Toronto's Depression-Era Beauty Queen Baseball Star

Women have been playing baseball for as long as anyone can remember. And for much of that time, they've been playing despite the men who've tried to keep them off the field. In baseball's early days, women were told they were much too fragile to swing a bat or field a grounder. Even Al Spalding, founder of the National League, said that women were welcome to sit in the stands and cheer for the men — but that was it.

"Neither our wives, our sisters, our daughters, nor our sweethearts may play Base Ball on the field," he declared. "Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind, except as she may take part in the grandstands, with applause for the brilliant play, with waving kerchief to the hero of the three-bagger." As if playing shortstop were somehow more physically demanding than, oh, say, giving birth.

Luckily, many women ignored that poor, Victorian advice. And when you look through the oldest photographs in the Toronto Archives, you'll find plenty of women already there, playing baseball on diamonds all over our city. They were forming their own teams and their own leagues, drawing their own big crowds.

By the time the end of the 1930s rolled around, even Miss Toronto herself was getting in on the action.

In 1937, the winner of the annual beauty pageant was a teenage softball pitcher from the Beaches. Billie Hallam's grandmother convinced her to enter the competition. And so, on a hot Saturday afternoon in July, she raced down to the Exhibition Grounds in her swimsuit, where she would parade before a panel of judges and 20,000 spectators. When Hallam was announced as the winner, the Mayor of Toronto presented her with a sash. She was only 17 years old, but in heels, she was already taller than he was.

That night, as the new Miss Toronto, Hallam was due to appear at a celebratory banquet at the Royal York Hotel. But she had business to take care of first. She rushed straight home from the pageant to change her clothes. From there, a police escort rushed her through the streets to Kew Gardens, where her ball team was playing a big game. She cheered them on from the bench in her evening gown, and then raced back downtown to the banquet.

The next morning, she woke to find the press knocking on her door, eager to interview the city's newest beauty icon. One journalist asked a version of the same question men had been asking for years: should women really play sports? Hallam's answer was pretty much the exact opposite of what Spalding had said decades earlier. "[T]here is nothing like exercise and sport," she told the reporter, "to make a girl a real lady."

The next time she returned to the mound, a crowd of more than 10,000 people was there to see her pitch — the most ever for a game at Kew Gardens. At one point, she even did a photo shoot wearing her uniform. You can find those photos in the Archives, too.

Hallam was far from the last Toronto woman to make her mark in the baseball world. More than 10% of the players in the famous All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — the league from A League of Their Own — were actually Canadian. In real life, the star of the Rockford Peaches wasn't Geena Davis, it was Gladys Davis, an interior designer from Toronto. Today she's in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and part of a display in Cooperstown.

Decades later, when the Blue Jays brought Major League Baseball to town, The Toronto Star's Alice Gordon made history as the first woman to cover an MLB beat. And she did it in the face of misogynist discrimination from many men in the game, including some of the Jays' own players. When the team travelled to Texas, the Rangers banned all reporters from the clubhouse just so they wouldn't have to let her in.

We have, of course, come a long way since then. Today, there are countless women writing about the game. This season, Jessica Mendoza is breaking new ground as a broadcaster with ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball. And on the field, players like Mo'ne Davis are making history, too. But we still have a long way to go. We were reminded of that just last week, when Blue Jays manager John Gibbons claimed that a new rule is making the sport less manly. "You know what, maybe we’ll come out wearing dresses tomorrow," he complained. "Maybe that’s what everyone’s looking for."

Well Gibby, Billie Hallam proved it nearly 80 years ago: you can sure as hell wear an evening gown and still be a damn fine ballplayer, too.

-----

Kevin Plummer has a much more detailed post about Billie Hallam's crowning as Miss Toronto here. Lots of my info comes thanks to him. And from old articles from Toronto Star written by another one of our city's pioneering journalists, Alexandrine Gibb.

The full, misogynist Al Spalding quote can be found in the book "Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line", which you can find on Google Books here. And I originally found part of it in another book, "Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball" which is also on Google Books here. 

The Rhino, in Parkdale, has a Miss Toronto mural overlooking the patio, as The Vintage Inn points out here.

Photo of Billie Hallam via the Toronto Archives. 
 

One Last Victory for the Most Dangerous Woman in the World

The Most Dangerous Woman in the World was playing a quiet game of cards. It was a snowy Toronto evening in the winter of 1940, that first terrible winter of the Second World War. She was staying with friends at their home on Vaughan Road, waiting for a meeting to begin. That's when she slumped over in her chair. It was a stroke. One of the greatest orators of the twentieth century couldn't speak a word.

This wasn't the end most people would have expected for Emma Goldman. For decades now, she'd been the most notorious anarchist on earth. Her ideas made nations tremble: thoughts about freedom and free speech and free love; about feminism and marriage and birth control; about violence and pacifism and war. She'd been thrown out of the United States for those ideas, forced to flee Soviet Russia, driven out of Latvia, Sweden, Germany... Canada was one of the very few places where she was still relatively welcome. She spent decades in exile. And everywhere she went, she refused to be intimidated: giving fiery speeches, sparking riots, inspiring assassins, visiting war zones. Nothing could silence her. Not exile, not prison, not threats of violence. Nothing, that is, until that quiet game of cards.

The first stroke didn't kill her. She still had a few weeks left to live, weakened and afraid, half-paralyzed, robbed of the powerful voice that had made her famous. But even on her deathbed, she had one more fight to win. There was one last life to save.

~~~

Young Attilio Bortolotti

His name was Attilio Bortolotti. Some people knew him as Art Bartell. He was a leader of the Toronto anarchists.

Bortolotti was born in Italy in the very early 1900s — which meant that he was still just a boy when the First World War swept into his hometown. He saw terrible things: death and destruction raining down from the sky; dead bodies dumped in ditches; drunken soldiers killing their own men. But he also saw an act of kindness that would change his life.

One day, during an air raid, his young nephew was in danger of being crushed by falling debris. Bortolotti watched in amazement as a German officer — the enemy — threw himself over the young boy and saved his life. It was a shock. This wasn't the image of the Germans the Italian newspapers were painting: of the inhuman, savage "Hun."

"Young man," the German officer explained to the confused teenager, "I want you to listen to what I have to say to you. I am a professor; I was teaching at the University of Berlin when I was called to serve in the army. I don't feel that I have the right to kill you because you were born here; nor should you feel you can kill me because I was born in Berlin. I want you to remember three words: Freiheit über alles." Freedom above all.

"A revolution," Bortolotti later remembered, "began in my head."

Once the war was over, he left Italy for Canada. Here, he wouldn't be forced into compulsory military service and could lead a more peaceful life. He was just sixteen years old when he sailed across the Atlantic, checking in at Ellis Island on his way north to join his brother in Windsor.

He spent the next few years working for a blacksmith and on construction sites and in auto factories — both in Windsor and just across the river in Detroit. But the life he found there wasn't entirely peaceful: the early 1900s were times of turmoil in North America, too — especially for the working class. These were the days of bloody union battles. Of police officers and soldiers killing striking workers in the streets. Of robber barons building private armies to crack down on dissent.

In Windsor, the young Bortolotti was exposed to new ideas. He spent long hours reading in the public library, talked about politics with his fellow workers, went to meetings, marched in protests and clashed with police. The more he learned, the more he saw, the more he became attracted to one idea in particular.

By then, anarchism was already an old idea: that government is inherently bad; that people should be completely free; that society should have no hierarchy at all. But in the last few decades, that old idea had been growing in popularity. Anarchists had played leading roles in some of the world's most important events. In France, they helped to establish the Paris Commune. In Russia, they fought alongside the Bolsheviks as they overthrew the Tsar. In Canada and in the United States, they were on the front lines of the fight for labour rights: demanding reforms like an eight-hour workday.

But they were also growing ever-more notorious. While some anarchists didn't believe in violence at all, those who did were giving the philosophy a reputation for bomb-throwing and assassinations. All over the Western World, anarchists were answering the violence against workers by trying to kill those in power.

Anarchist theatre bombing, 1893

They'd been doing it for decades. In Italy, King Umberto was shot three times in the chest as he climbed into his carriage. In Switzerland, Empress Elizabeth was stabbed to death with a file. In Spain, one Prime Minster was killed while relaxing at a spa and another while window-shopping at a bookstore in Madrid. In Kiev, the Russian Prime Minister was murdered during an opera. In Greece, King George was shot in the back while taking a walk. In the United States, President McKinley took two bullets to the stomach at point blank range while visiting the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Bombs blew up weddings and carriages and crowds, all in the name of anarchy.

Governments responded with arrests and executions and even more violence. Sometimes, it didn't seem to matter who they were putting to death — guilty or not — just as long as they were anarchists.

One of the most infamous examples was the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. After a deadly armed robbery in Massachusetts, two Italian immigrants were arrested. They were both anarchists, they were both found guilty, and they were both sentenced to death. But they were also both innocent. The evidence in the case was so flimsy that it sparked international outrage, with major protests held in cities all over the world. In the end, Sacco and Vanzetti were both electrocuted anyway. It wasn't until the 1980s that Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis finally cleared their names.

In Windsor, Attilio Bortolotti took up their cause. He organized meetings, raised money, and printed pamphlets. Even after the executions had been carried out, Bortolotti and his fellow anarchists continued to raise awareness of the case. Every year on the anniversary of the executions, you could find Bortolotti on the streets of Windsor and Detroit, handing out thousands of leaflets.

By now, his politics were starting to get him into trouble. His tireless opposition to fascism — which plenty of Canadians and Americans still supported back then, even as Mussolini marched on Rome and seized power in Italy — had gotten him blacklisted from jobs in the auto industry. His support for Sacco and Vanzetti earned him a meeting with Windsor's chief of police, who told him he was no longer welcome in the city. He was ordered to leave town. At first, Bortolotti just moved across the river, but it quickly became clear that things were getting dangerous. He was arrested in Detroit for handing out pamphlets; the police, he said, beat him unconscious. When he made bail, he slipped back across the border into Windsor, and then kept right on running.

That's how Attilio Bortolotti ended up in Toronto.

He got off the train at Union Station in the fall of 1929 — just a few weeks before the stock market crashed. At first, he didn't know anyone in the city. But when he took his leaflets to an Italian neighbourhood on the anniversary of the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, he met a few Italian socialists and Communists who introduced him to a fellow anarchist.

Before long they'd created their own Torontonian anarchist group: Il Gruppo Libertario. They published their own newspaper, organized meetings and events. They became familiar faces at the Labour Lyceum on Spadina Avenue: today, it's a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown (on the corner of St. Andrew Street), but back then it was the political hub for textile workers in the heart of Toronto's Jewish community. The Italians began to meet the city's other anarchists: mostly Jewish and Eastern European immigrants. The community grew. Bortolotti had finally found his home.

It was only a matter of time before he met another anarchist who had been staying in Toronto: the most infamous anarchist in the world.

~~~

Emma Goldman, 1901 mugshot

Emma Goldman was born in Russia in the late 1800s, back in the days of the Tsars. She grew up in what one of her biographers called "low-grade Tolstoyan unhappiness." Her father beat her, sometimes with a whip, and when she turned twelve, he forced her to leave school and go work in a factory instead. "All a Jewish girl need know," he told her, "is how to make gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give her husband babies."

Still, even as a child she was strong-willed and defiant. She had no patience for injustice. Decades before Bortolotti was shaped by the horrors of the First World War, Goldman was shaped by the horrors of Tsarist Russia.

"I was born a rebel," she would later explain to the Toronto Daily Star, "but my first feeling of hatred for the present system came when I was six years old. At that time I saw a Russian peasant flogged and this sight of a human being degraded and tortured by his fiendish masters taught me that something was radically wrong somewhere. An indelible picture of the poor, suffering wretch has ever haunted my life."

When she turned sixteen, her father demanded that she get married, so Goldman left home instead. Just like Bortolotti did at that very same age many years later, she sailed across the Atlantic, checked in at Ellis Island, and then headed north. She settled in Rochester, on the American shore of Lake Ontario, where her sister lived.

There, she fell in love with America: with its people and its relative freedoms. But that didn't blind her to its flaws. Rochester was a city filled with sweatshops and slums. Workers toiled away over long hours in dangerous conditions for little pay. Goldman was still just a teenager, but she was bent over a sewing machine in a miserable factory for ten hours every day. It only got worse when her parents arrived from Russia. And when she did eventually get married, she discovered that her husband was impotent and depressed. She left him after only a few months.

Meanwhile, her political ideas were becoming ever-more radical. It was the Haymarket affair that finally turned her into an anarchist. The case had a lot in common with the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. After a deadly bombing during a labour march in Chicago, the police arrested eight anarchists. All of them were convicted. Four of them were hanged. A fifth committed suicide. But the trial was a farce: there was no real evidence, the jury was biased, and not even the prosecutor claimed that any of the suspects had actually thrown the bomb. People all over the world were appalled. Today, it's remembered as one of the darkest chapters in American labour history; it even served as the inspiration for International Workers Day, which we still celebrate on May Day every year.

Outraged, Goldman headed south to New York City to take up the cause. She arrived on a summer's day in 1889, just twenty years old, with nothing but five dollars and a sewing machine. It didn't take long for her to settle in, though. That very first afternoon, she headed straight for an anarchist café. That night, she went to see her first anarchist speech. Before long, she was giving her own speeches, earning a reputation as one of the most riveting lecturers in the country, passionately speaking about issues like labour rights, feminism, and political philosophy.

Today, many of her ideas seem pretty obvious — an eight-hour workday, legal birth control, gay rights — but in the late 1800s and early 1900s, even those ideas were deeply radical. She quickly attracted the attention not only of the press, but also the police. Once, she was arrested for giving a talk about methods of birth control. Another time, it was for inciting a riot. ("Ask for work," she told a crowd of the starving and unemployed, "If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.") She got so used to spending time in prison that she started to carry a book with her wherever she went, just in case she suddenly found herself in a jail cell without anything to read.

By the end of the 1800s, Goldman had become one of the biggest celebrities in the country. She was a front page staple. Red Emma, they called her. The Queen of Anarchism. The Most Dangerous Woman in the World.

And she could be dangerous. At least to some people. In those days, it felt like radical change could come at any moment. To many, the revolution didn't just seem possible, it seemed inevitable. The young Goldman was willing to do whatever she could to help. If violence was necessary, that was okay with her. Even murder.

Just a few years after she arrived in New York, Goldman planned an assassination of her own. She and her lover, Alexander Berkman — who she met at that anarchist café on her very first afternoon in the city — plotted to kill Henry Ford Frick, the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Corporation. He was responsible for a bloody crack-down on a strike at a steel mill in Pennsylvania, hiring hundreds of Pinkerton detectives — private mercenary soldiers — to attack the striking workers, killing nine of them. In retaliation, Berkman burst into Frick's office with a revolver, shot him twice and then stabbed him with a steel file. But the attack failed: Frick survived and Berkman spent the next fourteen years in prison.

Emma Goldman's deportation

Goldman, though, walked free. No one knew she'd been involved. And in time, her views on violence seemed to change. In later years, whenever asked, she would always distance herself from the use of force. "The only remedy for the people is anarchy... the form of revolution I want is bloodless... Anarchism does not believe in violence... Ideas are the greatest of bombs."

But even then she wasn't willing to condemn those who did resort to violence. When President McKinley was shot, the assassin claimed that he was inspired to do it by Goldman's lectures. "Her words set me on fire," he said. Goldman was arrested and questioned, but she refused to denounce the killer. "I have never been an advocate of violence," she told the papers, but "I have always felt that when an individual resorts to violence it is the fault of the conditions above him that bring him to it."

It was a theme she often repeated. For her, the real blame for any assassination always lay with systemic oppression. "As an anarchist, I am opposed to violence. But if people want to do away with assassins, they must first do away with the conditions which produce murderers."

In the end, though, it wasn't Goldman's violence that got her kicked out of the United States. It was her pacifism.

When the First World War broke out, Goldman firmly opposed it. It was, she argued, a war to protect the interests of the rich: not a cause worth dying — or killing — for. For the first three years of the war, her opinion was widely shared in the United States. President Woodrow Wilson even won re-election on a promise to stay out of the fight. But once the Americans did join the war, speaking out against it was no longer allowed. Opinions that had been widely shared suddenly became illegal.

Goldman, as always, refused to back down, giving speeches denouncing the draft. That gave the American authorities the opportunity they'd been waiting for: an excuse to get rid of her.

She was rounded up with a bunch of other anarchists and deported — all loaded onto a ship and sent to Russia. If they believed in revolution, the government told them, then the brand new Soviet state was the perfect place for them.

It wasn't. At first, Goldman was actually pretty happy to be going back to Russia. As someone who had personally witnessed the horrors of life under the Tsars, she had high hopes for the Russian Revolution. But when she saw it with her own eyes, she realized it had gone terribly wrong. A meeting with Lenin confirmed her fears. They had replaced one totalitarian system with another. She fled the country. Goldman would spent the rest of her life angrily denouncing the Communists.

After that, she never really found another permanent home. She spent the rest of her life living out of her suitcase, forced out of one country after another. Finally, she arranged a marriage to a Welsh miner so that she could get a British passport. That gave her the right to live in Canada, where she would spend much of the rest of her life.

She would never again be allowed to live in her beloved United States, so she settled for the next best thing: she would stay in Toronto, just across the lake from Rochester, as close as she could get to her family and to the country she loved.

~~~

The Heliconian Club, Yorkville

This was 1926. Toronto was still a deeply conservative city: a provincial town, deathly quiet on Sundays, staunchly British; not the kind of place you'd expect to find the world's most notorious anarchist. And not the kind of place the world's most notorious anarchist expected to find herself.

"I am so terribly cut off from intellectual contact," Goldman once wrote while she was staying in Toronto. "I grow so depressed and unhappy at times it seems I could not stand it another day." When the old anarchist criticized the lack of modern books in the library, the librarian gave her a blunt reply: "We do not buy books we consider immoral." Toronto was, Goldman complained, "deadly dull."

Still, it wasn't all bad. The authorities in Toronto were more tolerant of her ideas than those in the United States had been — even if they did still screen all her mail. And there was a small, dedicated community of anarchists, artists and other progressive thinkers who were thrilled to have her in the city. They put her up in their homes, helped her to organize meetings and lectures, donated money to the causes she championed.

Plus, every time the Toronto Daily Star wrote about her — and they wrote about her a lot — it was in positively glowing terms. They called her "the world's greatest feminine apostle of free speech." "Brilliant." "[A] speaker of notable excellence." "You were impressed not only by her knowledge but also by her wisdom. She was a feminine Socrates conducting a brilliant dialogue on high and grave questions of human destiny and human conduct..."

"No woman of her generation," the Star would remember after she died, "was more widely known or lived more fully than Emma Goldman. None clung more staunchly, through adversity, to her ideals..."

Goldman became a familiar name in the local papers and in lecture halls across the city. She spoke at the Labour Lyceum on Spadina, the Heliconian Club in Yorkville, the Hygea Hall on Elm Street, the Oddfellows Temple on College — always after a stiff drink of whisky to calm her nerves. Crowds of hundreds came to see her talk about feminism, free love, politics, literature... She thundered on about Sacco and Vanzetti, denounced Toronto schools for forcing all their boys to have military training, and railed against the dangers of Stalin with such passion that local Communists would attend her lectures just so they could shout her down. She warned of a coming war before Hitler had even taken power and gave speeches condemning him when many in Toronto still thought fascism was a perfectly acceptable idea.

She became a role model in a city starved for radical thought, inspiring those who were determined to make Toronto a more progressive place, and pressuring them to do better when she thought they were falling short. It was Emma Goldman who dared to speak about birth control back when it was still illegal, giving a lecture to a packed house at the Hygea Hall, earning a roar of applause when she declared contraception to be a right. (She was careful not to mention any specific methods — that would have been blatantly illegal and landed her in the clutches of the Toronto Police Morality Squad — but she did hand out cards directing women to doctors who could help.) And it was Emma Goldman who launched the movement to ban Toronto teachers from using physical violence as a method of disciplining their students.

She would never fully settle in Toronto; she kept living out of her suitcase, like she always did. She had three long stays in the city, but would spend long periods away from it: writing her autobiography in France, visiting the anarchists fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, going on speaking tours across Canada — she was even allowed to make one last trip to the United States.

But in the end, she always came back to Toronto. And that meant she was bound to run into Attilio Bortolotti eventually.

"I went to hear her," he said, "and was flabbergasted by the way she spoke, with her energy, with the beauty of her sentences." They were introduced after her speech, and eventually became close friends. Bortolotti volunteered as her unofficial chauffeur, happy to drive the old anarchist around the city as she gave lectures and attended meetings. Once, he even took her to Windsor, so she could gaze longingly across the river at the country she adored. ("She looked at Belle Isle and Detroit," he said, "as though through the eyes of a lover. It was then that I understood how much America meant to her.")

But this was 1939. All of Goldman's dire warnings were about to come true: Hitler invaded Poland that September; the Second World War was underway.

Toronto's Balmy Beach Swastika Club

That meant trouble for Toronto's anarchists. With tensions rising, Bortolotti found his fascist enemies even more dangerous than before. "I was threatened with being 'taken for a ride,'" he later remembered, "and for the only time in my life — I detest firearms and killing — I carried a pistol for a few months." 

Meanwhile, the authorities were cracking down too. As the paranoia of the war years set in, anyone with unusual ideas became a target for suspicion. Italians, even more than most; Mussolini didn't enter the war immediately, but he had long been one of Hitler's closest allies. It didn't matter that Bortolotti was one of the city's most ardent anti-fascists, or that he had been warning Canadians about the dangers of Hitler and Mussolini for years, or that Toronto's own Nazi supporters were trying to silence him. In fact, many have suggested that the police were working with the fascists, who gave them tips about the anarchists they both despised.

"We organized demonstrations and street meetings at which I... spoke, and were attacked by mounted police," Bortolotti remembered. "The authorities kept me under constant surveillance, and now they tried in earnest to deport me."

It was the war that finally gave them their chance. When the country was at peace, the police had to respect civil rights. But when war was declared, the War Measures Act came into effect. Suddenly, the authorities had what one historian has called "quasi-totalitarian powers." They were, according to another, "the most serious restrictions upon the civil liberties of Canadians since Confederation." Habeas corpus was suspended. So was the right to a trial. Political groups could be banned by the government. So could entire religions. Eventually, they would use the War Measures Act to round up Canadians of Japanese descent and imprison them in internment camps — one of the most horrifying abuses of power in the history of our country.

By the end of the first month of the war, the government had expanded the Act to give themselves the power to censor any literature they didn't like — and to arrest anyone found with this "dangerous" material. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines were shut down. Bookstores were raided, their owners arrested. Private homes were targeted too. Word began to spread among the Toronto anarchists: the police were raiding their homes one by one. Some rushed to burn their papers before it was too late.

They came for Bortolotti just a few days after the new rules came into effect. Before dawn one morning in early October, police on horseback surrounded his home on Gladstone Avenue (at the very top of the street, near Dupont). It was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Toronto's notoriously brutal anti-Communist unit: the Red Squad. They burst into the house, grabbing all five anarchists who were staying there. "Get up," they told Bortolotti, "and put on your Sunday best. You won't be going to work for quite a while." They searched the house, finding two guns with the triggers removed (the anarchists used them as props in plays) and seized all of Bortolotti's books, magazines and newspapers: a library of 1,500 volumes. The police would burn them all.

Bortolotti was arrested. He would spend months in the Don Jail while the government worked to deport him. The original charges were dropped, and most of the other anarchists were released. But Bortolotti wasn't a Canadian citizen and, having been threatened by Windsor's chief of police, he hadn't checked in at customs the last time he came across the border from Detroit. So the government was planning on sending him back to Italy anyway, where Mussolini's fascist government would be waiting for him. If he was lucky, he would be thrown into a fascist prison. Otherwise, he would simply be killed.

But not if Emma Goldman had anything to say about it. She was an old woman now, but she was still as defiant as ever. She leapt into action, asking her friends and allies to support Bortolotti's defence. She organized meetings, raised money, hired a lawyer.

It wasn't easy. For the first few months, it was hard to find anyone to support the cause. The newspapers refused to cover the case. And even liberal Canadians were reluctant to challenge the government during a time of war. 

"Unfortunately," Goldman complained, "there exists a conspiracy of silence among the daily journals... More sad is the complete absence of individual animation of civic sense, disposed to defend civil rights from the invasion of authority... no journal, no magazine socialist, liberal, unionist or other, in the US or Canada, said one word in defence of the arrested of Toronto."

Meanwhile, Bortolotti was falling ill, suffering in the cold, damp conditions of the Don Jail. He came down with bronchitis, lost twelve pounds, ran a fever of 103ºF, and finally had to be transferred into the prison's hospital ward. 

Goldman refused to give up, but the campaign was taking a toll. It was, she admitted, "the hardest thing I have done in many years... [I am] frightfully weary of the struggle, and tired, tired beyond words."

That's when she suffered her first stroke.

~~~

295 Vaughan Road

She was playing a quiet game of bridge with friends, passing the time on a snowy evening before yet another meeting about Bortolotti's case. "God damn it," she complained at the beginning of a new hand, "why did you lead with that?"

Then, the Most Dangerous Woman in the World slumped over sideways in her chair. At first, her friends thought she'd dropped a card and was bending over to pick it up. But she'd actually suffered a massive stroke.

Bortolotti was out on bail when he got the phone call. "I don’t know how I drove without causing accidents," he remembered, "because I was out of my mind. And I arrived on Vaughan Road there, and saw Emma, moaning—she couldn’t talk any more. Just to think that here was Emma, the greatest orator in America, unable to utter one word." She was half-paralyzed. There was fear in her eyes. Embarrassed that her bare knee was showing, she pulled her skirt down with one hand. Moments later, the ambulance arrived.

She spent the next six weeks at Toronto General Hospital, where they did what they could for her. She was in tears for much of that time. When she was finally well enough to go home, her speech still hadn't recovered; she struggled to say even a few words. Still, she kept working. She could understand conversations and read her letters, getting friends to write her replies.

Slowly but surely, her persistence had begun to pay off. People had started contributing to Bortolotti's defence. First, it was an Italian-American anarchist newspaper. Then, a Yiddish-language paper in New York. There was a spaghetti dinner to raise money in Chicago. A play performed in Brooklyn. Another benefit in Massachusetts. Goldman had her letters to the editor published in The Nation, The New Republic and The Canadian Forum. Eventually, some leading progressive Canadians — like the leader of the federal CCF party (the forerunner of the NDP) — were convinced to join the fight. More letters were written. There were meetings with MPs. The Star published an editorial asking the government to halt the deportation. The tide was finally turning.

Goldman lived long enough to hear the good news: Bortolotti was free to stay. They'd won. He would eventually get his Canadian citizenship, start his own successful business, and play a leading role in Toronto's anarchist community for decades to come. Thirty years later, the Globe and Mail would write about him fondly, calling him "the grand old man of Toronto anarchism."

A few months after Goldman's first stroke, she suffered a second. This time, she wouldn't recover at all. She died in the middle of May at that same house on Vaughan Road.

A service was held at the Labour Lyceum, the same hall where Goldman's resounding voice had once filled the air. For three hours people shared their stories and remembered her. The crowd was so big there wasn't enough room inside the hall; the mourners spilled out onto Spadina. A full funeral in Chicago followed, where she was laid to rest next to the martyrs of the Haymarket affair who had inspired her to become an anarchist all those years ago.

She had gone down fighting, working hard for a cause she believed in right to the very end. It's all she ever wanted.

Once, years earlier, the Star asked her if she had any regrets. "Whatever will happen will happen," she said. "I hope to die on deck, true to my ideals with my eyes towards the east — the rising star."

That's exactly what she did.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

Emma Goldman's lonnnng autobiography is called "Living My Life". You can borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. Or buy if from Amazon here. Vivian Gornick's biography of Goldman was a big help with this piece. You'll find it through the Toronto Public Library here or from Amazon here. And so was Kathy E. Ferguson's "Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets", especially when it came to wrapping my mind around Goldman's attitude toward violence, which you can find through the Toronto Public Library here and from Amazon here. I also checked out C. Brid Nicholson's "Emma Goldman: Still Dangerous" which you can likewise find here and here.

There's whole documentary about Emma Goldman's time in Toronto called "The Anarchist Guest', which you can borrow from the Toronto Public Library here. Kevin Plummer wrote about her for Torontoist here (which was especially great for details about her final days). Mike Filey did the same in his book, "Toronto Sketches 6", which you can find on Google Books here. And Kaitlin Wainwright wrote a little bit about Goldman and her time in Toronto for Heritage Toronto here. You can see what the front page of the Toronto Star Weekly looked like on the day they welcomed her to Toronto here.

The University of California at Berkeley is home to the Emma Goldman Papers, which you can find online here. PBS' "American Experience" dedicated an episode to Goldman, which you can find online with lots of other information about here, or watch on YouTube beginning with part one here. The Past Tense blog talks about a Goldman visit to Vancouver here. 

The Toronto Public Library has an amazing online archive of old articles from the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. There are more articles about Emma Goldman than it's reasonable to list here, but if you search her name in the archival, you'll find lots and lots of pieces about her and her time in Toronto. You'll find that here.

Toronto's anarchists shared their memories of Goldman — and of the city's anarchist community in general — in the book "Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America", which you'll find on Google Books here or you can read it at the Toronto Reference Library (which lists it online here). There's also a whole chapter about Attilio Bortolotti.

Attilio Bortolotti tells his story on the "Between Canada and the USA: a tale of immigrants and anarchists" page of the Kate Sharpley Library website here and in the book "Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America", which you can find on Google Books here, through the Toronto Public Library here, and on Amazon here. His story is also featured is in the book "Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 1915-1940", which you can find on Google Books here, through the Toronto Public Library here, and on Amazon here. There's a "short multilingual bibliography" sharing more sources of information related to him here.

You can learn more about the case of Sacco and Vanzetti on Wikipedia here. The historian Reg Whitaker writes about the "Official Repression of Communism During WWII" in Canada, including a bit about the Bortolotti case, in a PDF here.

Emma Goldman's mugshot at the top of this post comes via the Women Who Kicks Ass Tumblr here. Her second mugshot, further down, was taken in Chicago in 1901. It's from Wikipedia here. The photo of Attilio Bortolotti come via estelnegre.org — which is, as far as I can guess, the website of a nationalist Catalonian libertarian group — here. The Petit Journal cover featured the anarchist bombing of the Liceo theatre in Spain (in Catalonia, actually) covers via the Spanish-language version of Wikipedia here.  Her deportation photo comes via the Jewish Women's Archive here. The Nazi images of the Balmy Beach Swastika Club are from the Toronto Telegram via Chris Bateman's article about them for blogTO here.

The photos of the Heliconian Club and 295 Vaughan Road are by me, Adam Bunch.

This post is related to dream 41 The Most Dangerous Woman in the World Emma Goldman, 1940

A Tour of Toronto's Skyline in the Summer of 1930

The summer of 1930. It was the beginning of a difficult decade for Toronto, along with much of the rest of the world. The Great Depression had just begun. But before the stock market crashed, the boom of the 1920s had fueled construction projects all over the city. Toronto was full of elegant new landmarks — many of them still familiar to Torontonians today: Union Station, The Royal York Hotel, Maple Leaf Gardens, The Palais Royale, The Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion, The Princes' Gates... And on one July day, a photographer climbed to the top of a building on the north-east corner of University & Dundas, pointed a camera south, and took this photo of our city's new skyline. It's full of interesting details, so I thought I'd give a brief "tour" of some of the buildings you can see.

But first, you’ll want to open the full version of the image so you can see the whole thing, which you can do by clicking it here:

 

01 The Maclean Building

By 1930, the Maclean family's publishing empire was already more than four decades old. It had all started back in the 1880s with a trade journal called The Canadian Grocer. Before long, they'd added Maclean's, Chatelaine and The Financial Post among other titles. They were the biggest publishing empire in the British Empire. And that meant they could afford to buy an entire block of land in downtown Toronto. On the north-east corner of University & Dundas, they built a whole complex to house their offices and printing presses. In 1930, the latest addition had just opened: the new Maclean Building soared a whole nine storeys into the air, making it the tallest building in the neighbourhood. That's when a photographer climbed up onto the roof and snapped this photo of Toronto's skyline.

Today, the building is still there. It's on the north side of Dundas, just to the east of the intersection. On the corner itself, you'll find a TD on the ground floor of the newer Maclean-Hunter Building; it was built in the early 1960s.

02 Eaton's

Of course, the Macleans weren't the only Toronto family to build a wildly successful business. At about the same time the first edition of The Canadian Grocer was hot off the presses, Timothy Eaton was moving his famous department store to the corner of Yonge & Queen. Over the next few decades, as Eaton's became a Canadian institution, the company bought up whole blocks of the surrounding neighbourhood. By the time this photo of the skyline was taken, they owned pretty much everything between Yonge, Bay, Queen & Dundas. In 1930, their complex sprawled over more than 60 acres: there was the main store, an annex store, factories, warehouses and mail order facilities. Today, that same huge chunk of land is home to the Eaton Centre.

  

03 The Ward
Today, this is where you'll find Nathan Phillips Square. But in 1930, the same spot was home to Toronto's most notorious slum. What is now an open expanse of concrete was a warren of hovels back then, where slumlords crammed people into tiny, poorly-insulated shacks. The Ward had been home to one new wave of immigrants after another — stretching all the way back to the mid-1800s — and by the time this photo of the skyline was taken, it had become Toronto's first Chinatown. These were hard days for those new Canadians: anti-Asian racism was rampant; the federal government had recently banned all immigration from China. The Great Depression would make things even worse.

By the summer of 1930, the days of The Ward were already numbered. Developers had begun to buy up parts of the neighbourhood to build office towers and hotels. Finally, in the late-1950s, the City expropriated the land, forced all the residents out, and demolished the buildings to make way for our new City Hall. Chinatown was driven west along Dundas to Spadina, where it is today.

 

04 Old City Hall
Back in 1930, Old City Hall was still known as just plain old City Hall. And Toronto's mayor was a newspaper reporter by the name of Bert Wemp. Just a few months earlier, he won the election by running against a plan to improve the downtown core. Huge swathes would have been rebuilt. There would have been grand boulevards slicing through the city centre, a majestic new square where Nathan Phillips Square is now, and a huge traffic circle near Union Station along with new Art Deco skyscrapers and public buildings. But after the stock market crashed, the public mood changed. And people in the suburbs had always felt the plan — which hoped to improve traffic congestion — did too much for downtown and too little for them. Wemp was elected. And in a referendum, the proposal was rejected by fewer than two thousand votes.

The Old City Hall building itself had already been around for thirty years by this point. It was designed by E.J. Lennox (the same architect responsible for Casa Loma, the King Edward Hotel and the west wing of Queen's Park). Until the Royal York Hotel was built in the very late 1920s, nothing in Toronto reached higher than the tip of this clock tower.

 

05 The Bank of Commerce Building

The Royal York didn't spend long as the tallest building in Toronto, though. In the summer of 1930, the title belonged to this new skyscraper. In fact, it was the tallest building in the entire British Empire. Today, we call it Commerce Court North, but back then it was called the Bank of Commerce Building. It was brand new — it opened the very same year the photo of the skyline was taken — and it was designed by the architectural firm of Darling & Pearson (who also built many of Toronto's other landmarks: like the original ROM, the AGO, and 1 King West). On the 32nd floor, it had the most spectacular observation deck in the city, decorated with four enormous, bearded heads. It would remain the tallest building in Toronto for the next three decades, until Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built the sleek black modernist towers of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in 1967.

 

06 The Royal York Hotel

In 1930, the Royal York was brand new, too, just a year old. Back then, it was the biggest hotel in the British Empire. It had ten elevators, the biggest pipe organ in the country, a shower and a bath and a radio in every single one of its 1000+ rooms, and a telephone system so extensive they needed three dozen operators to run it. In fact, the Royal York is so fancy that nearly a hundred years later, the Queen still stays there when she comes to town.

07 The Armouries

Once upon a time, this was one of the most impressive buildings in all of Toronto — in all of Canada even. The Armouries were built in the late 1800s as a training ground for the militia. It was the biggest building of its kind on the continent. It looked like a huge, squat castle, complete with turrets and flags. Inside, you'd find a rifle range, drill halls and even a bowling alley. This is where Torontonians lined up to volunteer for the Boer War, the World Wars and the Korean War. They were trained here, too. But in the early 1960s — about the same time The Ward was being leveled to make way for our new City Hall — the Armouries were demolished to make room for the new provincial courts that still stand on this same spot today.

08 The Goel Tzedec Synagogue
In 1930, The Ward was best known as Toronto's Chinatown. But thirty years earlier, it was most notably Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who called the neighbourhood home. It was back then — in the very early 1900s — that the local congregation opened this beautiful new synagogue on University Avenue (just a block to the north of the Armouries). Inspired by the design of England's Westminster Cathedral, this synagogue became the spiritual centre of Toronto's Jewish community. It stood on this spot for fifty years before it was demolished. By then, the community had moved west: the Goel Tzedec congregation merged with the worshipers of the Beth Hamidrash Hagadol Synagogue on McCaul and opened the brand new Beth Tzedec Synagogue on Bathurst Street between St. Clair & Eglinton.

09 The Canada Life Building
Today, the Canada Life Building — topped by its familiar weather beacon — is one of our best-loved landmarks. But in the summer of 1930, it was still being built. The Beaux-Arts skyscraper would serve as the headquarters for Canada's biggest and oldest insurance company: Canada Life. (They still own the building, though they were recently swallowed up by Great-West Life.) It was supposed to be just the first in a whole complex of buildings along University Avenue, but the Great Depression forced them to cancel those plans. 

The helpful weather beacon (lights run up or down according to the changing temperature, flash red or white for rain or snow, steady red for clouds and green for clear skies) was added in the 1950s.

10 The Chestnut Trees of University Avenue

Today, University Avenue is a canyon of concrete, pavement and glass. But less than a hundred years ago, it was a majestic tree-lined boulevard. In the early 1800s, five hundred horse chestnut trees were planted along either side of the road and a grassy promenade was built down what is now the centre of the street. It became one of Toronto's grandest avenues. Even Charles Dickens was impressed when he came to town in the 1840s.

11 St. George The Martyr

Over here, in the west, you can see the towering spire of one of Toronto's oldest churches. St. George The Martyr had been built at the edge of what's now the Grange Park all the way back in the 1840s. The population was booming; Toronto's very first church — the Anglicans' St. James — just wasn't big enough anymore. When St. George was built, it became one of the most easily recognizable landmarks in the city. The spire stretched a hundred and fifty feet into the air. It could be seen all the way from the lake. Ships used it to navigate. But sadly, the church suffered a terrible fire in 1955. Most of the building — including the slender spire — was destroyed. Today, only the brick tower that supported the spire is left standing. And a new church, with new gardens, has been built on the same spot. 

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I've got another tour of Toronto in the 1930s here.

The photo the skyline comes via Wikimedia Commons here.

You can see an aerial view looking north toward the Maclean Building thanks to Chuckman's postcard blog here. There's more about the history of the Maclean-Hunter company on Encyclopedia.com here. Kaitlin Wainwright shares a story about the man behind John Maclean's own impressive home here. And the City's own "Heritage Property Research and Evaluation Report" about the Maclean Building is in a PDF here. The photo of the building comes via Chris Bateman's blogTO article about a proposed condo development on the site.

Wikipedia has stuff on the Eaton's Annex here. And an image of the entire complex here. And a history of Eaton's here.

Chris Bateman has a brief history of The Ward over on blogTO here. And he lists "10 lost Toronto buildings we wish we could bring back" here.

Jamie Bradburn writes about Mayor Bert Wemp — who led quite a fascinating life — for Torontoist here. Wikipedia gives a much briefer rundown here. And a very quick overview of the 1930 municipal election here.

The Toronto Historical Associated has a bit more about the Armouries here. And so does Heritage Toronto here.

Kevin Plummer writes about one of the cantors of the Goel Tzedec Synagogue in an edition of Torontoist's Historicist column here. Wikipedia has a "History of the Jews in Toronto" here.

I wrote about the chestnut trees of University Avenue here.

You'll find a neat photo of John Street and St. George The Martyr in 1909 on Google Books here. And an even older painting of it — as part of a history of the nearby St. Patrick's Market on Queen Street — thanks to Doug Taylor here. The church's own website shares a history of itself here. The full photo of the church after the fire is on the Toronto Public Library website here. blogTO calls it one of the best make-out spots in Toronto.

Coca-Cola on Queen Street West in 1937

It's the spring of 1937 and we're on Queen Street West. We're on north side of the street, looking east toward University Avenue. It's just a block away. Today, this very same spot is home to the big glass wall of One Eighty Queen Street West — a fifteen story building with a bunch of commercial tenants. Next door is one of Toronto's Historic Sites: Campbell House (that old building on the northwest corner of Queen & University). It was built in 1822, but it wasn't on Queen Street back when this photo was taken. They moved it to the current location in 1972.

By this point, of course, Coca-Cola was already an iconic brand. Coke had just celebrated its 50th anniversary. The first bottles of the world's most famous pop were sold in the 1880s. By the 1930s, it was a massive business with lots of advertising. So, while I'm at it, here are a few American ads from this very same year this photo was taken:

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I discovered the photo of Queen Street thanks to the Toronto Archives Flickr page. You can check it out here.

The Eaton Family Hanging Out in 1931

I stumbled across this photo today while I was searching through the Toronto Archives online. The image caught my eye, so I checked the caption and did a little Googling. Turns out this is the Eaton family hanging out in 1931. They, of course, are the wealthy relatives of Canada's most famous department store baron, Timothy Eaton, who first founded the family business on Yonge Street back in 1869. The CBC calls them "Canadian royalty."

When Timothy died of pneumonia in the very early 1900s, the department store empire was passed down to his son, Sir John. But Sir John also died of pneumonia, just 15 years later, leaving the business in the hands of his cousin (Timothy Eaton's nephew), Robert Young Eaton. He had come to Toronto from Northern Ireland as a young man to work in his uncle's store. And they say he was very successful in his time at the helm, expanding the Eaton's empire until it was ten times as big as when he took over. (Sir John's widow never liked him much, though: she'd apparently always refer to R.Y.'s branch of the family as the "owner Eatons" and her husband's as the "worker Eatons".) He would serve as the President of the AGO for a while, too. That's his daughter, Margaret, on the left-hand side of this photo. And his wife, Hazel, beside her.

The young fellow without a hat, that's Erskine Eaton. He's Robert Young Eaton's son. He was just 16 or 17 when this photo was taken, but he was already making a name for himself. In this very year, he joined the Governor General's bodyguards. And he was a famous horseman, too, representing the Canadian army in horse shows around the world. He even dated a famous movie star, Toby Wing, who also had flings with Maurice Chevalier, Jackie Coogan and Franklin Roosevelt Jr.

But war loomed. A decade after this photo was taken, Erskine Eaton was on the front lines of the Second World War, storming the beaches of France. He died on one of the most infamous days in Canadian history: August 19th, 1942. He was one of more than 900 Canadian soldiers killed in the raid on Dieppe.

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Robert Young Eaton's house in Rosedale went on the market a couple of years ago. The Globe had an article about it here. The Toronto Then and Now blog has a bit of Eaton's family history here. The Montreal Gazette reports on Erskine Eaton's death at Dieppe here. Wikipedia's got a plenty of info about Dieppe here. And a page about Toby Wing here.

Toronto's Lucky Lion: The Story Of One Of Our Most Famous Early Monuments

It was one of Toronto's most famous early monuments — so well-known to locals that many simply called it the Monument. It was erected in 1939, in the opening days of the Second World War, to celebrate the city's newest highway. The beautiful Queen Elizabeth Way would stretch from the Humber River around the bend of Lake Ontario to Niagara Falls. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother herself came to open it that summer, on tour with her husband, the stuttering King George VI. (She was the mother of Queen Elizabeth II, better remembered these days as the Queen Mum.) It was the first time a reigning monarch had ever visited Canada — or any Dominion for that matter — a way of rallying the Empire as war with the Nazis loomed.

And so, the new monument would not only celebrate the new road, but also commemorate the royal visit and Canada's role in the Second World War. A tall column would stand at the entrance to the QEW by the mouth of the Humber River, topped by a crown. A relief would portray King George and the Queen. And at the base of the column, there would be a lion sculpted by one of Toronto's most famous and respected sculptors: Frances Loring.

Loring and her life-long partner, Florence Wyle, had come to Toronto in the early 1900s. They'd both been born in the United States and shared a studio in Greenwich Village. They were at home in that neighbourhood's bohemian atmosphere, getting to know their artist neighbours like Georgia O'Keeffe and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. But their parents didn't approve. One day in 1913, Loring's father shut down the studio and offered to move the pair to Toronto. He would be able to keep an eye on them here — and hoped our city's conservative values might rub off on them.

Instead, it was the other way around. The Girls, as they were known, would bring a slice of bohemian life to stodgy Toronto. They eventually settled in a rundown converted church in Moore Park (a block south of St. Clair, a few blocks east of Yonge). The Church would become not just home to the sculptors and their work, but the closest thing Toronto had to the famous art salons in Paris.

Loring and Wyle became friends with the most important artists, musicians, architects and intellectuals in the city. Their Saturday night parties became the thing of legend, going on long into the night, guests warmed by the big red brick fireplace, surrounded by half-finished sculptures and an assortment of cats. The Group of Seven and Sir Frederick Banting, the Nobel Prize-winning doctor who helped discover insulin, were particularly close friends, but the guest lists were long and filled with notable names.

Loring and Wyle in 1914

The Church has been called "the hub of all that was vital and exciting in the Toronto art world of the twenties and thirties... one of the most fascinating gathering places in the country." Their good friend A.Y. Jackson, one of the members of the Group of Seven, called it "the art centre of Toronto... a most colourful place... What wonderful parties they put on!" A young Timothy Findley grew up nearby; his father pointed Loring and Wyle out to him. "One day," his father said, "you will remember those two women, and you will understand how wonderful they are."

Their contributions went far beyond social gatherings. At a time when female sculptors were dismissed and passed over for commissions — they were too frail for such physical work, some claimed — Loring and Wyle not only pioneered the place of sculpture in modern Canadian art, but the place of art in modern Canadian culture. When the Girls first arrived in Toronto, Canadian art was not taken seriously even by Canadians. They played a leading role when it came to changing those attitudes  — even while some Torontonians were busy gossiping about their sexual orientation (which is unclear to this day). Loring and Wyle co-founded several groundbreaking artistic organizations, including the Sculptors Society of Canada and the Federation of Canadian Artists, pushing for the policies that would eventually lead to the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts. Loring in particular dedicated much of her time and energy to public causes and education, a familiar face at meetings and art openings, a familiar voice on the CBC.

By the time the QEW opened, Loring and Wyle were already well-known for their war-related work. During the First World War, they had been commissioned to produce a series of statues about workers on the home front. Those sculptures had made them famous. Since then, Wyle had concentrated on smaller pieces while Loring developed a taste for large, monumental work. Loring was an obvious choice for the lion that would sit at the base of the column on the QEW; Wyle was chosen to carve the much smaller King and Queen in relief.

The Lion was one of the most challenging pieces Loring would ever tackle. The work came with strict, nationalistic requirements. The limestone would have to come from a Canadian quarry even though it was of a lesser quality. And that was only the beginning of the trouble. A stone carver would be required to complete Loring's design, but every stone carver she suggested was rejected. They all had Italian or German heritage; as far as some Canadian government officials were concerned, they were the enemy. In the end, Loring was stuck with an Englishman she had never worked with before — and who resented taking direction from a woman.

Finally, when she discovered the stone carver had made a change to the design of her lion without her permission, Loring fired him on the spot. She would complete the stone work herself, despite the fact that she had never done stone work on that scale before. Already in her 50s, but undaunted, she climbed the scaffolding up the column on an island in the middle of the superhighway, protected from Lake Ontario's bitter November winds by only a thin tarpaulin. As she chipped and chiseled away in the cold for weeks on end, her fingers were seized by arthritis. The ailment would consistently plague her for the rest of her life.

Loring's Lion in 1940

Despite the obstacles, when Loring's work was finally finished, it was a triumph. The sculptor had produced a beautiful, stylized lion rising from a reclining position, snarling and defiant, ready to face the Nazi threat and the brutal travails of the Second World War. Loring was praised for her artistic mastery: "a balance of tension that could be sensed running from the powerful paws to the end of the tail." The great cat has been hailed as "one of the finest pieces of outdoor sculpture in Canada" and "the finest piece of architectural sculpture in the country."

The Lion became a landmark for Torontonians. It was impossible to miss as they drove along the lake shore in and out of the heart of the city. Children were particularly enthralled by the stone beast, keeping an eye out for the big cat as their parents drove along the highway. They called it the Lucky Lion. It was a powerful part of the city's public imagination.

But then came the Gardiner Expressway. Twenty years after the opening of the QEW, the new highway along the lake shore cut a swath through some of Toronto's most recognizable landmarks. The old Dufferin Gate at the CNE was demolished. So was most of the Sunnyside Amusement Park. South Parkdale disappeared. Fort York was barely saved. And with the new highway and a booming population driving more and more traffic toward the QEW, the older highway would need to be expanded. In 1974, it was widened to twelve lanes. The island where the Monument stood was removed. The plan called for the Lion to be demolished.

In response, there was an outpouring of public support for the Monument. Torontonians loved their Lion. In the end, the government relented and promised to save it. But many hoped for more than that: not only did they want the Lion saved, they wanted it to be given a new home where it would remain an important part of Toronto's cultural consciousness. The Globe and Mail published an editorial declaring, "A country which sweeps aside its past and its art for ribbons of concrete is going nowhere of any importance." The Lion, the newspaper argued, should be given "a place of prominence by the Queen Elizabeth Way, or another place of equal prominence."

The sculptor Rebecca Sisler, who had followed in the pioneering footsteps of Loring and Wyle and would later pen their first biography, wrote a letter to the paper. "Surely The Monument represents something rare in the annals of Canadian achievement: a synthesis of artistic excellence, historic significance, and public affection. Is this province so poverty-stricken, spiritually and financially, that funds cannot be allocated to preserve our best-known monument? ... Are there no sites in the core of Ontario's capital where the column and its splendid Lion could be re-erected in the mainstream of everyday life where it can continue to stir public imagination?"

In the end, there was a compromise: the Monument was moved to a nearby location in Casimir Gzowksi Park on the waterfront. It survived — it's still there today — but its importance was greatly diminished. Cars passing on the Gardiner can barely see the tip of it; the Lion is a part of the mainstream of everyday life only for those who pass through that section of the park or pay particularly close attention as they speed by on Lake Shore Boulevard. Over the last few decades, the Lion has faded from the minds of most Torontonians. As have Loring and Wyle.

Their work does live on, however. Their sculptures can be found all over our city — all over Canada, in fact: chiseled into some of our finest buildings, on display in Osgoode Hall and in the Art Gallery of Ontario and in the National Gallery in Ottawa, standing on Parliament Hill, preserved among the facades on the grounds of the Guild Inn in Scarborough, and in the Loring-Wyle Parkette on St. Clair... "They are our immortality," Wyle once said.

Loring and Wyle at the Church, pre-1952

The Church, too, is still there. When Loring and Wyle first moved in, it stood in an orchard north of the city. Now, it's in the middle of the megacity; Mount Pleasant Road roars by just a couple of doors down. The Girls left the building to the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts when they died, to be used in support of Canadian artists. The Academy, unable to bear the cost of turning it into an arts centre, sold it so they could put the funds to use instead. Some worried the Church would be turned into condominiums or demolished entirely. Instead, it ended up in friendly hands.

The Sniderman family lived nearby. Sam the Record Man himself was a guest at some of Loring and Wyle's legendary parties. His wife Eleanor was a long-time friend of the sculptors; she even commissioned a bust of her likeness to be sculpted by Wyle and put on the labels of the albums released by her record company. Their son, Bobby, grew up as one of the neighbourhood kids who would visit the "Clay Ladies" for a glass of milk and some cookies, a few words about art and kindness to animals, and a lump of clay to take home. When the Church went up for sale, Eleanor Sniderman begged her husband to buy the Church so that it would be saved. And so he did. Bobby Sniderman would marry his wife, Marlie, in front of the big red brick fireplace the very same year the Lion came down off the QEW.

In the decades that followed, the younger generation of Snidermans would continue to live their lives in the Church. When Loring and Wyle's most recent biographer, Elspeth Cameron, visited before the publication of her book in 2007, she found the Church much as the Girls had left it. It had been cleaned up, restored in places, but still preserved, still home to many of the sculptures created there. The busts Loring and Wyle had sculpted of each other were still gazing at each other across the fireplace.

Now, nearly 40 years after the Monument was moved to its current home, the future of another one of Toronto's beloved cultural landmarks is up for debate. And while we decide what to do with Sam the Record Man's spinning neon disks — how and where to preserve the sign, and with it a reminder of the rich musical history of the Yonge Street Strip — there may be a lesson or two to be learned from the Snidermans themselves, from their friends Loring and Wyle, and from that defiant stone lion on the lake shore.

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Frances Loring in the Church, 1958

Someday I'll write more about Loring and Wyle and their church. And I'm working on a dream for Loring. But for now, one of my favourite tidbits that didn't make this piece: Loring and Wyle kept chickens, which they named after the members of the Group of Seven. Oh and here's a bit about the  Church before it became their studio from the brilliant Lost Rivers site.

You can learn more about the sculptors in a couple of biographies. You can buy Elspeth Cameron's And Beauty Answers here or borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. Or buy Rebecca Sisler's The Girls here and borrow it from the library here.