefielder. When there hadn’t been another deal between the two clubs for decades—even after both had moved to the west coast—the Sporting News speculated that it was because the Dodgers had been stung so badly by Rosen that season. Goody was pleased at the notion, according to the Star (February 19, 1955).

When Rosen was once again rushed back from injury—a severe leg injury caused by crashing into the outfield wall in Pittsburgh—by his manager that season, he never fully recovered. At the end of the season, he was sent to the Giants’ International League affiliate in Jersey City. By this time, Goody had opened a restaurant—the Dunsway at Bloor and Dundas—and only wanted to play in Toronto.

“Physically, I feel a lot better than I did last year,” he told the Globe and Mail (January 28, 1948). “The knee and shoulder I injured with the Giants two years ago are okay now. I had a bad season last year, but there are others in the same fix. Unless I can get someone to help out at the restaurant while I’m away, I might as well retire.”

Now that he was physically broken down, prior to the 1947 season, Goody’s hometown Maple Leafs finally succeeded in acquiring him. Although he batted .274 in 145 games that year, he was inconsistent and continued to be hobbled by nagging injuries. After the season he was unconditionally released.

Rosen speaks at a joint meeting of the Optimist and Sertoma clubs in Sarnia, October 24, 1952. Image from Lambton County Museums.

His professional career over, Rosen kicked around with local baseball and softball clubs like the Bellwoods Old Timers, and the Daltons of the Kiwanis-YMCA Senior “B” league, the Levys, Tip Top Tailors, and then the People’s Credit Jewellers—all of the Beaches Major Fastball League—as well as the Canadian National Softball Team. In 1950, he was player-manager of the Galt Terriers of the Intercounty Senior Baseball League, and coached a team of Ontario all-stars in an exhibition against the Maple Leafs.

Rosen capitalized on his celebrity by working as a sales rep for brewer John Labatt Limited and other companies, before eventually rising to the position of general manager of the Biltrite Rubber Company.

Throughout his later years, living in a North Toronto apartment, Goody remained popular with his fans. “I must get 2,000 letters a year from the States,” Rosen estimated in 1983, noting the baseball cards and programs fans sent for his autograph. A lively character and a skilled raconteur, Rosen was a fixture at the regular oldtimer reunions of sandlot and playground players held in Toronto. Elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1984, Rosen died a decade later in early April 1994 at the age of 81. He was buried in Beth Tzedec Memorial Park. The New York Times published a four-paragraph obituary—a reminder of his enduring popularity with a particular generation of New York baseball fans.

Other sources consulted: Brian Kendall, Great Moments in Canadian Baseball (Lester Publishing, 1995); Cyril H. Levitt and William Shaffir, The Riot at Christie Pits (Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987); Sammy Luftspring and Brian Swarbick, Call Me Sammy (Prentice-Hall of Canada, 1975); Archibald Newman, “Good Boy, Goody,” Star Weekly (July 30, 1938); and articles from Baseball Digest (May 1948 and April 1951); the Canadian Jewish News (June 22, 2000); the Globe and Mail (October 5 and November 11, 1937; January 1, May 14 & 19, August 17 & 22, and December 29, 1938; April 21, June 22 & 27, and July 21 & 25, 1939; February 12, 1940; August 2, 1943; June 14, 1945; February 5, March 13, and May 1, 1947; and July 26, 1984); the Star August 22, 1929; August 16, 1930; April 21 & 30, June 15, and July 8, 1931; June 24 and September 14, 1933; March 9, 1934; February 21, 1935; December 10, 1936; February 20 & 22, August 13, September 15, 17 & 18, October 20, November 9, and December 2, 1937; January 22, March 12 & 23, June 18, July 13, October 13, November 5, 7 & 29, and December 23, 1938; February 23, June 26, July 15, 20 & 21, and November 10 & 11, 1939; June 11, 1940; February 25 and September 20, 1941; August 16 and November 27, 1945; February 23 and September 30, 1946; January 10 and June 28, 1947; February 26, May 5, July 2, 6 & 8, and September 4, 1948; May 10, 1949; August 19, 1950; April 17 and June 5, 1951; February 16 & 19, 1955; May 15 and June 5 & 17, 1965; October 26, 1967; February 2, 1974; June 11, 1975; January 24 and September 4, 1981; April 5 and July 22, 1983; June 4, 1988; May 20, 1991; January 3, 1993; April 7 & 8, 1994; and August 3, 1999); and the Vancouver Province (April 14, 1994).

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

Entrance to Fort York, August 26, 1953. City of Toronto Archives. Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 1, Item 1832.

Today, Fort York is generally considered to be one of Toronto’s most significant historic sites—which might lead you to believe the site has been consistently respected ever since the Americans left in August of 1813. The reality is quite different. Fort York has endured both neglect and repeated attempts at redevelopment; what remains on the site today represents the effort of considerable advocacy and resistance to those circumstances, on the part of many Torontonians who thought the old fort worth defending.

After much of the fort was destroyed in 1813, its defences were improved to guard against another invasion from the south. In 1814, the American ship Lady of the Lake arrived in York’s harbour; there were some exchanges of fire. But, notes historian Carl Benn in his book, Historic Fort York: 1793 – 1993, “in the end, the Americans decided not to challenge Fort York’s new defences but sailed away instead. The rebuilt Fort York and its outlying defences had fulfilled the classic military function of deterrence.”

Some commemorations of the War of 1812 frame the end of the war as the beginning of two hundred years of peace, but this peace was anything but guaranteed. Changes to the fort continued after the Treaty of Ghent formally ended the War of 1812, and the threat of an American invasion was considered real for much of the remainder of the century; these threats included rising emotions based on the Trent Affair in 1861, the Fenian Raids following the American Civil War, and increased tensions of an 1895 boundary dispute in Venezuela. A local garrison was also necessary at times to guard against local uprisings, particularly following the 1837 rebellion, and through various political riots including those over the Rebellion Losses Bill.

Changes to Fort York’s buildings, as well as fluctuations in the size of its occupancy, varied over the course of the century, depending on other conflicts within the Empire and the perceived threat of war or conflict in York (or Toronto) itself. Carl Benn notes that “the fortifications were not maintained well during periods of relative peace and therefore eroded or otherwise deteriorated. But, at the first sign of possible hostilities, the army rebuilt and strengthened Fort York’s walls and batteries.”

Map showing the fort in 1823. Image courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

During much of the nineteenth century, Fort York was deemed to be outdated and in major need of repair. Despite numerous proposals to replace or significantly reconfigure the fort, few redevelopments were implemented, and most changes during these years appear to be limited to replacing individual buildings. The most significant change was the opening of a new barracks in the 1840s (named “Stanley Barracks” in 1893), southwest of the old fort site. The old fort remained in operation after the opening of the new barracks, however, both for harbour defence as well as other military uses.

By the turn of the new century, many of the buildings at Fort York had been neglected for some time, and the area surrounding it was considered somewhat unsavoury. Despite the old fort’s active role in Toronto life, there were several proposals in the late nineteenth century which called for demolishing the fort buildings and redeveloping the site, either for railroad expansion or for residential development. These plans were all vetoed by the Department of Militia and Defence, on the grounds that they were still using the site for the Toronto garrison.

The situation altered in October of 1903, when the City purchased the old fort site for $200,000 (considered relatively cheap at the time), to take effect once the military had erected and occupied a new site elsewhere in Toronto. (One early plan, never realized, called for the new barracks to be constructed in Baby Point.) The conditions of the sale, insisted upon by the Department of Militia and Defence, were that the City agree to restore the Fort York site and only use the property as a park. The Globe hailed the purchase, writing that “this property must be the basis of any great park improvement scheme for the city,” and that the project could, “when finally completed, make Toronto one of the most beautiful cities in the world.”

Toronto, however, had other plans.

It soon emerged that the City was not so much interested in the fort itself, but in the valuable land on which it sat. Despite the promise to maintain the whole of the fort property, within weeks of the purchase permission was granted to a meatpacking plant to encroach on the eastern part of the property, destroying both a bastion and a guardhouse, and unearthing the bodies of American soldiers.

The Canadian National Exhibition was a growing enterprise at this time, and a very profitable one for Toronto. Although the original 1903 agreement anticipated a streetcar line running along the northern boundary of the property, plans emerged in 1905 for an extension of a streetcar line actually running through the site, necessitating the destruction of at least three buildings.

Pen and ink map showing the proposed streetcar line through the fort. Image courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

Credit for rallying public opinion goes to Jean Earle Geeson, a local historian and school teacher at Parkdale Public School, who was in the habit of taking her students to the Fort York site. On October 4, 1905, the Globe published a letter from Geeson decrying the streetcar plans. Geeson noted that the proposed plan called for the destruction of the oldest buildings in the fort, which she believed to be the oldest buildings in all of Toronto. Referring to Fort York as “the chief landmark of Toronto’s history,” she asked, “has it been forgotten that this Old Fort is the cradle from which has sprung our magnificent and life-throbbing city, the Queen of the West, and the centre from which armies have gone forth to fight, not only for this Dominion, but for the mother land?”

The Globe editorial staff agreed with her, and within a week all the Toronto dailies wrote editorials supporting Geeson and advocating for the preservation of the fort and an alternate plan for the streetcar line. A Star editorial opined that “it should be impossible for anybody to get consent of the city to do injury to that historic spot now that it is the property of the city, of which it was, in a real sense, the foundation stone.”

Dozens of historical societies, including the York Pioneers, the Women’s Canadian Historical Society, and the Ontario Historical Society came into action, all protesting the City’s plan. Not only did these groups oppose the streetcar extension, but they called for the removal of the slaughterhouse which had been permitted to encroach on the property, citing the terms of purchase which forbade any use other than as a park and historic site.

A cartoon from noted historical illustrator C.W. Jefferys, featured on the front page of the Toronto Star, October 11, 1905.

The City defended its proposal. The City engineer explained that the streetcar line would “only” require the removal of three buildings, adding “one is now used as a cottage, another as a men’s sleeping quarters, and the other as a store house. None of these buildings, however, have any historical significance.” Indeed, they touted the streetcar line as a positive development for the fort, believing it would bring more people to the neglected site. According to 1970s research by the York Pioneers, Mayor Thomas Urquhart sought to reassure the public by saying “Naturally some old buildings will have to come down, but, as I have always said, the Old Fort will not be disturbed…” The following year, Toronto’s new Mayor Emerson Coatsworth was quoted in the Globe saying “People ought to understand by this time that we have no intention of desecrating the Old Fort property. The Old Fort has been desecrated almost as long as I can remember and now we propose to try and take care of it.”

As part of the January 1907 election, Toronto ratepayers were presented with a plebiscite over whether to bear the cost of the streetcar plan, with nearly 70 per cent of the vote rejecting it.

The City was undeterred, and suggested a new plan the following autumn which kept the streetcar line running through the site, but which only required the destruction of one building, a barracks. An application was put to the Province of Ontario for permission to proceed with the plan without needing the ratepayers’ approval, but a vigorous campaign from heritage advocates ensured that the Province unanimously refused it.

With this setback stalling the City’s plans, the City and the Ontario Historical Society reached an agreement in the summer of 1908, wherein the OHS would generate plans for restoring the Fort York once the City had completed a new survey of the site, with a plan that called for the retention of all of the 1812-era buildings. The nature of exactly how the site would be used was still unclear, but a notice in the Globe from an OHS representative suggested that “some [buildings] might be used as homes for veterans, others for the creation of museums.”

Fort York, ca. 1926. City of Toronto Archives. Fonds 1244, Item 1507.

Despite this plan, it appears that no serious work was undertaken to restore the fort until the early 1930s, largely because many of the buildings were still occupied by the army. This changed in 1932, when Toronto recognized that restoring the fort would be a suitable project for the city’s centennial in two years’ time.

A 1932 Globe editorial reported that “detailed plans have been matured recently by which citizens may have the buildings restored to their original state and made an asset of great value…” Citing recent success elsewhere at Annapolis Royal and Chicago’s Fort Dearborn, the piece added “it would seem that the chance to do something worthy with Fort York has now come, and if it can be linked with the celebration of the birth of Toronto as a city, the entire community should join with enthusiasm.”

Restoration work took place between 1932 and 1934, as a make-work program during the depression. Despite the continued importance of the site following the War of 1812, the restoration focused on the old fort as it was in 1816, at the time when its post-war reconstruction was completed. Not only were the remaining 1816-era buildings restored, but all the later buildings on the site were destroyed, presumably in a well-intentioned effort to be faithful to the fort’s 1816 appearance.

Fort York, probably in the 1890s. City of Toronto Archives. Fonds 200, Series 376, File 5, Item 15.

This restored fort was unveiled to a sizeable crowd by the Governor-General, the Earl of Bessborough, as part of the 1934 Empire Day celebrations on May 24. According to the Mail and Empire, “the transformation of the Fort won the commendation of all visitors from the Governor-General down. The original plan has been followed, the redoubts rebuilt, the grass relaid, and a start has been made [at making] the Fort what it is destined to become: a national museum.” Most accounts of the restoration focus on the structure and terrain of the Fort, rather than on the interiors or exhibits. It appears that exhibits were supplied by various local historical groups, many of which had been involved years earlier in opposing the streetcar plan.

Old Fort York was again closed for restoration work following the Second World War, work which was carried out by the Toronto Civic Historical Committee (the forerunner of the Toronto Historical Board), reopening to the public on June 14, 1953. Whereas the 1934 restoration concentrated more on the buildings and their exteriors, newspaper coverage of the 1953 restoration noted major changes to the interiors and their exhibits, which showcased the social history of the fort as well as its military heritage. A preview from the Star noted “you can see what the troops ate off — wooden dishes and spoons. What they slept in — nice looking beds, with springs of stretched rope. But you’d pay the price of a new car for the fireplaces they warmed their feet in.” According to the Globe, “the [Toronto Civic Historical] Committee is putting its best foot forward in the exhibits of old military equipment, and several private collections have been put on show. Cutlasses, flint-lock pistols, epaulets of heavy metal, ancient lanterns, and kitchenware are just a few of the ancient articles now being catalogued.”

With the success of the reopening of the fort, its future in Toronto at last seemed safe and secure. And then came the Gardiner Expressway.

Photos from the opening of Fort York in the Telegram, June 15, 1953.

Metropolitan Toronto’s plans called for the Gardiner to cut through the southwest section of the Fort York site, requiring supports to be embedded in the fort’s ramparts. When this became public knowledge in January 1958, numerous historical groups and private individuals again raised their displeasure. Typical is a letter to the Globe from the president of the Niagara Historical Society, which decried the plan as “vandalism,” and adding that “while the Provincial Government is spending money erecting plaques to mark historic sites and buildings, Metropolitan Toronto is busy destroying them.”

Metro considered altering the route of the expressway, but found this option to be expensive, with the additional cost generally reported at $2,000,000. Furthermore, the roads commissioner for Metro, George Grant, claimed that an alternate route around Fort York would reduce speeds on the expressway from 50 to 30 km/h, severely reducing its effectiveness as an express route.

The proposed plan for the Gardiner Expressway. The Globe and Mail, January 24, 1958.

After visiting the fort in May, Metro Chairman Fred Gardiner announced that he was scrapping the plan to run the expressway through the site, and offered up what he considered to be a good alternative: the expressway’s route could be maintained if the entire fort was packed up and moved to nearby Coronation Park, where it would be safely out of the way. After all, the fort’s present location was inconvenient, and would be even harder to get to once the new expressway was built; in addition, the fort’s historical context was as a prominent fixture by the waterfront, but changes to the landscape meant that the fort was now considerably inland. As one Star article put it, moving Fort York to Coronation Park “would restore it to its original relative position and put it in a more attractive location and show it to the public as it was.” It was believed that this move could be accomplished for a mere $1,000,000, thereby making it $1,000,000 cheaper than rerouting the expressway around the site.

This solution found favour with the Toronto press. In a June editorial called “Second Fort Retreat Now In Order,” the Star dismissed claims to Fort York’s authentic heritage noting that it had already been rebuilt in the 1930s, and calling into question the quality of some of the restoration work that had then been performed. The editorial also questioned Fort York’s historical significance, writing that as the Americans were already retreating in 1813 when the powder house exploded, “if anything, the fort is a memorial to 52 dead Americans who went sky high with the magazine at the moment of victory.”

In August, the Globe wrote an editorial saying “the purpose of history and its artifacts is to help us understand something of ourselves by learning something about our past. Fort York could best fulfill that function if it were in an easily accessible location… Left where it is, Fort York will be of even less value when the Expressway is built. If it is difficult to reach now, it will be almost impossible then. Indeed, the only means of entry may be by helicopter.”

The Toronto newspapers continued to run pieces supporting the scheme throughout 1958, imploring the heritage community to drop their objections and support the move. Heritage advocates continued to condemn the plan, eventually winning Fred Gardiner to their side, although not necessarily the rest of Metro Council. Gardiner was apparently not swayed by the historical arguments, but believed that the objections could result in legal challenges that would delay the timely completion of the expressway project. The cause of relocating the fort was picked up by Toronto Mayor Nathan Phillips, who continued to put public pressure on the rest of Metro Council to put it to a vote and push it through.

The Toronto Star illustrating the various plans being considered. The Toronto Star, October 4, 1958.

The tide turned quickly in January of 1959. Pierre Berton wrote a piece for the Star condemning the proposed move, tying the fort’s significance to the land on which it sat. “We can build a phony Fort York on the lakeshore if we wish… and perhaps for a while people will see it. Will they see the real McCoy? No, alas. In an age of sham and simulation they will see another piece of fakery. They will see a sideshow but they will not see a shrine.”

In addition to the historical and legal concerns, it soon became apparent that it was unclear whether this scheme actually would save any money at all, as the costs of reconstructing the fort might not offset the money saved by keeping the proposed expressway route. With the prospect of saving money no longer an issue, newspapers began questioning the wisdom of the move and public opinion began to change. On January 30, a recommendation for the plan put forward by Metro’s executive committee was defeated by Metro Council, by a vote of 16 to six. The Gardiner Expressway was eventually routed around Fort York, leaving the site intact as per the 1903 purchase agreement. While historical groups rejoiced at the decision, Nathan Phillips called the decision not to relocate Fort York a “tragedy,” and predicted that “it will never be a prominent historic or tourist attraction.”

Pierre Berton, however, predicted otherwise. “…[S]o much of what we know is impermanent. Expressways will come and go every quarter century, lakeshores change at the whim of man and nature, rail yards shift, factories rise and crumble. Only on these 10 acres do we walk with history.”

Additional material from: Carl Benn, Historic Fort York 1793—1993 (Natural Heritage/Natural History Inc., 1993: Toronto); Jean Earle Geeson, The Old Fort at Toronto: 1793—1906 (W. Briggs, 1906: Toronto); The Globe (and Mail) (October 23, 1903; October 4, October 7, October 18, 1905; April 25, 1906; January 2, 1907; July 16, 1908; June 7, 1932; April 27, 1933; May 8, May 24, May 25, 1934; June 11, 1953; January 24, February 4, February 25, March 12, March 25, March 26, March 27, June 19, August 25, December 8, 1958; January 15, January 21, January 21, 1959); Gerald Killen, “The York Pioneers and the First Old Fort Preservation Movement 1905—1909,” in The York Pioneer, Vol. 68, 1973; the Mail and Empire (May 2, 1934); Robert Malcolmson, Capital in Flames: The American Attack on York, 1813 (Robin Brass Studio, 2008: Montreal); John W. Scott, “Fort York” in The York Pioneer, Vol. 54, 1959; the Toronto Star (October 23, October 26, October 27, 1903; March 22, October 6, October 7, October 9, October 11, October 17, November 23, 1905; June 8, October 20, 1932; August 25, 1933; May 21, May 22, May 23, May 25, 1934; June 12, 1953; January 24, January 28, February 21, February 24, March 8, March 14, April 5, May 29, June 5, June 7, June 20, September 2, September 3, October 4, November 22, 1958; January 6, January 12, January 17, January 21, January 31, 1959); the Toronto Telegram (October 23, 1903; May 23, May 25, 1934; June 15, 1953; January 31, 1959).

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

Over the past half decade, two transplants to our metropolis and one lifelong Torontonian have been working to uncover the events, places, and characters that shaped Toronto into the city we know today. Now, Historicist, our weekly history column, has reached its fifth anniversary.

Starting with the tale of the “Old Lady of Melinda Street” on April 19, 2008, Historicist has presented over 250 glimpses into Toronto’s past. Every weekend, we dispel the misguided notion that our city’s history is dull. We’ve striven to provide interesting glimpses into stories that can be enlightening, entertaining, head-spinning, inspiring, or tragic.

Torontoist largely gives us (that is, the Historicist writers: Jamie Bradburn, Kevin Plummer, and David Wencer) carte blanche to investigate and write about any topic we happen to find interesting, however minor or mundane the subject matter may seem. The editors take it on faith that if we find it interesting, readers will, too.

We’re always conscious of the need to make our columns representative of Toronto’s history, and so we’ve tried to cover events that reflect the city’s broad geography and cultural diversity. Achieving this can be challenging, partly because it’s sometimes difficult locating appropriate images that we have permission to publish—particularly when it comes to post-1950s topics. Archives and libraries with Toronto-related materials thankfully realize the value in consistently adding to their digitized collections, and those additions often inspire us to cover certain topics.

We feel we’ve played a significant role in popularizing Toronto history for a wide audience. We’ve also built strong relationships with respected local historians, community groups, and archival institutions, all of which recognize the care we apply to our work.

After Historicist got its start, it quickly became apparent to us that we were filling a void once occupied by mainstream news outlets, whose history columns had vanished or decreased in frequency. We’ve learned of university courses that have listed our articles in their syllabuses, and have been flattered by other writers who have followed our lead. All of this makes our efforts to produce accessible pieces worth the sleepless nights we endure researching and writing them.

Another rewarding aspect of writing Historicist is hearing from family members of people we’ve discussed. Kevin has heard from relatives of cartoonist George Feyer, politician William Peyton Hubbard, and Miss Toronto pageant winner Billie Hallam, while Jamie has received notes from the families of Toros owner Johnny Bassett, discrimination target Harry Gairey Jr., and Great Fire of 1904 victim John Croft. We’ve even occasionally been acknowledged by the subjects of our pieces, like when we got a hat tip from Toronto Sun founding editor Peter Worthington. We enjoy hearing from people interested in our columns. Sometimes, we wish we’d gotten in touch with them during our research, for their anecdotes or quirky asides.

Readers sometimes reach out with suggestions for future topics. On occasion, we’ve been able to follow through, although sometimes the suggestions, while intriguing, don’t fit our schedule. But input is always welcomed and appreciated. We also build columns around issues related to current events, like election campaigns or the 2010 G20 summit.

Things don’t always go smoothly. Each of us has had ideas collapse as deadlines neared, or watched the clock run out before we could shape a story in the way we’d intended. Only once in five years has one of us accidentally tried to write about something that had already been covered in a previous installment.

And then there are the stories that sit on each of our backburners, slowly simmering away as they await the right moment to appear on Torontoist.

We’d like to thank our editors over the years (including former editor-in-chief David Topping, who suggested that we write a weekly column) for providing a venue for us to share our passion for the city’s past with readers. We thank the many copy editors who have pored through our feature-length posts, refining our words and spotting typos we made at four in the morning. Most of all, we thank you, the reader, for your continuing interest and support.

To mark our anniversary, we’ve assembled some links to some of our favourite columns. Click through the image gallery to see them.

Image of the SR.N2 Hovercraft from Flight International (March 9, 1962).

Imagine skimming along Lake Ontario at 120 kilometres per hour, reading the newspaper on the way to work in the city. Inching along the congested (and increasingly dangerous) Queen Elizabeth Way or the Gardiner Expressway might’ve taken you up to an hour, but instead your commute aboard a massive passenger hovercraft makes the same journey in all weather in mere minutes—and with none of the stress traffic creates. Twenty-five minutes to get downtown from Hamilton, or 11 minutes from Oakville, and just four to travel from Mimico.

The spacious passenger cabin, where you’re strapped into your seats for safety (in case the vessel needs to skid through a turn at a high speed), is comfortable and protected from the spray and blasting wind of the propellers. Seconds after arriving downtown, the amphibious craft gliding up a concrete ramp at the ferry docks, you emerge through a side door and head to the office. Passengers bound for the suburbs board and, in minutes, the hovercraft is off again, blasting across Lake Ontario.

This might’ve been your commute, and the future of regional transportation in Metro Toronto, if Mimico Mayor Hugh McGregor Griggs had had his way in the early 1960s.

Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1962, with Hugh M. Griggs at bottom right. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 5000.

Mimico had been a Toronto bedroom community since the first streetcar line was laid in the late 19th century. After the Second World War, as servicemen returned home to purchase homes and start families, it steadily grew, from 8,785 in 1945 to 10,410 in 1951. The booming growth was typical of Toronto’s suburbs at the time; along with Toronto proper they formed the Metropolitan Toronto regional government in 1954, to coordinate in areas of common concern.

Grey-haired and bespectacled, Griggs was elected in 1960, after campaigning on a promise “to give the town a sane, dignified administration” during this period of region-wide growth, as the Globe and Mail (November 28, 1962) put it. He would remain mayor until 1967 when, along with New Toronto and Long Branch, Mimico was absorbed into the Borough of Etobicoke. In office, Griggs played a key role in establishing Mimico’s Planning Board, and developing an official plan that altered the local landscape. The town of predominantly single-family homes saw large numbers of apartment high rises constructed along the waterfront at the behest of the local council. By 1962, the population had ballooned to 17,707—all crowded into an area one square mile in size. “It is now,” Harvey Currell stated in The Mimico Story (Town of Mimico and Library Board, 1967), “part-way through the 1960s, one of the most densely populated apartment areas on the continent.”

A former schoolteacher and editor of the Canadian School Journal before entering municipal politics, the new mayor became intrigued by an emerging technology making waves in the United Kingdom: the hovercraft, a vessel capable of travelling over sea or land on a cushion of high-pressure air. Although the technology had only progressed to the prototype stage, Griggs thought it had potential as a means of relieving his constituents’ daily commute to the city core.

Image of the SR.N2 (left) and SR.N1 (right) Hovercrafts from Flight International (March 9, 1962).

The modern hovercraft emerged from the backyard experiments of Sir Christopher Cockerell, who built several working models in the 1950s. When the British military showed no interest in the technology, Cockerell’s designs were declassified by the British government for development by the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC), the body tasked with turning promising inventions into viable commercial enterprises.

In October 1958, under contract to the NRDC, the Saunders-Roe Division of Westland Aircraft Ltd. began work on a full-scale hovercraft prototype. The SR.N1, as the small vessel was called, first flew in early June 1959, and just over a month later made a successful crossing of the English Channel. That well-publicized event, and a subsequent test piloted by Prince Philip, caught the public’s imagination, and further hovercraft developments were widely reported in the world press.

By 1961 it was no longer a question of whether the hovercraft’s ground effect principle worked. The challenge was now whether the companies could prove the hovercraft was more than a novelty—that it had the potential to carry large numbers of people or cargo at great speed over long distances, and at a reasonable operating cost. So when Saunders-Roe received correspondence from a small-town Canadian mayor, the company took the inquiry seriously, mailing him studies and research information. “On the face of it, it seems Air Cushion Vehicles could play an important part in the over-all transportation pattern in the Toronto area,” F.R. Drew of Saunders-Roe later told a Toronto reporter.

(Above right: Portrait of Hugh M. Griggs from Harvey Currell’s The Mimico Story; Town of Mimico and Library Board, 1967.)

Armed with this material and the company’s encouragement, Griggs made a presentation at a meeting of the Metro Roads and Traffic Committee in November 1961. “Let’s set up a committee,” he explained, “to take a serious look at this British Hovercraft—I think it could be the answer to all our problems.” Metro officials laughed, thinking his futuristic, “flying saucer” proposal to be nonsense.

Griggs refused to be discouraged. “I don’t mind that the Committee laughed at me,” he said after. “Bigger and more important people have laughed at me before for suggesting something different or unusual.”

Griggs found an ally in aviation reporter Kerry Gibbens. “[T]he major design problems have now been licked,” Gibbens argued in a profile of Griggs’ hovercraft scheme in Canadian Magazine (July 1962), “and within two years it could become the logical answer to commuter transport problems in Toronto—and in every other major Canadian city with urban areas spread along accessible waterfronts.” He suggested Vancouver, Montreal, and other cities with significant waterfronts might follow Toronto as early adopters of the hovercraft.

Griggs envisioned regular, year-round hovercraft commuter service along Greater Toronto’s lakeshore, carrying hundreds of commuters downtown and back to the suburbs several times daily—as well as to the islands. “It is easy to operate, runs forward, backwards, sideways, turns on a dime,” Gibbens noted enthusiastically. “It can hover like a helicopter, move forward at near-aircraft speeds. And if its motors fail, it will float like a boat—in fact, in extremely bad weather when it cannot skim over the waves, it can ride through them like a regular ferry.”

Because the hovercraft could land on any beach or strip of concrete protruding into the lake and didn’t require specially-constructed terminals, the capital cost to establish this service was expected to be a fraction of that for any other emerging commuter option like a subway, monorail, or even helicopter. If operating at full passenger capacity, Griggs and Gibbens estimated the hovercraft’s operating costs to be about eight cents per passenger mile (or 40 cents per trip). “In two years,” Gibbens echoed the view of Saunders-Roe officials, “it will be able to handle all of Toronto’s rush hour lakeshore traffic at a price little more than the present car fare.”

(Above: Toronto Star; May 7, 1963.)

Griggs and Gibbens were confident there’d be sufficient demand for a hovercraft service. “Toronto west-enders,” the reporter stressed, “would undoubtedly plump for ANY means of transport that could beat the nerve-wracking 60 minute crawl to and from work each day—let alone one that can do it for the price of car fare.”

At the time Griggs pitched the Metro Roads and Traffic Committee, Saunders-Roe’s prototype for a larger, faster hovercraft capable of carrying 50 or more passengers (the SR.N2) had not yet been tested at sea. But subsequent successful tests of the SR.N2 confirmed its commercial promise. Hovercraft companies also began solving the problems they’d faced in early designs. Flexible skirts to contain the compressed air and improve lift and stability over obstacles or rough waves, for instance, made passenger service more practical. Finally, in July 1962, the first hovercraft operating as a passenger ferry—the Vickers VA-3—entered regular service, carrying up to 25 passengers across a 27-kilometre route between Merseyside and Wales on the River Dee.

Suddenly, Griggs’ futuristic idea didn’t seem so far-fetched.

Toronto Star (April 30, 1963).

In late April 1963, the SR.N2 Mark 2 was unloaded in Montreal for two weeks of live demonstrations, the first held outside of the United Kingdom. Griggs and other Metro Toronto officials were among those in attendance at the trials on Lake St. Louis and along the St. Lawrence River—a crowd of 600 that included representatives of commercial firms and armed forces from across the Western Hemisphere, as well as from governments from as far away as Japan.

Toronto Star reporter George Bryant took a test run. “As one of the first in Canada to ride in one,” he said. “I can guarantee they’re as comfortable as they are speedy.” He described the passenger compartment, sealed to protect from the wind and spray, as spacious. The control room, he said, resembled an airplane’s cockpit.

“The first real surprise comes when the craft lifts,” Bryant wrote. “The sensation resembles that experienced when a helicopter goes up, or one that might be experienced by sitting on a large truck tube while it was suddenly inflated.” He added: “The feeling of speed only occurs when the driver makes a 75-mile-an-hour sliding turn and lets the skirt dig in the water.”

Others who travelled by hovercraft in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, however, would question whether the mode of transportation lived up to its billing, commenting on the loud engines and the need to be strapped into one’s seat.

Clarence Downey and H.E. Pettett, chairman and secretary of the TTC respectively, also had the opportunity to take a test flight. Their presence indicates how seriously Metro Toronto was contemplating acquiring one of the crafts, which came with a $1,351,000 price tag but could carry 150 passengers at a cruising speed of 130 kilometres per hour. Saunders-Roe, newspapers noted, could deliver an operational hovercraft in no more than a year.

But no hovercraft was ever ordered.

Toronto Star (May 4, 1963).

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, hovercrafts became a regular feature of the transportation landscape. More and more of them entered regular passenger service, crossing The Solent to the Isle of Wight, connecting Weston-super-Mare and Penarth on opposite banks of the River Severn, and spanning the English Channel to France, among other routes. Ambitious designers introduced ever larger and more powerful designs throughout the 1960s, leading Cockerell to speculate that his invention might eventually take shape as a 10,000-ton ocean liner, zipping across the Atlantic in 30 hours. Late in the decade, Cockerell was at work on a “hovertrain,” a concept that aimed to apply the same air-cushion principles to the railway, but which petered out by the 1970s.

In Toronto, Griggs continued stumping for hovercrafts for years. In 1963, when construction of a subway line beneath Queen Street was being debated, Griggs predicted that the purchase of a hovercraft would make subway expansion unnecessary. Speculating with gathered journalists on the benefits of regular hovercraft service, Griggs confidently asserted that 15 hovercrafts could be ordered for $20,000,000—the cost of 1.6 kilometres of subway.

When Parks Commissioner T.W. Thompson, speaking off the cuff, told a group of Metro officials that hydrofoils might be an option to replace standard ferry service between the mainland and Toronto Island, Griggs took the opportunity to again redirect public discussion to the topic of hovercrafts. As late as 1966, speaking at the Lakeshore Kiwanis Club, he urged Metro Toronto to divert some of the funds being spent on regional expressways to the procurement of a giant commuter hovercraft.

Photo of the SR.N4 Hovercraft, October 2000, by Andrew Berridge from WikiMedia Commons.

Although Griggs’s efforts came to naught in the 1960s, hovercraft passenger service was eventually initiated on Lake Ontario in July 1974 with the Toryoung I and Toryoung II. The service quickly proved popular, carrying 14,000 passengers between Toronto, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Youngstown, New York, in August 1974 alone. But the service was discontinued shortly afterward when, in mid-September, the Toryoung II hit a buoy and nearly sank.

The circumstances of another accident in February 1987—when several policemen and firefighters responding to an ice-boat accident on Burlington Bay became trapped in freezing water and were rescued by a Toronto man demonstrating his recreational hovercraft nearby—prompted numerous Ontario police and fire departments, including the Metro Police, to investigate the use of small-scale hovercraft as rescue vehicles. This, whether by police and fire services or the Canadian Coast Guard, has remained the most common use of hovercrafts in Canada today.

But the idea of passenger hovercraft service on Lake Ontario has never disappeared entirely. In February 1991, with the backing of the provincial Ministry of Transportation and the Toronto Harbour Commission, a group of private consultants undertook a study of the feasibility of a rush-hour ferry service using hovercrafts, hydrofoils, or catamarans, running year-round between Toronto and the Niagara Peninsula. The same year, another company in Burlington, Transportation Alternatives, hoped to operate a commuter hovercraft service from Port Weller to Toronto.

More recently, brothers Dale and Ryan Wilson of Hover Transit Services first sought to purchase two retired hovercraft ferries from a British museum in 2004 in order to establish commuter routes on Lake Ontario to the east and west of Toronto. Then, in the spring of 2008, Hover Transit Services next proposed using a second-hand passenger hovercraft to revive the fast ferry service linking Toronto and Rochester that had previously failed in 2004 and 2006—with hopes the venture might eventually lead to commuter service for Toronto.

None of these proposals were ever implemented.

Sources consulted: Kerry Gibbens, “A Flying Saucer for Toronto?…Why Not!” Canadian Magazine (July 1962); Bill Gunston, “Stepping Stone to the Economical Hovercraft,” Flight International (March 9, 1962); and articles from the Canadian Press (July 9, 1991; and July 15, 2008); Globe and Mail (November 28 & 29, July 24, September 29, 1962; and April 9, 2008); National Post (September 7, 2002); Toronto Star (July 20, September 5 & 29, 1962; April 23 & 30, May 4, 5 & 7, June 11, 1963; January 28, April 2, September 8, October 19, 1966; May 24, 1987; May 27, 1988; January 22, September 17, November 8, 1990; February 23, 1991; January 17, 2004; and January 1, 2007).

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

Advertisement, the Toronto Star, November 23, 1921.

This year witnesses two significant anniversaries surrounding Laura Secord. June 23 marks the bicentennial of her legendary walk from Queenston to warn the British of a surprise American attack. October 20 marks the centennial of the opening of the first branch of the candy chain named in her honour. It’s hard to say if the combined celebrations will clear up or reinforce any misconceptions that the historical Secord was both a War of 1812 heroine and a crafty buttercream-filled Easter egg maker.

When Frank O’Connor entered the candy business in 1913, the 28-year old entrepreneur wanted a name which would represent the clean, wholesome image he wanted his store to purvey. Who better than a beloved heroine whose exploits were drilled into several generations of schoolchildren and appealed to a growing sense of Canadian nationalism? Especially in a year when her name would have been in the news a lot due to the 100th anniversary of her legendary stroll. O’Connor’s decision to name his shop at 354 Yonge Street Laura Secord was, according to culinary historian Elizabeth Driver, “a stroke of marketing genius.” A chain quickly followed.

One of the earliest ads we found for Laura Secord, stressing its “old time home made candies.” The Toronto Star, December 21, 1915.

Beyond the appeal of Secord’s name, O’Connor treated his products as the work of fine artisans. Advertising stressed the craftsmanship and quality of ingredients that went into Laura Secord candy. Production facilities were dubbed “studios.” Packaging was kept simple to reflect the purity of the product: a plain white box graced with a cameo of a middle-aged Secord.

In January 1923, O’Connor presented employees with a surprise gift to mark the start of the company’s 10th anniversary year. “As far as I know,” O’Connor announced from his office at Laura Secord’s headquarters at Bathurst and Niagara streets, “we are the first candy concern in the world to share its profits with employees.” The anniversary was also marked with a historical essay contest open to all students aged 18 or younger across Ontario. Among the rules were a 500-word limit, use of only “historically accurate” facts, and a note that “neatness, originality and good composition will have first consideration.” The grand prize reflected the maternal image the company liked to project: either $200 in gold or “a fine chance for some bright Canadian youngster to treat his mother to a trip to New York.” Judged by a panel which included editors from all four Toronto daily newspapers, the prize went to 17-year-old Helen Cameron of Glencoe, who stressed Secord’s fulfillment of everyone’s desire to be heroic. When the prize announcement was made, two contestants were praised for the worthiness of their essays but publicly humiliated for exceeding the word limit.

Northeast corner of Danforth and Pape Avenues, November 3, 1927. The store shown here opened in 1921. Photo by Alfred Pearson. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 16, Series 71, Item 5484.

The company’s financial statement for 1926 showed that Laura Secord had grown into a 57-store chain stretching from Windsor to Quebec City. It observed that “the characteristics of the shops are: distinctive design; prominent locations; cleanliness; fresh merchandise of one quality, and sales at a fixed price for cash.” It was also claimed that Laura Secord had “never had an unprofitable year.” The statement didn’t touch upon the company’s American subsidiary, which was based in Rochester, New York. Since the name “Laura Secord” had little resonance for most Americans, O’Connor named the stores after cookbook author Fannie Farmer, though the spelling was changed to “Fanny Farmer” when the first shop opened in 1919.

Candy made O’Connor a millionaire. Beginning in March 1928, he purchased 600 acres of land along Victoria Park Avenue (then known as the northern extension of Dawes Road) north of present-day Lawrence Avenue to build Maryvale. The property included a residence, horse stables, and a farm which was used for educational programs, plowing matches, and livestock judging. One of the routes which offered a convenient route between Maryvale and the city was soon named in his honour: O’Connor Drive.

O’Connor used his money to become one of Toronto’s most generous philanthropists. A devout Catholic, O’Connor funded many educational institutions tied to his faith, including St. Michael’s College and De La Salle College. In 1935 he presented Archbishop James Charles McGuigan with a gift of $500,000 to be disbursed among various organizations, which included orphanages, the Canadian Institute for the Blind, Christie Street Veterans’ Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, and the Toronto Star Fresh Air Fund. He was named a Knight Commander of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XI in 1937.

Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, Senator Frank O’Connor, and Premier of Ontario Mitchell Hepburn, 1930s. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 8040.

Politically, O’Connor was a key backroom operator in the provincial Liberal Party who helped elect Mitch Hepburn as Premier in 1934. He was among the business elite who partied at Hepburn’s suite in the King Edward Hotel. The reward for his work was a Senate appointment in 1935.

During the last year of his life, O’Connor withdrew from Laura Secord, turning its presidency to his brother-in-law. After a long illness, O’Connor died at Maryvale on August 21, 1939. Many tributes were paid to his generous nature—former Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Meighen observed that “he seemed incapable of making an enemy.” O’Connor left his property to the Christian Brothers, who remained until 2000. Pieces were gradually sold off for uses ranging from residential neighbourhoods to a high school eventually named after O’Connor. A 21st-century battle to prevent the demolition of the remaining estate buildings by the Toronto Catholic District School Board led to renovations overseen by a non-profit organization. Despite the setback of a fire in May 2012, plans are moving ahead to open the first phases of O’Connor House as a multi-purpose community space later this year.

A World War II advertisement addressing sugar supply issues. The Globe and Mail, July 6. 1944.

Following the Second World War, the company’s depiction of its namesake changed. The romanticized depictions of Secord long featured in artwork and textbooks finally won. Out went the frumpy-looking matron in a bonnet; in came a younger, headwear-free attractive lady. “More-or-less authentic portraits of Loyalist goodwives do not sell candy,” writer Ken Lefolii noted in 1966. He felt the new image looked “like Miss Anywhere, the darling of half the advertisements in the Western world. Her face is as blank and smooth as a curtain-wall skyscraper, and like the new buildings that are lifting the faces of our cities, she has a look without a country.” Subsequent revamps of the corporate logo featured depictions of Secord further away from historical reality, matching instead the design trends of the time.

Alongside its evolution into a staple of suburban malls and plazas, Laura Secord launched several experimental formats in Toronto during the early 1960s. Ads published in October 1960 announced the introduction of fresh baked goods at select locations, starting with the Yonge and St. Clair branch. Customers were assured that the combo stores utilized “ultra-modern ovens to help preserve all the real old-fashioned goodness that goes into them.” During the summer of 1964, a store opened within Eglinton subway station offered a deli for hungry, time-pressed commuters. Globe and Mail advertorial queen Mary Walpole lavished her usual hyperbole and excessive use of ellipses on the new concept:

Something new has happened to our town…and right in the Eglinton Subway if you please…We are talking about the opening of a quite different Laura Secord Shop…that has a new and very complete delicatessen service…and that has been the brilliant idea of people who know that most of us live our lives at a merry pace with no time for wasting in the kitchen…so what could be nicer than to pick up a complete and wonderfully good dinner as you wend your way home with nothing to do but set it forth…to collect a few delicacies to take along to your weekend hostess in the country…to plan an impromptu picnic and find everything right here but the basket…As the whole world knows before the name Laura Secord goes on…the finest quality can be taken for granted…and this shop is delightful proof of it…Shopping here can be fun too…for the décor is delightfully different…perky and fresh as the field flowers…and all this you will enjoy as you wander round picking up a roast chicken with savory dressing (but $1.59) choosing from the freshest salads…a wondrous array of cooked meats and moulds…going right along to the famous rolls…the breads…the cookies…pastries…and quite special cakes.

Cover of The Laura Secord Canadian Cook Book (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1966).

Looking for a project to celebrate Canada’s upcoming centennial, management entered into a partnership with the Canadian Home Economics Association to develop a cookbook whose recipes reflected the nation’s culinary history and diversity. A call went out for recipes, which were tested at Maple Leaf Mills in Toronto. The result, The Laura Secord Canadian Cook Book, became a kitchen staple across the nation when McClelland & Stewart published it in 1966. Given its namesake’s ties to the War of 1812, the book launch was held at Fort York.

Soon after the cookbook hit the shelves, the company’s Canadian identity was thrown into crisis. Former American subsidiary Fanny Farmer acquired majority control in October 1967 following a bidding war with Salada Foods. A Star editorial joked that the historical Secord’s wartime role might be rewritten to depict her walking 20 miles through the woods to warn the American army of a British attack. Globe and Mail columnist Scott Young received a call from a reader appalled that nobody fought the takeover. “The heart of Laura’s story was that she outwitted the Yanks,” Young reflected, “and now we have let her down. It has nothing to do with chocolates at all. They are carrying off our heroine.” A few souls saw the move as further evidence Canada was destined to become the next state in the union.

Those fears were short-lived. In June 1969, Labatt purchased Fanny Farmer’s stake in Laura Secord. The brewer added the candy maker to its growing portfolio of food brands like Catelli pasta and Habitant soup. Among the new owners’ first moves was to purchase the historic Secord’s home in Queenston, which underwent extensive renovations before reopening as a museum in 1972, complete with attached candy store. Candy production was moved from Bathurst Street to a new plant at 1500 Birchmount Road in Scarborough. Problems launching the new facility, combined with soaring ingredient prices, led to financial troubles during the mid-1970s.

Advertisement, the Globe and Mail, April 2, 1958.

Over the past 30 years, Laura Secord has changed hands many times, with owners ranging from multinational corporations (Nestlé) to American investment firms (Gordon Brothers). For a time, it was reunited yet again with Fanny Farmer. Among the casualties during these changes were the museum (assumed by the Niagara Parks Commission in 1998) and the Birchmount Road plant (shut in April 2009). Quebec-based company Nutriart restored the chain to Canadian ownership in February 2010, thus preventing any ardent nationalists from feeling too awkward should they choose to bring along Laura Secord products to any War of 1812 commemoration.

Additional material from The Laura Secord Canadian Cook Book (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1966; reprint edition North Vancouver: Whitecap, 2011); the June 1996 edition of the Financial Post Magazine; the September 22, 1923, November 17, 1923, and December 9, 1926 editions of the Globe; the August 22, 1939, August 19, 1964, December 8, 1966, and October 30, 1967 editions of the Globe and Mail; the June 3, 1999 and June 6, 2009 editions of the National Post; the August 21, 1939 edition of the Ottawa Citizen; and the January 16, 1923, August 21, 1939, August 22, 1939, October 19, 1960, November 11, 1966, October 30, 1967, and February 19, 2010 editions of the Toronto Star.

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

Presley on-stage during the 6 p.m. show at Maple Leaf Gardens, from the York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, F0433, ASC00845.

“It goes without saying,” Toronto Star music critic Hugh Thomson wrote in a scathing review of Elvis Presley’s two-concert apperance at Maple Leaf Gardens on April 2, 1957, “he has all the appeal of one-part dynamite and one-part chain-lightning to the adolescent girls, but to one like myself who is neither a girl nor adolescent, I could only feel he was strikingly devoid of talent.”

While a frenzied audience (reportedly composed predominantly of women, ranging in age from four to 64) screamed and cheered in approval as Elvis glided across the stage, seductively cradling the microphone and stopping to rock his hips in rhythm to the music, Thomson seethed: “One rock ‘n’ roll ballad sounded just like the other, and the basic theme and appeal were sex, which Elvis lays on with the subtlety of a bulldozer in mating season, you might say. He is Mr. Overstatement himself. He has to knock himself and his audience out at every beat.”

Toronto Star (April 2, 1957).

Elvis’ appearance in Toronto was credited, in the Toronto Telegram, to the efforts of Leaside’s Carol Vanderleck, who mailed off a petition with 2,443 signatures asking him to perform here. The Star suggested responsibility rested with another fan, Shirley Harris, who with the aid of a local radio show collected 2,000 signatures of her own. And it was widely reported in the Canadian press that, on a per-percentage basis, Elvis received more fan mail from Canada than from anywhere else. But it was Vanderleck who Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, called personally to announce an upcoming concert at Maple Leaf Gardens.

With one hit song after another through 1956, Elvis skyrocketed in popularity and, Jerry Hopkins suggests in Elvis: A Biography (Warner Books, 1971), Parker was loathe to continue to give his star property away for free on television. So Parker organized a money-making tour in the spring of 1957, starting in Chicago and including stops in Fort Wayne, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Buffalo. His appearances in Toronto and Ottawa on this tour—and a subsequent engagement in Vancouver later that summer—would be Elvis’ only live performance outside of the United States in his career.

Elvis had only released his first single, “That’s All Right,” four years earlier; his popularity exploded rapidly, with numerous television appearances and Hollywood films in 1956 and early 1957. Still 10 months away from being drafted into the army, Elvis was at the peak of his early career. Everywhere he made a personal appearance, bedlam ensued.

“It generated coverage, controversy, and cash, and from nearly every point of view could not fail to be accounted a success,” Scotty Moore, a member of Elvis’s backing band, recalled of the March–April 1957 tour. “But if anything was needed to confirm the Colonel’s growing conviction that this was a phenomenon that had orbited out of control…this tour served to do it… [I]t was becoming increasingly impossible even to do the show.”

Presley with fans backstage, April 2, 1957, from the York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, F0433, ASC00836.

The first in line for tickets when they went on sale on March 20 was a 13-year-old boy, who showed up at 5:45 a.m.; the Maple Leaf Gardens box office didn’t open until 10 a.m. With prices ranging from $1.25 to $3.50 a seat, tickets sold out within 48 hours. Elvis and his handlers quickly agreed to a second show: the tickets that had already sold would be honoured for a 9 p.m. show, and a 6 p.m. performance would be added.

The first major rock ‘n’ roll event in Toronto had come almost a year before, when Bill Haley and his Comets performed at Maple Leaf Gardens. But where Haley—a jovial and portly singer approaching middle age—might’ve been accepted as relatively innocuous, for moralizing politicians, preachers, and parents, Presley represented a dangerous new youth culture.

Canadian critics, like American critics before them, commented on his suggestive stage movements; his noisy (to older ears) fusion of country and rhythm and blues; and, most importantly, on the response the hearthrob singer provoked among his young fans.

Journalist Barbara Moon gave Toronto religious leaders free reign to vent about Elvis in Maclean’s (July 7, 1956). Jan Scott, religious columnist for the Toronto Telegram, insisted that teenagers who listened to rock ‘n’ roll would inevitably regret it once they realized “the whole business of pleasure-seeking and self-indulgence was a mockery and a sham.” Reverend W.G. McPherson of the Evangel Temple proclaimed that rock played on emotions “like the music of the heathen in Africa.”

“Elvis Presley is a vulgar, tasteless amateur!” exclaimed Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Company, who happened to be visiting Toronto in late March. He was pressed by Toronto reporters about whether there was at least something entertaining about Elvis’ on-stage antics. “No,” he sternly insisted. “I find this no laughing matter. It is a desperate state of affairs when you consider millions of youngsters being brought up on horror comics and Presley.”

Presley’s fans, April 2, 1957, from the York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, F0433, ASC00840.

Presley didn’t do himself any favours in the face of critics claiming a link between the singer and juvenile delinquency when he got into an altercation on a Memphis street a few weeks before the show. While signing autographs, Elvis was confronted by an 18-year-old U.S. Marine alleging the singer had bumped the soldier’s wife months earlier. Guileless, Elvis pulled out a Hollywood prop pistol, and with a broad grin on his face exclaimed: “I’ll blow your brains out, you punk.”

‘It was all a misunderstanding,” Presley explained after the matter was resolved amicably through a Memphis judge’s mediation. “We’re both sorry it happened. I thought he and his buddies were trying to beat me up.” However minor, the widely reported incident served to underline the danger Elvis and his rock ‘n’ roll ilk posed to North America’s youth.

While the Telegram, for its part, initiated the Elvis Suppresley Club, there were among the Toronto media those who defended the singer and his teenage fans. “There is far too much gratuitous insult handed out these days to young people regarding what they like or don’t like, and the guilt-by-association technique had been over-used already on the many decent youngsters who genuinely like Presley even to the point of imitating his haircut,” Globe and Mail columnist Scott Young wrote thoughtfully, placing Elvis within a longer history of youth culture and mothers who’d swooned over Rudy Vallée (and fathers sporting coon coats) in their younger years. “And in 20 years, some vital young man with long hair or no hair at all will come along playing a bassoon or a Tibetan lute and will fill Maple Leaf Gardens with the sons and daughters of the people who will be there to hear Elvis Tuesday night,” he concluded. “And the veterans of this Elvis recital, away off there in 1977, will sit at home and stare into their coffee cups and wonder what the world is coming to.”

When they finally met him in person—as Star staffer John Beehl did when Elvis kicked off the tour in Chicago in late March—journalists were surprised to discover a boyish but respectful, soft-spoken young man, who didn’t drink, smoke, or swear, rather than the caricature described at so many pulpits.

“If I thought I was contributing to juvenile delinquency or causing anybody to go astray,” Elvis said when a Canadian reporter gave him an opportunity to answer his critics, “I’d go back to driving a truck.” Of his provocative performances, he added: “When I start to sing I’m carried away, I spread my feet apart, pick the guitar, and the rhythm carries me from there. I can’t help movin’ around. It’s the way I sing.”

Toronto Star (March 27, 1957).

In the weeks leading up to Elvis’s arrival, the Toronto press carried dozens of stories on Elvis and his local fans. The Star visited the kids of Presley Avenue in Scarborough. “Kids keep asking me all the time if I really live on Presley Ave.,” one 14-year-old resident and Elvis fan commented. “When I tell them I do, they practically swoon. ‘Oh I wish I lived on Presley Ave.’ they say.’” The Globe and Mail featured a photo of two East York teens, Helen Hagen and Judi Reilly, who’d composed a song in Elvis’s honour. Radio stations held contests for the chance for young listeners to meet Elvis in person.

The Star dispatched Don Carlson to Memphis to pen a three-part biographical profile of the singer, recounting his rise from Memphis truck driver to rock ‘n’ roll sensation in less than four years. Carlson was astonished by the money-making yield of what he dubbed “Elvis Incorporated.” Selling records at a rate of a million per month, he said, earned Elvis about $1 million in royalties annually from his record deal with RCA Victor, television appearances added $100,000 per year, and personal appearances another $25,000 per week. Hollywood commitments added between $100,000 to $250,000 per movie on a three-films-per-year contract. Carlson further cited conservative estimates that consumers spent $25 million each year on products bearing the singer’s likeness—such as scarves, busts, shirts, pyjamas, and lunchboxes—and Elvis-endorsed products like cosmetics and soda pop.

Presley backstage at Maple Leaf Gardens with Gene Smith (L) and George Klein (R), April 2, 1957, from the York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, F0433, ASC00833.

Prior to the 6 p.m. show, perched on a table in a concrete room in the bowels of Maple Leaf Gardens, Presley chatted with the journalists who were there to cover his performance. Wearing an open-collar silver metallic silk shirt and a red suede jacket, he impressed most of them with his natural charm, humour, and ease at responding to questions about his critics, his love life, his taste in women, and his multi-faceted career—which most reporters in attendance assumed would be over in short order.

Had he ever thought of becoming a doctor or psychiatrist, one journalist asked. “I haven’t thought about becoming a psychiatrist, but I’ve often thought of going to one,” came his quick-witted response. Asked about formal musical technique, Elvis playfully conceded: “I don’t know anything about music—in my line I don’t need to.” He admitted to experiencing regular stage fright, despite the crowd’s howling enthusiasm. “It’s the waiting part that gets me,” he told one reporter. “It’s not so bad once I’ve done the first couple of numbers. But I’m never completely at ease.”

Other reporters, while undeniably impressed by Presley, thought his charm dangerous. “After seeing Elvis in action the question is not what’s going to happen to the teen-age squealers who undoubtedly will recover their equilibria, but what will become of this Bible-reading, non-smoking, non-drinking boy who is so good to his mother,” the Star‘s Angela Burke pondered after the press conference. “For the trouble with Elvis, from this observer’s view,” she added, “is young Mr. Presley’s complete lack of naiveté. Even the way he handles himself in a press conference, parrying questions sometimes with humor, and sometimes with remarkable innuendo, is a shocker when one considers his age.”

Fans at Maple Leaf Gardens, April 2, 1957, from the York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, F0433, ASC00843.

Out in the arena, the crowd grew restive sitting through a half dozen opening acts. An hour-long revue featuring tap dancer Frankie Trent, singer Pat Kelly, standup comic Rex Marlowe, and banjo player Jimmy James culminated in a chorus of boos for Irish tenor Frankie Connors. Only a solo set by the Jordanaires, Elvis’s backup singers, was well-received by the impatient audience.

After a 20-minute intermission, when the house lights dimmed and a local disc jockey announced Elvis’s imminent arrival on-stage, the crowd shrieked at top volume for 30 seconds straight. “From there on the Gardens,” the Globe and Mail recorded the scene, “from floor level to the highest tier, became a din of shrieks, whistles, feet-stomping and handclapping, lit by the chain lightning of amateur photographers’ flash bulbs.”

But, having broken a guitar string or hit himself in the eye with a microphone (accounts vary), Presley was further delayed en route to the stage. “Elvis doesn’t think you’re making enough noise,” came another announcement over the PA system, and the thunderous cheers from the crowd grew louder still. When he finally emerged on stage—dressed in the famous Nudie Cohn-designed gold lamé suit he’d introduced at the start of the tour—the ear-splitting noise prevented any one from hearing Elvis actually sing. “It was Presley a la pantomime all the way,” the Globe and Mail reported, “but nobody seemed to mind.”

“Up and down the stage he goes, dragging the mike like a captive, undulating, shouting feverishly,” wrote organist Charles Peaker, who attended the concert at the invitation of the Star. “He freezes, the orchestra stops—he glares at the audience like one in a hypnotic trance, then he leaps, gives tongue, and starts to dislocate his golden legs again.” Providing the most colourful descriptions of Elvis’ performance carried in the Toronto press, Peaker continued: “Then his face sets, his lips curl back and seizing the mike by the scruff of the neck he prowls up and down the platform, snarling, and driving his worshippers crazy.”

Presley on-stage in Toronto, April 2, 1957, from the York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, F0433, ASC00832.

Whenever Presley smiled seductively to one section of the audience or stretched out his arm towards another, the affected spectators erupted with ecstatic screams. His guitar was more prop than musical instrument. “At times he even balances on both toes with his knees forward, hips wiggling and chest thrown out,” reporter Joe Scanlon recalled. “The position appears physically impossible to hold, but Elvis manages to stay that way for 15 or 20 seconds.” None of the stage movements were choreographed or ever the same from concert to concert, which caused problems for his backup singers. “So we’d be watching,” one of the Jordanaires, Gordon Stoker, recalled of this tour in Hopkins’ biography of Elvis, “and we’d be watching so hard we’d blow the part, we’d forget to come in with the ‘ooooowahhhh’ and he’d turn around and give us the lip—you know the way he moves the left side of his mouth in a cocky sneer—of he’d say something like ‘oh yeah?’ or ‘sumbitch.’”

Among those 23,000 who attended Elvis’s Toronto concerts were several local celebrities including TV comedians Wayne and Shuster—who characterized Elvis as “sort of an E.P. Taylor with sideburns”—and Toronto Symphony Orchestra conductor Walter Susskind. “I feel that Mr. Elvis Presley is everything he is reported to be,” Susskind summarized. “Unfortunately, I could hardly hear him, so I cannot comment myself further.” A contingent from the Toronto Town Jazz Club attended “out of curiosity.” “What a horrible experience,” club president and jazz critic Dave Caplan complained. “I came to find out what all the noise about Presley is about; and that’s just what it all amounted to—a lot of noise.”

Evelyn Dumas, a twenty-something from Saskatchewan working for a Toronto family, was gifted a front row ticket by her employer. Slightly older than the majority of the teenage audience, she nevertheless gave in to girlish exuberance: “Although I was never one to do it—he walked on that stage, pointed his finger, began singing—and I screamed, just as loud as the rest of the girls in the audience that night! I was spellbound.”

Elvis performed most of his hits, all except “Blue Suede Shoes.” He treated the audience to “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Love Me,” “Too Much,” “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” and “All Shook Up”—which would be the number one record on the very first CHUM chart on May 27, 1957—as well as some lesser known songs like the not-yet-released “One Night,” and “Butterfly,” which he never formally recorded.

Presley on stage during a show the previous night in Buffalo, from the York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, F0433, ASC00835.

As raucous as the gathering appeared, members of Elvis’s entourage told Toronto journalists that “the whooping and hollering and shenanigans just didn’t compare to what they had seen in other cities.” Just the night before, in Buffalo, a woman had clutched the singer until a blow from a policeman’s club broke him free.

Toronto police, under the command of District Chief George Elliott, took no chance of a repeat, stationing as many as 125 uniformed police officers around the arena to spot trouble before it started. “Whenever a youngster bounced up in his seat a policeman would reach over and plunk him down again,” the Star‘s Scanlon observed. “This sometimes gave the Gardens the appearance of a large jack-in-the-box but it seemed to have the desired effect.” Two young female fans were ejected that night when they rushed the stage. In addition, the Globe and Mail noted “a scattering of fainting women.”

Surveying the scene from the back of the stage, Elliott, satisfied that the crowd was well-behaved, was seen tapping his foot to the music. “I’m a bit of a Presley fan myself,” he later told the press. “They were a good bunch,” Elliott said of the audience, which avoided the ugly scenes witnessed elsewhere at Presley performances—like that in Vancouver several months later, when the concert was cut short because the crowd rushed the stage.

The most difficult task of the night for police was clearing the arena after the early concert so that those with tickets for the 9 p.m. show could take their seats.

Presley with fans backstage in Buffalo, April 1, 1957, from the York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, F0433, ASC00837.

In between performances Elvis rested backstage, lying down in his dressing room for a period and meeting some lucky fans, including Vanderleck and Harris, whose petitions had led to the concerts in the first place. Meanwhile, clean-up men filled and carried away boxes and boxes of used flashbulbs collected from the arena floor.

The early show proved to be the last time Elvis wore the full gold lamé suit. His performance style, regularly dropping to his knees, had quickly worn down the gold on the front of the pants. Other than that detail, the second show went much the same as the first. With 15,000 fans now jammed into Maple Leaf Gardens (the largest audience to that point in Elvis’ career) the crowd’s hollering once again drowned out the singer and his musicians. As he neared the end of another hour-long performance, Elvis was drenched in sweat, his hair disshelved. One reporter in attendance likened him to “a kid staggering after a tough basketball game.”

He closed the show with “Hound Dog,” repeating chorus after chorus a dozen or more times in a growing crescendo. And then, an instant after the last notes were played, he was gone. For his own safety, Elvis never did encores or lingered at the venue. Before the audience could react—still hopeful there’d be a curtain call—he bolted off-stage and into a waiting car. “I’ll bet that guitar hadn’t hit the stage from his hand by the time he was shooting through the door,” one Toronto police officer observed. “His fast disappearance made it a lot easier for us.”

Presley’s fans and Toronto Police, April 2, 1957, from the York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, F0433, ASC07058.

As hundreds of onlookers began swarming the service entrance on the north side of Maple Leaf Gardens, Elvis was in a taxi, bound for Union Station. Squads of police officers had been dispatched to the King Edward Hotel expecting, like most of Elvis’s fans, that the singer would return there. By the time they all realized he wasn’t coming back, he was on a train to Ottawa, where he played another doubleheader the next day before returning to the United States.

Sources consulted: Ryan Edwardson, Canuck Rock: A History of Canadian Popular Music (University of Toronto Press, 2009); Jerry Hopkins, Elvis: A Biography (Warner Books, 1971); Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock ‘n’ Roll (Archon Books, 1988); and articles from the Globe and Mail (March 20, 21, 23, 28 & 30, and April 3 & 4, 1957); and the Toronto Star (October 29, 1956; March 22, 25, 27, 28, 29 & 30, and April 1, 2 & 3, 1957).

CORRECTION: April 7, 2013, 10:30 PM The photo from Presley’s Buffalo concert, above, was originally identified as a photo from the Maple Leaf Gardens show, but has now been corrected.
CORRECTION: April 9, 2013, 10:30 AM The photo of Presley backstage with fans, above, was identified as being taken on April 2 in Toronto, when the photo was actually taken on April 1 in Buffalo.

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

Children outside Warrendale. Screenshot from the documentary Warrendale, directed by Allan King, 1967.

In December of 1965, staff and children moved into a new, long-term mental-health treatment centre at the end of a cul-de-sac near Kipling Avenue and Albion Road. This was the new home for Warrendale, an experimental and controversial treatment centre for emotionally disturbed children, which had previously been centred north of metropolitan Toronto, in Oak Ridges. Over the next few months, Warrendale would face a complicated power struggle, the resignation of its entire staff, and an award-winning documentary which the CBC refused to broadcast.

Warrendale’s origins lay in St. Faith’s Lodge, initially established as an Anglican charity for girls. After several decades, St. Faith’s Lodge underwent a radical change in 1952, when it established a centre called “Warrendale” and redirected its focus toward providing long-term, residential treatment for emotionally disturbed youth.

In 1953, the board hired a new executive director, John Brown, an American-born social worker whose name would soon become synonymous with Warrendale. Over the next decade, Brown developed an approach for the care of disturbed children and helped expand Warrendale’s facilities to include a variety of centres and sites. By the early 1960s, Brown had established a new—and frequently contentious—model for treatment that was in place at all the centres he was affiliated with.

Warrendale facilities were residential centres, where children lived in groups of eight to 12. Each residential group had several staff members, the team leader of which reported regularly to Brown. Brown’s model called for children to live together in an environment designed to emulate that of a family. Strong, familiar relationships were encouraged between the children and the staff, Brown telling the Star that “we actually provide parenting for the child to make up the lack of mothering and fathering he [or she] missed the first time around.”

The Warrendale centre at Oak Ridges. The Toronto Star, December 15, 1965.

In 1965, 44 children were temporarily housed in two cottages at Sunnybrook Hospital, waiting to move into the new Etobicoke site. That autumn, journalist Sheila H. Kieran visited this temporary Warrendale location, and described her observations in a Maclean’s feature the following February, helping to bring Brown and his methods to national attention.

Kieran writes that “Warrendale’s supervisory people are trained social workers or psychologists but, surprisingly, the child care staff get most of their training on the job and through personal psychotherapy.” The novelty of this kind of work, coupled with the desire for a large number of workers, resulted in a large number of staffing positions which often proved difficult to fill. The staff was generally young; a Telegram article from August 1966 notes the average staff age at Warrendale was 24. One classified ad in the Toronto Star that same month reads: “University degree preferred. Experience not necessary. Training program offered.” In her article, Kieran notes that Warrendale was planning to expand its training program, and that “with today’s problems of inadequate staff in all fields of mental health, this solution strikes me as full of promise.”

The children at Warrendale were generally between the ages of nine and 17, and arrived with a variety of individual problems. Brown told the Star in 1965 that “we get the type of child that has been classed as ‘unreachable.’ They’ve gone through hospitals, clinics, been ‘case-worked’ to death. Our methods have to be unorthodox because orthodox treatments have failed with these children.”

Television producer Patrick Watson, who was involved in a documentary on the Etobicoke Warrendale facility, writes that “the children who live at Warrendale are people whose lives have gone off the track… Eventually, their paths diverged so far from the normal that it became impossible for them to live in a normal family or a normal community. Their fear, their rages, their withdrawal had become so extreme that parents and teachers and friends could no longer contact them, and they were lost.”

As part of Brown’s approach to creating a family-like atmosphere, physical contact played a significant role at Warrendale. “As you see children and the care workers moving about this house,” he told the Star, “you will notice a lot of hugging between them and bodily contact. We over-emphasize certain areas of giving like this because these children have been starved in these areas.”

This emphasis on physical contact was part of a larger idea of “retrogression” therapy. Kieran’s Maclean’s article notes that a child at Warrendale has “missed out on vital emotional experiences” in their development, “and remains, whatever his apparent age, still an uncivilized infant. On this basis, children at Warrendale are taken back to re-experience their infancy, this time with loving, giving, substitute parents [the child care staff]. If, in the opinion of the staff, a youngster needs a baby bottle, he is given one, no matter what his age. The children, even the teenagers, are cuddled frequently, tucked into bed, bathed, and sometimes fed.”

Another chief component of the Warrendale treatment program was the “holding” technique, in which a child who becomes hysterical or violent is physically held by staff, as opposed to subjected to straight jackets or sedatives. Within a “holding” session, it is believed that the child is able to vent frustrations and fears, without fear of injury to themselves or others.

A child and two staff involved in a holding session. Screenshot from the documentary Warrendale, directed by Allan King, 1967.

Between the bottle-feeding and the emphasis on physical touching, it could be easy for Warrendale to become the subject of rumours. Kiernan writes, “I looked in vain for teenagers being cuddled suggestively by adult workers. Instead, I found, for the most part, that a substantial amount of physical contact comes in casual ways… all of it casual and appropriate enough to withstand scrutiny by the most priggish Mrs. Grundy.”

The new facility in Etobicoke opened on December 14, 1965 with four residences, an office, and a school building, with two additional residences under construction. Speaking at its opening, Ontario Welfare Minister Louis Cecile said, “We have been impressed by the results of the Warrendale program. You have a high rate of success in treatment so that you must have developed remarkably effective techniques in dealing with that elusive and complex entity—the mind of a child.”

Despite the hope surrounding the new facility, things began to unravel for for John Brown and Warrendale the following summer.

Brown became involved in an ongoing public debate over the state of mental health in Ontario, particularly over the matter of Ontario children who were found to be receiving psychiatric care in institutions designed for adults. This debate soon became charged with politics, as prominent NDP figures including Stephen Lewis advocated for changes to the existing system, meeting opposition from various figures in the reigning Conservative government and some members of the medical establishment. In June of 1966, in the same election that saw radical Toronto coroner Morton Shulman enter provincial politics as an NDP candidate for High Park, Brown was announced as the NDP candidate for the provincial riding of Beaches–Woodbine.

Suddenly, on August 10, John Brown announced he would be leaving Warrendale, effective September 1. Brown accused the Ontario Department of Welfare of forcing him out by putting pressure on Warrendale’s board of directors. He hurled a series of accusations, mostly at the Department of Welfare, claiming they wanted to interfere with his program and limit its ability to provide care. He further alleged that the government was targeting him, specifically, due to his affiliation with the NDP.

Warrendale Court. Screenshot from the documentary Warrendale, directed by Allan King, 1967.

The director of Child Welfare for the province, Betty Graham, denied that there was any such interference and accused Brown of having a “persecution complex.” Ontario Welfare Minister Louis Cecile, who had spoken in praise of Warrendale just six months earlier, now told the press he no longer believed in Brown’s work, quoted in the Star as saying “most psychologists I’ve met do not approve of his methods.” Brown vigorously defended his treatment methods, and maintained that he was being dismissed because of his political affiliations, claiming that there were Conservative candidates in parallel situations who had not been forced to resign their posts.

As the dispute raged on, Brown set up his own company, Brown Camps, Ltd., at Oak Ridges, with plans to carry on his work there. His affiliation with Warrendale would cease on September 1, when acting director Robert Henry would assume control. The remaining staff at Warrendale planned to carry on without John Brown.

This plan was cast athwart when Henry resigned on August 24, claiming he was unable to reach an agreement with the board of directors over continuing Brown’s treatment program, and writing that “the board has lost focus on the treatment of children.” The next day, all 40 staff members of Warrendale announced their resignations, citing a lack of positive leadership, and announced a plan to relocate all the children currently at the Etobicoke centre to Brown’s private camp at Oak Ridges. “If necessary,” staff director Walter Gunn told the Telegram, “we will hire tents and set up a camp until the end of September so we can help these children.”

After an attempt at mediation failed, the Warrendale board sold the Etobicoke site to the Province of Ontario, who assumed responsibility for the facility. The old board would remain in place until a new administrative model could be established, and the new director would be Dr. J. Donald Atcheson, who was already the superintendent of the nearby, government-run Thistletown Hospital, an institution with a similar mandate to that of Warrendale.

Health Minister Matthew Dymond issued a statement to touch on several of the major issues. Dymond noted that Thistletown was then a more “medically oriented” institution than Warrendale, “but this doesn’t necessarily mean that Warrendale’s program will now become medically oriented.” Each child would be individually reassessed, and staff would be instructed to consider “all types of treatment with a completely open mind.” He also noted that “parents of children who are at present patients at Warrendale can be assured that the transfer will be accomplished with as little disruption as possible.” The transfer proved to be extremely disruptive.

(Above right: John Brown. The Toronto Star, September 10, 1966. Photo by Boris Spremo.)

The next day, all three Toronto newspapers reported that groups of children had fled Warrendale during the night, some on their own, others reportedly with the aid of former Warrendale staff. Twelve children were reportedly picked up in a station wagon by a former staffer. Several children reportedly slipped away on their own and hitchhiked to Brown’s centre in Oak Ridges; one reportedly walked the entire way. According to Brown, several of the youths called him during the night, asking for protection. Case worker Vicki Hollenberg told the Star she received a phone call from two girls who had run away, asking to be picked up. After contacting two Children’s Aid societies and getting permission to transport them to Brown’s new camp in Oak Ridges, provincial officials raided Hollenberg’s home at 4 a.m. and took them back to Warrendale.

Over the next few days, reports continued of children escaping from Warrendale. In the Telegram, “workers and parents charged the new staff is lax, unable to control the children and using out-of-date methods, including solitary confinement.” A former Warrendale social worker was paraphrased in the same article, indicating that the new staff was incapable of working in the Warrendale setting, and noted that “they can’t work with children unless there are bars and locked doors.”

Following this disastrous transition, many parents preferred to relocate their children to Brown’s private facility in Oak Ridges. One parent told the Telegram, “In Thistletown, long-term treatment is not given, and that is my concern. My son has only a slim chance of accepting life again. And for this reason I must ignore bribes of free service under the Provincial hospital plan, and go to Brown camp.” According to one source, 52 of the 57 children who had been at Warrendale at the time of the government takeover were back under Brown’s care within a year.

Over the next few months, the uneasy transition at the Etobicoke site went on. Brown continued to have a public dispute with various departments of the Ontario government, both over the veracity of his methods and the finances of Warrendale.

During the dispute, the Star’s Marilyn Dunlop wrote an article foreshadowing what would soon become the general public’s primary window into the world of Warrendale: the memories of documentary filmmaker Allan King, who had spent considerable time in the Etobicoke centre in the spring of 1966.

(Above left: John Brown. The Telegram, September 19, 1966. Photo by Boris Spremo.)

Following some initial conversations with John Brown, King began visiting Warrendale regularly, getting to know the staff and children, eventually spending close to a month on site before bringing in the rest of the crew and any equipment. In a subsequent interview, King stressed his preliminary meetings with the children, saying “it was essential to obtain their full consent. Before they would agree, they wanted to know why we wanted to make the film and what other people would think of them.” According to Dunlop’s article, “King said he told them he wanted to record their daily lives because their feelings were important and their difficulties were problems shared to some degree by all society.”

After receiving consent to film from the children and staff, King and his crew spent several weeks filming inside one of the Warrendale residences, collecting footage in preparation for a CBC documentary on Warrendale, recording everyday activities, ranging from typical games and interactions to holding sessions and bottle-feeding.

The resulting film, simply titled Warrendale, presents life inside Warrendale with little additional context. No introduction or narration is provided, and the audience is given no initial explanation as to what Warrendale is, or of the specific problems affecting the children, or of the roles of the staff. Scenes of bottle-feeding are included, as are scenes of children sitting on the laps of workers. Several holding sessions are shown. These aspects of Brown’s methods are interspersed with footage of children and staff playing, eating meals together, and watching hockey on television. The climax of the film comes with the staff breaking the news of the sudden death of Dorothy, the cook, resulting in an exhausting episode in which several children experience violent emotional outbursts.

Headline and photo from a review of Warrendale. The Telegram, June 3, 1967.

By April 1967, however, the CBC had yet to air the completed documentary. Given the nature of the treatment centre and the emotionally charged accusations from the previous summer, the CBC’s reluctance to air the film seemed understandable. Roy Shields raised several questions in the Star’s television column. “With scenes of screaming, hysterical children being held by staff workers, with other scenes of children experiencing regression to bottle-feeding, will unprepared viewers understand or be outraged?… Considering the current political and medical controversy over John Brown’s methods of treatment, does the film argue for or against him? And if so, is it fair?” Ultimately, though, what kept CBC from airing the film was the word “fuck.”

Allan King revealed that what caused the CBC to balk were, in the words of Roy Shields, “scenes of children in wild fits of rage, cursing their fates while being held in check by Warrendale social workers.” CBC executives agreed that the film was excellent, but in a statement released to the press, stated that “certain sequences would violate the broadcast regulations… Following discussion with the producer, it has been found impractical to delete from the film the sequences which would be in violation of the regulations.” By this time Warrendale had already been sent to New York, London, and Paris, and had been accepted for entry at the Cannes Film Festival. Shields predicted “there is the fear that only after it has been accepted abroad will it be deemed fit for home consumption. Politics aside, that’s what really hurts—that on our own, we haven’t the guts to show or see this film.”

As a film, Warrendale proved to be immensely successful, winning the Art and Experiment Prize at Cannes, and garnering enthusiastic reviews.

On the night of its Toronto debut in June 1967, Allan King held a premiere party at Casa Loma, the proceeds of which were donated to the Ontario Association for Emotionally Disturbed Children, attended by people involved with the film’s production, along with other local luminaries including Dalton Camp and Bruno Gerussi. The Telegram noted that this was not a typical film party, probably “because the film about emotionally disturbed children simply didn’t lend itself to gala festivities.”

The party at Casa Loma, following the Toronto premiere of Warrendale. The man at the far right is the film’s executive producer, Patrick Watson. The Telegram, June 7, 1967.

All three Toronto dailies ran effusively positive reviews of Warrendale. The Globe’s Ralph Hicklin wrote, “King and his associates have taken a real and difficult situation, and dehydrated it into a concentrate that retains all the truth and anguish and love and hate of five weeks in the lives of a handful of struggling children.” Clyde Gilmour in the Telegram described it as “a total-experience film that rips at your guts and unlocks your compassion and makes you re-examine your own assessments of yourself and the people who surround you.” In the Star, Margaret Weiers described it as “a film every parent should see.”

Although only brought to Toronto for a two-week run at the New Yorker Theatre (now the home of the Panasonic), Warrendale proved so popular with the public that it was held over multiple times, playing for a total of nine weeks. For those who had read about Warrendale and its troubles over the past few years, this was the first and only opportunity to see for themselves the staff, children, and treatment used at John Brown’s Warrendale, which no longer existed in the form seen on screen.

Warrendale Court remains in Northern Etobicoke today; most of the buildings from John Brown’s time are still standing. John Brown won his riding in the election of 1967, but chose not to seek re-election in 1971. Following his death in 2004, the Ontario Legislature devoted time to acknowledge his contributions. Jim Bradley, speaking of Brown, praised Brown’s work and his willingness to take on difficult cases. “John Brown and his group were prepared to take on the most difficult. He had a revolutionary approach to children’s mental health… He took great strides both before and after his election to communicate the need for the Ministry of Health to invest in children’s mental health facilities, and that cry is with us today, as it has been for a long time.”

Additional material from: Browndale.net; Karen Gilmour-Barrett and Susan Pratt, A New Profession; The Globe and Mail, December 9, December 15, 1965, April 7, June 2, June 3, June 4, July 21, August 10, August 11, August 12, August 13, August 17, August 25, August 26, September 2, September 3, September 8, September 9, September 10, September 12, September 13, September 15, September 19, October 1, October 25, October 27, 1966; March 27, April 18, June 3, October 18, December 30, 1967, June 15, 2009; King, (Allan) Associates, Warrendale (Produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1967); Maclean’s, February 19, December 17, 1967; The Toronto Star, December 15, 1965, February 9, April 30, June 2, June 30, August 10, August 12, August 16, August 24, August 25, August 26, August 27, August 31, September 8, September 9, September 10, September 12, September 13, September 14, September 15, September 19, September 30, November 5, 1966, January 24, February 3, February 16, March 25, April 6, April 18, May 8, May 13, May 24, June 3, July 1, July 7, August 14, October 18, 1967; The Telegram, June 2, August 10, August 11, August 25, September 8, September 9, September 13, 1966, June 3, June 7, 1967.

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

As the bell rang for the fifteenth and final round, George Chuvalo stepped forward to meet Muhammad Ali at centre ring as the Maple Leaf Gardens crowd roared. By most observers’ count, the Toronto-born heavyweight had only won one round—on sheer determination alone—and needed a knockout for victory. The match faced Chuvalo against the brash young heavyweight champion, undefeated as a professional but reviled by much of the American press and public for his refusal to serve in Vietnam. A last-minute substitute to the fight, Chuvalo was considered a has-been on the down side of his career by the boxing establishment.

He was the prototypical “coulda been,” with a promising career that regularly saw him near the top of the heavyweight boxing rankings, but seemingly unable to put it together in the high profile fights. Now, he pushed Ali to 15 rounds for the first time in the American’s boxing career. It was the first time a heavyweight title bout went the distance since 1954, and one of the most memorable fights ever to take place on Canadian soil.

“It was a fight such as people had hoped for and few expected—a fierce, primitive battle between a ponderous, rough-hewn slugger and a master hitter of polished skills,” wrote Globe and Mail columnist Dick Beddoes. On the other hand, Milt Dunnell wrote in the Star, “You don’t win fights simply by proving the other guy can’t knock you out.”

Cassius Clay listens to Elijah Muhammad speak, 1964, from WikiMedia Commons.

Since winning gold at the 1960 Olympics, Cassius Clay (as Ali was then known) quickly worked his way through the heavyweight ranks en route to unseating Sonny Liston as the World Heavyweight Champion in February 1964. Fighting in an unconventional style—”fast footwork, hand held low, a defence that leaned back, bobbing and weaving,” as historian Bryan Palmer described it in Canada’s 1960s (University of Toronto Press, 2009)—Clay riled the (predominantly white) boxing establishment with his bravado and bombastic trash-talking.

After he’d changed his name to Muhammad Ali as part of his conversion as a member of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, he was called to appear before the United States Selective Service. Although he’d already failed a section of the induction exam and been deemed ineligible, the escalating demands of the Vietnam War meant lowered entry standards. For Ali, it meant that in February 1966 he was reclassified as eligible for selection.

Announcing his intention to refuse service as a conscientious objector with an infamous comment—”I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong,” he said—Ali sparked nationwide controversy. Years before broad public opinion turned against the war, already hostile white sportswriters, who’d long painted Ali as a loudmouth and as a member of what they considered a black extremist organization, could now include “unpatriotic draft dodger” in their attacks on the boxer.

A Young George Chuvalo from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 2470.

By 1966, 28-year-old George Chuvalo was on the down side of his boxing career. Born to immigrant parents from Bosnia-Herzegovenia, Chuvalo had grown up in working-class instability in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood. And he took to boxing as an alternative to his father’s fate of working at the abattoir.

First teaching himself boxing basics by studying photos in magazines, Murray Greig writes in Goin’ The Distance: Canada’s Boxing Heritage (Macmillan Canada, 1996), Chuvalo was the Canadian amateur heavyweight champion at age 17. Then, he turned professional in April 1956, taking a $500 purse for knocking out four opponents in a tournament at Maple Leaf Gardens. But managers and promoters, starved for legitimate boxing talents, rushed Chuvalo into gruelling headline bouts. He earned the Canadian heavyweight belt by 1958.

He never developed into a well-rounded boxer because he’d never been given the opportunity to refine his boxing fundamentals in shorter undercard matches. Relying on his sheer size and strength, Chuvalo moved relentlessly forward at his opponents, absorbing their punishing blows on his body and face, and wailing away in counter-attack. It was a style that once led to Ali dubbing him “the washer-woman.” Inconsistent in the ring, Chuvalo lost the Canadian crown but regained it shortly afterward.

He had his shots at earning a world title, but always seemed to falter in the big fight. In February 1965, he went the distance against former champ Floyd Patterson at Madison Square Gardens but lost a close decision. He lost his next major bout against top contender Ernie Terrell in a unanimous decision, a bitter outcome that Chuvalo remains convinced was fixed. After a win against Joe Brygraves, Chuvalo unexpectantly dropped a decision against Eduardo Corletti just three months before facing Ali.

When news of the draft board hit the front page, Ali was scheduled to face Terrell in Chicago on March 29, 1966. But in mid-February, media pressure prompted the State of Illinois to cancel the bout when Ali not only refused to apologize for his anti-war statements but doubled-down at a special hearing before the state boxing commission.

Right: Muhammad Ali, 1967, from WikiMedia Commons.

The offer from Louisville—Ali’s hometown—to act as a substitute venue came to naught when the Kentucky legislature hastily passed a resolution condemning the boxer as bringing “discredit to all loyal Kentuckians and to the names of the thousands who gave their lives for this country during his lifetime.” The promoters next tried Florida, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Oklahoma, Missouri, and elsewhere, but were rebuffed again and again through the refusal of state or local officials to sanction the bout.

Although the Ali-Terrell fight was still without a venue just a month out, as the first fight to be promoted by Main Bout, Inc.—a company formed by Ali in association with the Nation of Islam—cancelling the fight was never an option. Main Bout didn’t need the the fight to be overwhelmingly profitable, but a failure to even stage the fight might prove a symbolic knockout blow for the Nation’s philosophy of economic nationalism.

The eventual selection of Toronto was not without its own political controversy. In the legislature, MPPs debated not only Ali’s comments about Vietnam but also Terrell’s rumoured mob connections before officially sanctioning the bout on March 8.

Conn Smythe, the builder and long-time director of Maple Leaf Gardens and a veteran of the Second World War, objected to the Gardens hosting a draft dodger. Denouncing the bout as “cash before class,” Smythe resigned as director and sold all his stock in the arena.

Toronto Star (March 11, 1966).

By this time, in the States, the Veterans of Foreign Wars had threatened to picket any theatre screening a closed-circuit telecast of Ali-Terrell. Of 280 theatres that had originally signed on for the March 29 event, only 32 showed the fight. Additionally, an American radio broadcast was cancelled over difficulties with sponsors. With the profitability of the boxing match plumetting, Main Bout pressured Terrell to accept a modified contract. He balked, objecting to the smaller purse being offered and unacceptable clauses in the contract, and backed out of the fight.

With less than three weeks notice, on March 12 Chuvalo stepped up as Ali’s substitute opponent. Though he admitted he’d have preferred more time to prepare, Chuvalo would still manage to cram in 100 rounds of sparring before the fight.

Ali arrived in Toronto on Saturday March 19—travelling with special permission of the draft board on condition that he be back stateside by April 17. With his trainers and entourage, Ali installed himself at Earl Sullivan’s Toronto Athletic Club on Ossington Avenue. Paying $1 to $5 each for the privilege, spectators crowded into the 300-person-capacity gym to watch the champion spar. Chuvalo’s gym at the Lansdowne Athletic Club was similarly packed—at 50 cents per head, with the proceeds donated to charity.

Each day, Ali proceeded to give away his portion of the door receipts—usually around $1,000—as prize money for races and contests he organized between the dozens of kids who clamoured around him at the gym. When Ali was asked about whether the newspapers could be contacted for a photo op with the kids, one of his trainers recalled in Thomas Hauser’s Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (Simon & Schuster, 1991), Ali replied: “Please don’t. I’m having too much fun. If the newspapers come and write about it, my people are going to get upset and I won’t be able to do it anymore.”

Toronto Star (March 22, 1966).

Cameras did follow him on an apppearance at the Metro Toronto junior boxing championship tournament a week before the Chuvalo event, where he refereed a few matches and offered consoling words for boxers discouraged by the outcome of their fight. “Be a champ,” he told the whole group of youngsters. “Work hard and get to be a champion and you may have to fight me. I’ll still be champ 20 years from now.” None of the kids posing for photographs with Ali or seeking his autograph seemed to care about the controversies then plaguing the fighter.

Such vignettes suggest Canadians, on the whole, were more liberal and tolerant in their reception of the scandalized heavyweight. “Canadians didn’t think Muhammad Ali to be the ogre as painted by some American politicians and newspapers,” Jet (April 14, 1966) concurred about the cordial treatment afforded Ali in Canada. “Ali seemed to captivate Canadians with his wit, charm, and ring prowess.” Nevertheless, some Canadian journalists peppered their coverage of the fight with racial epithets and casual racism, insisting—like most of their American colleagues—on referring to him as Cassius Clay, and dubbing him “Mecca man,” or “Allah’s wordiest son,” and describing the Nation of Islam as “the Negro counterpart of the Ku Klux Klan.” And, while the crowd’s cheers at the Gardens far out-weighed the boos as Ali entered the ring, astoundingly racist taunts could be heard in the arena “Kill that nigger, George,” Palmer records one such slur. “Hit him in the guts; the black boys can’t take it there.”

“Clay could have been the most popular of all champions,” Arthur Daley of the New York Times complained in the lead-up to the Chuvalo match-up.

Left: Toronto Star (March 26, 1966).

“But he attached himself to a hate organization, and antagonized everyone with his boasting and his disdain for the decency of even a low-grade patriotism.” Daley questioned the quality of the match-up, urging a boycott of an event he argued promoters were jamming “down so many unwilling throats” and which “thumb[ed] its nose at the public.”

While Ali was regularly smeared as a disgrace to boxing by journalists, fellow boxers, and politicians alike for his anti-war views, the same critics had to at least acknowledge the 24-year-old’s boxing acumen. Chuvalo, four years his elder, received no such respect for his boxing skill. Foreign sportswriters labelled him a “second-class challenger,” and a “blocky, short-armed, plodding punching bag” who’d lost two of his last three fights. At best, they begrudgingly acknowledged that his durability—his willingness to accept punishment round after round—was a kind of boxing skill. At worst, they called him a mere brawler and a dirty fighter. The bout, they said, was a farce.

Friendly local reporters scoured the boxers’ respective careers for glimmers of hope for Chuvalo. They latched onto his knockout of Doug Jones in February 1964—his last significant victory—which had so shaken his opponent that Jones was unable to fight again for over a year. Against the same fighter in March 1963, they noted, Ali won on points—a decision lustily booed by the crowd at Madison Square Garden who thought Jones deserved the victory. But even the local press gave little chance of a Chuvalo upset.

Unofficial odds—if you could even find someone to take a bet on the fight—favoured Ali 7-1. “I’m at my best as the underdog,” Chuvalo explained to the Star (March 15, 1966). “I’m a rough fighter,” he explained his planned strategy on another occasion. “When I’m in close, I feel that I’m the boss, and I try to make sure my opponent knows it. I’ll treat Clay as roughly as I can whenever I can. I plan to put pressure on Clay from the first bell and never let up. The hardest part of the fight for me will be the first 10 rounds. After that, he’ll be worn down. I think Clay will quit if he’s hurt, and I intend to hurt him.” As the shorter fighter, Chuvalo hoped—by relentlessly moving towards his opponent and preventing free movement about the ring—to overcome Ali’s advantages of greater reach and speed.

The Ali-Chuvalo fight—hyped as “The Heavyweight Showdown”—was considered a joke by the boxing establishment. One journalist argued the bout would “reduce the status of the world heavyweight championship to burlesque,” and called Toronto a “city without sporting shame.” While few American media outlets showed any interest in the lead-up to the fight—and their correspondents arrived in Toronto only begrudgingly for the fight itself—local Star and Globe and Mail reporters filed almost daily reports from the respective training camps. They were there to record Ali’s characteristically poetic bluster.

“I am a jet,” he exclaimed, tracing an arc in the air with his outstretched arm like an airplane in flight, “and all the rest is props. Boxing will never be the same. Once you have a been in a jet, you not ever really happy in a prop again.” He added: “I am a jet, you can’t rank me with no boxer. I’m in a class by myself. Nobody asks me how many miles I run this morning, people don’t come up to me on the street and ask if my double left uppercut hook is sharp. They talk to me like a congressman.” To another reporter, Ali promised to “become a teacher and a minister.”

Seemingly inspired by Ali’s mode of self-promotion, Chuvalo offered his own witty repartee. “He’s supposed to have killed Liston with one shot last summer, but that’s crazy,” he argued, referring to the controversial “phantom punch” that knocked Liston out when Ali faced him for the second time. “Hell, my kid could have taken a better punch than that.” Playing along, a journalist asked if he meant his oldest son, aged six. “No, no, I mean Jesse, the youngest. He’s 2. It would be an insult to the oldest to say he can’t take a harder shot than Liston did.” On another occasion, Chuvalo quipped: “If he comes at me, it’ll be Muhammad Ali up my alley.”

Although the boxing establishment complained the fight wasn’t worth 30 cents, nearly 14,000 spectators were willing to buy tickets, paying up to $100 for ringside seats. When the last-minute demand for $10 tickets exceeded the supply, Gardens officials ordered that $20 tickets be sold at half price to ensure no paying customer was turned away. The result, Palmer notes with reference to a New York reporter, was that the white-jacketed social establishment usually seen at Toronto boxing matches was largely absent. Instead, the crowd was comprised of working-class immigrants one might see in Yonge Street taverns—much like Chuvalo’s own background—and the likes of rock-and-roller Ronnie Hawkins.

They were treated to an exciting, violent, memorable bout. “There was a lot of criticism about this match, and a lot of people saying it never should be held, that it was some kind of social injustice being foisted on the customer,” veteran boxing announcer Don Dunphy commented during the broadcast, “they sound rather happy don’t they?”

True to his pre-fight strategy, Chuvalo sought to make the bout an endurance test, concentrating on body shots—and more than a few low blows—to wear his opponent down. Ali let him, the Globe and Mail (March 30, 1966) reported, “almost disdainfully, allowing the Toronto slugger to pepper his body with plowing right hands—many to the kidneys and many low.” Although Ali would be peeing blood in the aftermath of the fight, Chuvalo’s efforts gave him no immediate advantage.

While the bout was not a classic example of Ali’s free-wheeling style, the Star (March 30, 1966) observed, he relied on “perfect timing—offensively and defensively—moving forward, backward or to either side.” Ali didn’t tire after the tenth round as Chuvalo had hoped. And with the champion connecting on seven times as many punches as the challenger by one observer’s count, Ali was in command of the fight. It became clear to all in the late rounds that Chuvalo’s only opportunity to overcome his deficit on points—and to upset Ali—would be a knockout. Despite his renewed efforts in the final rounds, Chuvalo landed no decisive blow, and Ali won by unanimous decision.

“The judges’ points are mere mathematics,” one British journalist remarked. “They convey not one tithe of the excitement that threatened to un-freeze the ice-rink floor as brave, bloodied, but ever unbowed Chuvalo bashed his way through to the 15th-round ditch.” By a combination of Chuvalo’s hard-headed unwillingness to fall down or relent, and the referee’s refusal to penalize him for his low blows, reporters argued, it was the toughest fight yet of Ali’s career. The international press issued a collective mea culpa over their pre-fight criticisms of the questionable nature of the match-up. “It was a far, far better show than anyone could have expected,” Jesse Abramson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune.

Toronto Star (March 30, 1966).

“He’s the toughest guy I ever fought,” Ali told reporters in the ring immediately after the fight. “I kept saying he was tough, tougher than Sonny Liston, tougher than Floyd Patterson, tougher than Ernie Terrell, but people thought I was just trying to build up the gate. Now you know I was right.” He later complained of the low blows but added jokingly: “George’s head was so hard I bruised my right hand.” He and his handlers left Toronto expressing their respect for the Canadian bruiser. “Look, you people ought to be proud of this Chuvalo,” Ali’s manager, Angelo Dundee, commented. “I was and I was in the other guy’s corner. But if you care about boxing, you got to admire a man like that.”

Chuvalo was disappointed at losing, and never quite understood why people thought he should be pleased with the fight. “When people say to me, ‘You must be so proud of this fight,’” Chuvalo told Stephen Brunt for Facing Ali: The Opposition Weighs In (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2002), “I say, ‘Proud of what? I lost the fight.’” But he eventually came to accept—and even feel pride—that his performance had made Canadians proud of being Canadian.

The bout might have been a minor occurrence in Ali’s career, but one of a series of title defences—most staged on foreign soil—before he was convicted of evading the draft in June 1967 and subsequently stripped of his heavyweight belt. But for Chuvalo, facing Ali in the March 1966 bout—as well as their rematch in May 1972—was the defining moment of his career. The newfound respect going the distance with Ali earned Chuvalo from the boxing establishment prolonged his career, and he would go on to fight some of the greats of the era, like Joe Frazier, Jerry Quarry, George Foreman, and Cleveland Williams, before retiring—still Canadian heavyweight champion—in 1978.

“He was the toughest man I ever fought,” Ali said of Chuvalo decades later. “He took all my best shots.” Chuvalo regarded Ali as the greatest heavyweight of all time.

Chuvalo slipped from mainstream public consciousness until a series of tragedies involving drugs and suicide afflicted his family, at the cost of his wife and three sons in the 1980s and 1990s. He reinvented himself as a public speaker, discussing the perils of drugs to student audiences. His story will be the subject of his soon-to-be-released autobiography.

Other sources consulted: Michael Ezra, Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon (Temple University Press, 2009); Jet (March 24, 1966); The Last Round (2003); and articles from the Globe and Mail (March 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 22, 26, 28, 29 & 31, 1966); and the Toronto Star (March 8, 10, 19, 22, 25 & 26, 1966; November 1, 1992; November 13, 1993; January 8, 2002; and May 29, 2005).

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

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip riding down Bay Street, June 29, 1959. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 4986.

As Toronto prepared to welcome Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip in the weeks leading up to the couple’s two-day visit in June 1959, press on both sides of the Atlantic debated whether Canadians suffered royal tour fatigue. The upcoming tour would be Elizabeth’s third of the decade, and the first to pass through Toronto since 1951, when she was still heir to the throne. Other royals, such as Elizabeth’s sister Margaret and aunt Mary, Princess Royal, conducted their own tours. What had been a rare experience was becoming less so.

Controversy exploded when Joyce Davidson, one of the hosts of CBC-TV’s Toronto-based newsmagazine Tabloid, headed to New York City for a featured guest stint on Today. When host Dave Garroway asked Davidson on June 18, 1959, about the Queen’s visit, she surprised him by saying “we’re still annoyed at still being dependent on a monarchy.” She declared most Canadians expressed “indifference” to the Queen because their backgrounds were not British. Davidson tried to cover her tracks by indicating her remarks did not necessarily represent her own opinion.

Joyce Davidson on the front page of the Telegram, June 20, 1959.

That point was lost when the news hit Toronto. Phone lines at the CBC and daily newspapers were flooded with outraged callers incensed by the gall of Davidson to suggest anti-monarchist thoughts. Mayor Nathan Phillips demanded an apology, stating that Davidson “doesn’t represent Canadians or the people of Toronto.” Ethnic organizations declared their loyalty to the crown. Though more politely written, letters and statements condemning Davidson displayed an underlying tone of ugliness towards her familiar to anyone visiting online comment sections recently—a Telegram editorial declared “Joyce is no brain” and that she was “posing, as some Canadians do when absent from Canada, as superior to things Canadian and thought she would show Mr. Garroway just how emancipated she is. La-de-da-da-da.” Davidson’s two young daughters, who were being watched by their grandmother in Toronto, were taunted as “traitors” by playmates.

Initially, Davidson refused to apologize. Interviewed on Tabloid that evening, she told co-host Percy Saltzman, who admitted he would have internalized similar thoughts, that “nothing I said had any reflection against the Queen… or anyone in her entourage.” During her final appearance on Today the following morning, she joked that when she returned to Toronto, “they’ll probably shoot me when I get off the plane.” She wrote a piece for the Telegram where she expressed her astonishment at the vitriol she unleashed over “a mild opinion from a mild girl.”

Discussions with CBC brass determined that Davidson would not return to Tabloid until the furor died down. In a second Telegram piece, she apologized for distressing people. Calls to media outlets continued, but opinion started to favour Davidson. CBC, which was experiencing unrelated troubles with the federal government, was criticized for pulling her off the air. Star columnist Pierre Berton doubted a similar stir would have arisen had she declared herself an atheist. He believed Canadians generally were indifferent to royal visits and that “if this be treason, make the most of it.” Davidson took her daughters to watch the royal procession when it arrived in Toronto and returned to the air a week after the Queen departed. Within a couple of years, she moved south of the border and married TV talk show host/producer David Susskind.

Cartoon, the Telegram, June 29, 1959.

While the Davidson furor died down, another tour-related controversy flared briefly at city council. Mayor Phillips’ eight-year-old granddaughter Linda was designated to present the official city bouquet to the Queen at City Hall, as she had for Princess Margaret a year earlier. While some aldermen had no problems, others felt the choice should have been made from local schools or children’s hospitals. Future mayor William Dennison thought that at least Linda should have an assistant who was “a crippled child or an orphan.” Phillips stuck by his choice.

The Queen and Prince Philip arrived in Toronto Harbour aboard the royal yacht Britannia around 9 a.m. on June 29, 1959, accompanied by an entourage of royal naval ships, RCMP patrols, and harbour police. Temporary stands were filled when the royal couple stepped onto land near Queens Quay and Yonge Street around 9:30 a.m. Military guards and musicians were dressed in heavy ceremonial garb ill-suited for temperatures hovering around 33 degrees Celsius. At least three collapsed during the ceremony, the first of many guards and spectators who crumpled from the heat over the course of the day.

After dedicating docks named in her honour, the Queen and Prince Philip loaded into the open-air royal car. They headed east to Kew Beach to meet Beaches residents and physically challenged children. Greeting them was Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe, who joked that he wanted to “give the Queen a tip” for the following day’s Queen’s Plate horse race, preferably for Smythe’s entry, Major Flight. Instead, he introduced her to that year’s Easter Seals “Timmy.”

Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, and Nathan Philips at civic reception at Old City Hall, June 29, 1959. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 4980.

The royal party arrived at Old City Hall at 11:30 a.m., 15 minutes early. Despite strong winds which nearly blew away his speech, Mayor Phillips officially welcomed the Queen at a ceremony which drew 6,000 spectators. “There is probably not a member country of the Commonwealth which is not represented in this vast concourse of citizens assembled here,” Phillips noted. He invited the couple to “come again when we can promise an entirely new batch of sites.” One of those future attractions caught Prince Philip’s eye: a model of the new City Hall, which reminded him of a boomerang. He asked how to contact architect Viljo Revell.

After receiving a painting of the waterfront by Manly MacDonald, the Queen thanked Torontonians for “a demonstration of love and loyalty which has touched us beyond measure.” The royal motorcade received the ticker-tape parade treatment as it proceeded south along Bay Street before heading back to the Britannia. Following lunch, the couple visited the Redpath sugar refinery. Photographers trailing the Queen for American and British newspapers balked when told they would have to walk up many flights of stairs to follow the royal party, which had exclusive use of the freight elevator. These photographers sulked in a nearby bus, while their local counterparts braved the stairs. They were rewarded with shots of the Queen quizzing Redpath officials about sugar and the prince demonstrating his refining knowledge.

Maps of the royal tour routes, the Telegram, June 27, 1959.

Next stop was High Park, where the royals viewed floral displays, took tea with the mayor, and presented awards to Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. As he returned to the car, Prince Philip glanced at Grenadier Pond and announced that he would go for a swim. A nearby Scout warned him the water was polluted. “If we both went in,” Philip responded, “it would be more polluted.” A stop at the CNE Grandstand for a military review featuring the 48th Highlanders followed. The crowd of 20,000 roared when she closed her parasol as the car entered the stadium.

The evening was spent with 1,500 dignitaries at the Lieutenant-Governor’s gala dinner at the Royal York Hotel. Over a meal of Lake Erie pickerel, avocados, strawberries, and domestic champagne, the royals chatted with Premier Leslie Frost, who had been present during opening ceremonies for the St. Lawrence Seaway days earlier. Frost told the audience that the Queen consented to bestow her name on a provincial scholarship program. The Queen told her fellow diners that she and Philip felt at home in Canada. “Each time I come here,” she observed, “I am fascinated by your way of life, your homes, your work, your games and recreation.” They are at once so familiar yet so different that I always want to know a bit more about them.”

Some people could be overly zealous about showing respect to the Queen, as this story from the June 26, 1959 edition of the Telegram demonstrates.

The next day the royals headed off on separate itineraries. Prince Philip attended the annual general meeting of the Canadian Medical Association at the Royal York, where he was named the organization’s president. He viewed the session as “a perfectly marvellous opportunity to do a little preaching” and urged members to combat the decline in Canadian physical fitness. His suggestions included more physical education programs in schools, recreational facilities, and expanding the role of youth organizations.

Meanwhile, the Queen made numerous stops around Metro Toronto. She started at the O’Keefe Centre construction site, when she spent an extra 10 minutes asking questions about the performing arts centre and its future users. She visited seniors at the Arthur Meighen Salvation Army residence on Davisville Avenue then greeted onlookers at the Golden Mile Plaza. Metro Toronto Chairman Frederick Gardiner presented her with a $5,000 cheque in her name to the Canadian Cancer Society, while other local dignitaries gifted her with heavy wool cardigans for Prince Charles and Princess Anne. Scarborough Reeve Albert Campbell invited her to shop at the strip mall’s Loblaws, but the tour had to move on. “I’d like to go shopping in it,” she told a Loblaws official, “but unfortunately I don’t have the time.” Later accounts suggest she might have briefly roamed the store.

Heading back west, the Queen stopped along Bayview Avenue at the Canadian Institute for the Blind, where she took extra time to talk with those welcoming her. At Sunnybrook Hospital, the Queen prevented an RCMP handler from stopping a war veteran from approaching her in his wheelchair. She also surprised veteran Walter Crossmith when she recognized his medals as Boer War vintage. After reuniting with Prince Philip, the couple stopped at the Etobicoke municipal officials for a meet-and-greet with local officials led by Reeve H.O. Waffle. The Globe and Mail called it the most formal presentation of the entire visit, “perhaps caused by the fact that all of the dignitaries were done up in toppers and such finery.”

Prince Philip, jockey Bobby Ussery, Queen Elizabeth II and E.P. Taylor at the Queen’s Plate, June 30, 1959. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 4997.

Like the royals, these snappy dressers made their way to the new Woodbine Racetrack for the 100th running of the Queen’s Plate. When the royal party was over half an hour late, jokes flew that the entourage visited the old Woodbine track by mistake. While temperatures had dropped 10 degrees, the threat of rain reduced the expected crowd from 35,000 to 25,000. After a ceremony featuring the Governor-General’s Horse Guards, the Queen and Prince Philip joined business tycoon E.P. Taylor in the royal box. He was good company for the couple, as his horse New Providence won. Signs hadn’t boded well for the horse: he had won once in 13 starts that year, while his usual jockey, Hall-of-Famer Eddie Arcaro, was injured during the Belmont Stakes. Replacement jockey Bobby Ussery called his victory “the second biggest thrill of my life. The first was when I won my first race.” Smythe’s Major Flight finished second, while race favourite Winning Shot placed third.

The royals departed for Ottawa via an RCAF VIP plane from Malton Airport at 6:18 p.m. Before they left, Premier Frost observed that the Queen’s reception during her two days in Toronto was the opposite of indifference. An estimated 500,000 people came out to see the royal visit. Unlike past tours, the couple seemed to reach out more to their subjects, going over allotted time at many stops to talk to them about their lives and their city. Conversely the experience, combined with the Seaway opening and the city’s 125th birthday, provided, as a Star editorial noted, “an occasion for Toronto and Torontonians to celebrate themselves.”

Additional material from the June 19, 1959, June 30, 1959, and July 1, 1959 editions of the Globe and Mail, the June 18, 1959, June 20, 1959, June 22, 1959, June 27, 1959, June 29, 1959, and June 30, 1959 editions of the Toronto Star, and the June 19, 1959, June 20, 1959, June 26, 1959, June 27, 1959, June 29, 1959, and June 30, 1959 editions of the Telegram.

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

Veterans Monument, Portland Square, ca. 1910, from the Toronto Public Library (PC 3015).

On May 25, 1909, some 200 men gathered at the University Avenue Armouries to march north to Queen’s Park. There, veterans of the 1866 Fenian Raids, the 1885 North-West Rebellion, and the 1899-1902 South African War decorated their respective monuments to honour the fallen. Afterwards, the men regrouped at the front steps of the legislature for speeches. Lieutenant-Colonel William Hamilton Merritt, a veteran of both the North-West Rebellion and the South African War, reminded the crowd that Queen’s Park had no monument “to the brave men who saved Canada in 1812 to 1814 and who laid deep and strong the foundation stone of this great Dominion.”

More than 100 years later, that is still the case.

In his speech, Merritt said that centennial commemorations of the war were being organized, and that it was “no secret” that Ontario’s premier, Sir James Pliny Whitney, “was in sympathy with the idea of erecting a suitable monument.” Shortly after, Toronto’s Army and Navy Veterans Association wrote to the Globe to remind Merritt and Torontonians that the city already had a memorial to those who had fought in the War of 1812.

It had little effect. Merritt would continue to campaign for a monument at Queen’s Park doggedly.

The monument to which the letter-writers referred was Walter Allward’s sculpture of the “Old Soldier,” unveiled in January 1907 at the centre of Toronto’s old military burial ground (now called Victoria Memorial Square). Bronze plaques affixed to each of the pedestal’s four sides honoured those who gave their lives in the War of 1812; the monument also honoured the British soldiers who had died while stationed in Upper Canada and were buried at that location.

(Right: William Hamilton Merritt, from the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada.)

Had Merritt listened, that letter might have spared him some harsh lessons, learned in the course of a years’ long campaign. The Victoria Square monument had cost just $4,000, but it had taken five years to complete partly because of delays in fundraising. (Some $200 remained outstanding when it was unveiled in 1907.) And Merritt’s ambitions were much greater.

Planning for War of 1812 centennial commemorations began in the summer of 1909, with two Toronto-based organizations emerging to arrange events that would be both spectacular and national in scope. A provisional committee of “The Centenary Celebration Association 1812-1912″ organized a public meeting at City Hall in December 1910 to discuss plans for a grand historical pageant, a national monument, and an invitation for King George V to visit Canada. But grand ambitions did not yield well-organized plans: the Toronto Daily Star dubbed it “A Peaceful But Tangled Meeting.”

Another organization, The Memorial to the Heroes of 1812-14 Association, arranged a January 1911 meeting at the Queen’s Park legislature for the premier, leading citizens of Ontario, representatives of numerous historical associations, and delegates from the Six Nations. Premier Whitney promised that his government would give the matter full consideration; his encouragement spurred the memorial association to gather signed petitions and to lobby elected officials at all levels of government for public funding.

In two months, Merritt would learn that “full consideration” by Whitney and his Conservative government did not mean financial support. Providing the premier with a range of estimates, ranging from $20,000 for a small memorial to $100,000 for the much larger monument he hoped for, Merritt inquired if the provincial government might budget $10,000 to help move the project forward. Whitney’s response: it was “simply out of the question…to put a single dollar in the Estimates for that purpose this Session… It is a great mistake to imagine that this Government intends to take on its shoulders the burden of this monument. It intends simply to assist.” The premier recommended that the memorial association continue working at its own fundraising.

With no financial support from the provincial government forthcoming, Merritt travelled to Ottawa in February 1912 to seek financial support from federal officials.

(Left: Headline from the Toronto Globe; February 5, 1912.)

By the time he arrived, the project had grown in scope: Merritt described the project as a $200,000 campaign for a memorial arch—double the estimate he had given Whitney. Like the premier, Prime Minister Robert Borden provided no funding, but promised that he and his government would give serious consideration to Merritt’s request.

In the months that followed, the plans for a monument became the subject of ridicule from other parts of the province. The Hamilton Herald sniped that the request for federal funds was “particularly Torontoesque,” with the Ottawa Citizen commenting that all Toronto had done during the war was get captured by the Americans. The Toronto Daily Star shot back that Ottawa should be quiet, since that city hadn’t even existed until long after the War of 1812. But perhaps, the Star jabbed, the Hamilton Herald might have a point about locating the memorial in Toronto: “The city is growing so fast and buildings are being pulled down and rebuilt at such a rate that a memorial, if it is to abide, might perhaps be more safely erected in a slower town.”

The memorial association remained confident in its ambitions, and several months after this editorial exchange it renewed its campaign at a meeting on June 12, 1912. That gathering brought together representatives from Toronto’s genteel associations, including the United Empire Loyalists’ Association, the Daughters of the Empire, the Canadian Club, the Canadian Institute, the Board of Trade, and the Canadian Military Institute. It also featured a special guest: the Parisian sculptor Paul Chevré, who presented some design suggestions for the monument.

(Right: Paul Chevré, ca. 1910, from Wikimedia Commons.)

The association had extended a special invitation to Chevré, knowing that he was coming to Ottawa in the spring for the unveiling of his bust of former Canadian prime minister Wilfrid Laurier at the Chateau Laurier Hotel. (This was just one of several sculptures that Chevré had created for Canadians; the most notable was an acclaimed statue of Samuel de Champlain erected on Quebec City’s Dufferin Terrace.) It was remarkable that Chevré had arrived in Canada at all, for he had made his transatlantic crossing on the Titanic. Chevré survived the ocean liner’s sinking, but his designs and estimates for Toronto’s War of 1812 monument were lost. All he could present to those who had gathered was a recreation of his ideas assembled upon his arrival to Canada.

Headline from the Toronto Globe (June 13, 1912). It would prove to be an overstatement.

After hearing from Chevré, the memorial association decided it would begin to select the monument’s design, tender contracts, and continue fundraising. It was this last task that would prove the greatest obstacle. It’s not known how much money the association had raised as of June 1912, but the Globe suggested that they would need to raise some $50,000-$100,000, with the Canadian government likely providing the rest.

Federal funding did not materialize, however, and the prospects for a monument at Queen’s Park dimmed over the course of that summer. Efforts to raise money from the public also faltered, perhaps due to donor fatigue (there had been recent fundraising drives for both the Victoria Square and South African War memorials). Even Merritt’s choice of Queen’s Park was questioned: some thought a location near the University Avenue Armouries would be best; others preferred Exhibition Place.

Merritt did not give up hope of producing some type of memorial to the heroes of the War of 1812, but the shape of the project had to change. In September 1913 he contacted Prime Minister Borden with a significantly revised proposal, this time for a bronze tablet inscribed with a chronological listing of thirty-four British victories from the war. Merritt hoped that Borden would have the plaque installed in the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. After conferring with members of his cabinet, Borden approved. Cast at a German foundry, Merritt shipped the tablet to Canada in early 1914, and it was installed in the Centre Block that spring.

War of 1812-1814 bronze tablet, courtesy of the House of Commons Collection, Ottawa.

Though the tablet was certainly not as large as a Queen’s Park monument would have been, it was a memorial in the halls of the Canadian parliament. The national prominence of this location was likely an acceptable trade-off to Merritt, considering the financial realities that limited the original plans.

A devastating February 1916 fire destroyed almost all of Canada’s parliament buildings; only the parliamentary library survived. Remarkably, the War of 1812 tablet did also. In the early 1920s it was reinstalled in the rebuilt Centre Block, between the Reading Room and the Library of Parliament, where it can still be seen today.

Ross Fair is a member of Ryerson University’s Department of History, where he teaches a course on Toronto’s history. He recently curated a War of 1812 exhibit for the Archives of Ontario, Perceptions of 1812: Identity, Diversity, Memory, which is open to the public at the Archives’ Helen McClung Exhibit Area until December 2014. He will present a lecture at the Archives of Ontario on March 21, 2013.

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