cityscape
Encapsulating Toronto’s Past
A look at time capsules across the city—and what's in them.
The Ontario Legislative Building is home to one of Toronto’s many time capsules. Photo by Alfred Ng from the Torontoist Flickr pool.
Email, cell phones, Twitter, and even old-fashioned snail mail mean there are plenty of ways to communicate in the present—but if you want to send a message to the future, there’s only one thing for it: a time capsule. Toronto has been squirreling away all sorts of trinkets in time capsules over the past hundred years. We’ve tucked away everything from newspapers to rock-and-roll albums, from vials of pollutants to peanuts. With their open dates still decades away, we map out a few of Toronto’s time capsules—and let you know what’s inside them.
Additional material from the City of Toronto Archives; the December 17, 1958, May 11, 1962, April 15, 1964, May 15, 1964, October 15, 1970, September 9, 1971, October 1, 1976, and July 1, 1986 editions of the Globe and Mail; the December 2, 1938, August 25, 1963, November 4, 1963, and September 20, 1967 editions of the Toronto Star.