Star Gives Library More Than One Million Vintage Photographs

Torontoist

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Star Gives Library More Than One Million Vintage Photographs

Images spanning the last century will soon be available to the public.

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The Toronto Public Library’s special collections department has just received a sizeable donation: more than one million photographs, which represent the complete photographic archive of the Toronto Star for the years 1900–1999.

“This photo archive is believed to be the only complete archive of Canadian news photographs spanning the entire 20th century and we are proud that we can now make this freely available at the library,” said Jane Pyper, city librarian.

The public will have access to most of these images as of July 7. They’ll be available in the Marilyn & Charles Baillie Special Collections Centre on the fifth floor of the Toronto Reference Library—the TPL also has plans to make some of images available in its digital archive.

“Part of ensuring the future of Toronto is shoring up our past and our memories of this city as it once was,” commented Star publisher John Honderich.

And those memories involve, unsurprisingly, a wide range of peoples, places, and events—some of which most are us too young to remember (e.g. soldiers from Eaton Machine Gun Battery posing with their bulldog in 1915) and some of which we may well have been around for, but now seem lost in the mists of time (the Blue Jays celebrating their 1992 World Series win). Click through the gallery above to view selected images from the archive.

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