Results tagged “history”

Egypt’s famed boy-king is gearing up to set off another bout of "Tut-mania" in Toronto.

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

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

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

We’d like to offer a toast to the unheralded service industry workers who served up fine fountain drinks back in the 1960s. Whether it was a bow-tied bartender who knew the perfect mixed drink to suit his or her customer's needs or a bow-tied teenager asking if you'd like a Coke with your burger and fries, these professionals required the finest of beverage-dispensing equipment to quench the thirst of bowlers, brides, and boozers.

Twelve thousand dollars. That’s the budget the organizers of the first edition of the International Festival of Authors (or Harbourfront International Authors' Festival, as it was called then) had to work with in 1980 to showcase twenty-two writers of varying infamy. Capacity crowds throughout the six-day event proved to organizers and potential sponsors that Toronto could support a literary festival.

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

In 1993, CPG (Community Programs Group) began publishing The New Jr. Jays Magazine, an eclectic mix of baseball, sci-fi, health and safety tips, and overt product placement. The magazine was designed to develop the Jays’ younger fan base, and featured comics, baseball articles, interviews with fans and players, and movie, book, and video game reviews. For only five dollars a year, Jr. Jays club members received four issues, a personalized membership card, and several Topps baseball cards. In the words of Ed Conroy, the publisher of The Magazine, a monthly magazine for kids, and a former Jr. Jays writer, "You couldn’t make something like this today."

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

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

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

Parkdale was established in the late nineteenth century as a suburban enclave where middle-class families could enjoy parks, the lakeshore, and the new exhibition grounds far from the bustle of the central city. Over the course of the twentieth century, Parkdale became increasingly seen as a slum at the end of a downward spiral. Then, in more recent years, the neighbourhood has been resurrected as a gentrifying urban village. So goes the commonly accepted version of Parkdale's history.

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

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

During World War II many Torontonians worked towards victory and, as this billboard testifies, cows were not excluded from doing their part to tackle Hitler and Tojo. The regional bovine population contributed to the war effort by providing food-solid goodness for the home front. Officials of local dairies soon discovered that the helmets they issued refused to stay on any cow’s head (straps were at a premium), so they were utilized as feed buckets or souvenirs for children touring their facilities.

When voters go to the ballot box in St. Paul’s on Thursday their choices will include the latest in a long line of Toronto Sun columnists who have attempted to parlay their print personas into elected office, usually for parties that have matched the paper’s right-wing tilt.

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

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

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

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

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

       

What might become of our current streetcars when they're replaced by shiny new ones over the next few years? No one knows yet, but they might well dream of seeing out the rest of their days at the Halton County Radial Railway.

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

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

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

Are you suffering ill effects from the temporary disruption of your yearly prescription of trips to the Toronto Islands via the Sam McBride or the other ferries? Do you miss riding your bicycle from Hanlan’s Point to Ward’s Island, hearing the sound of children playing at Centreville, or other island-centric activities? True, you can hop on a water taxi or find your own means of crossing the harbour, but those methods of transport cannot handle the crowds the islands are accustomed to seeing at this time of year. Fear not if you are suffering withdrawal symptoms (or feel, as the blood-red headline in yesterday’s Sun shouted, that CUPE killed your summer)—cultural archivist Retrontario provides you with a minute’s glimpse of how the islands normally look at this time of year. This provincial ad first aired around 1980 and enticed visitors from all corners of the province to check out, in the narrator’s words, “a walk on the grass kind of place.”

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

The Eglinton was the grandest of Toronto's Art Deco movie houses. People from all over Toronto flocked to Eglinton near Avenue Road for the grand opening showing of King of Burlesque. Kaplan and Sprachman, the prolific pair who would design over one hundred cinemas in Canada, won the Governor General's architecture award for the building in 1937: although it was asymmetrical, its elegant design and fine interior detailing invested a trip to the movies with an aura of sophistication, its defining feature the colourful, neon-lit marquee that's been a neighbourhood icon for generations.