Scene: Steampunk on Queen Street

Torontoist

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Scene: Steampunk on Queen Street

By • Photos by Nancy Paiva


WHERE: The Campbell House Museum, at Queen Street and University Avenue

WHEN: Saturday, June 23

WHAT: The Steam on Queen festival took place at the Campbell House Museum this past weekend, and transformed the early-19th-century building into a carnival of steampunk pageantry. (Steampunk, for those who don’t know, is a genre of science fiction that imagines a Victorian-era world with anachronistically advanced technology—hence all the weird goggles and historically inaccurate costumes.) Vendors hawked all sorts of new old-timey gear to attendees, some of whom went in elaborately detailed costumes.

CORRECTION: June 25, 2012, 3:37 PM This post originally concluded with a joke that went like this: “And, in fact, the event’s attention to stylistic detail didn’t end there: the organizer says his name, implausibly, is Adam Smith.” It was written under the mistaken impression that Adam Smith was the inventor of the steam engine, which would have made the fact that the organizer of a steampunk event was also named Adam Smith an implausible coincidence. In fact, it is, of course, James Watt who is commonly credited with having invented the steam engine. Adam Smith was the 18th-century social philosopher whose theories laid the groundwork for modern capitalism. Adam Smith is also the 21st-century organizer of Steam on Queen. (That is really his name.) We regret the error.

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