Dream 07 "The Lake Sturgeon" (Ernest Hemingway, 1923)

As Hadley lay awake beside him, desperately pregnant and uncomfortable, Ernest Hemingway dreamed that it was raining. It had been raining for days, coming down in vast, endless torrents. It hammered at the treetops and at the ground and at the tiles of the roofs in a steady, wet roar.

It rained so hard for so long that Castle Frank Brook swelled and broke its banks. It climbed up the sides of the valley, swamped muddy Bathurst Street and rose higher still. Soon it was spilling in through the open window and lapping up against the edges of their bed.

With the flood came great fish that swam up from the lake. They glided by through the murky water; an enormous old sturgeon circled the dresser and chairs, eyeing Hemingway with an ancient gaze. It seemed as if at any moment, the beast would speak, tell forgotten stories, tales of Huron and Iroquois and of mammoths and wolves. But instead, it opened its jaws, swam toward the bed and swallowed it whole: the sheets, the mattress, the headboard, and Hemingway and Hadley with them, all tumbling down into a dark, fishy abyss.

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Explore more Toronto Dreams Project postcards here.

Forest Hill Village in 1927

Neat. This is Forest Hill Village — which is just a bit north of Spadina & St. Clair — in 1927. It was brand new back then: the village was incorporated just a few years earlier and wouldn't be officially swallowed up by the City of Toronto until 40 years after this photo was taken. 

Just a block to the west (i.e. to the left) of this spot is Cedarvale Ravine. Hemingway lived not far away just a few years earlier than this, and he'd take walks along Castle Frank Brook, which runs along the bottom of the ravine. It's also where the city planned to put the Spadina Expressway in the 1960s, until the famous grassroots campaign forced them to cancel the plans.

We're looking north at the intersection of Spadina & Lonsdale. That building on the north-east corner is home to a Second Cup now. The one of the south-east is a restaurant with yoga upstairs (Um, well, last I checked, anyway — it's just a few minutes from my place, but I don't go over there as much since my favourite breakfast place closed).

The Beautiful Brook Hemingway Used To Stroll Along

Castle Frank Brook, 1907

That's Castle Frank Brook in 1907. Oh how pretty it once was. It used to run through the heart of our city — from Dufferin and Lawrence down along the south-western edge of Forest Hill, across the northern end of Yorkville, through Rosedale Valley Ravine and into the Don River. It was right near that spot, in the ancient pine forest overlooking the valley, that the dude who founded Toronto, Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, decided to build his family's summer home. He named it, with tongue firmly in cheek, after his young son Francis: Castle Frank. And so the brook ended up with that name too.

This photo was taken more than 100 years later and quite a bit further upstream, just south-east of St. Clair and Spadina. There, the brook runs through the Nordheimer Ravine, named after the family who used to own the land. Samuel Nordheimer made his fortune importing pianos and then married Edith Boulton of the super-crazy-important Boultons: one of the first families to move here when the city was founded, they were leaders of the Family Compact and the people who built the Grange. In the 1870s, the newlywed Nordheimers built a mansion on the hill overlooking the ravine and damned the brook at this spot to create a little pond and waterfall.

Not long after that the Town of Yorkville built their waterworks nearby, using the brook to supply the town with what quickly became not very clean drinking water. The yuckiness of it eventually helped convince the town that they should join the rest of the city. The waterworks were replaced with a brand new pumping station right around the same time this photo was taken, and then later expanded. It's still there now, designated as a heritage site and used to control the entire freaking water system for the whole entire freaking city.

Now, as for Ernest Hemingway. It was a little less than 20 years after this photo was taken that he moved into the neighbourhood. In the early 1920s, he and his wife Hadley lived on Bathurst, just a couple of blocks north of St. Clair, while he was writing for the Star. Their apartment building overlooked the brook about a ten or fifteen minute walk upstream of this pretty little waterfall. They say Hemingway used to like to take strolls along the banks of the creek.

Since then, sadly, most of Castle Frank Brook has been buried, tied into the city's sewer system just like the other streams that used to run through the middle of Toronto. In the 1960s, it was going to be even more obliterated than that: the Spadina Expressway was supposed to be built right on top of it. Thankfully, plans for the expressway were killed after opposition by community groups led by the likes of Jane Jacobs and Marshall McLuhan (who also used to live only a few minutes away from where this photo was taken). Today, most of the ravines around the area where Hemingway used to take his strolls are preserved as parkland. And Castle Frank Brook has been brought partially back life, trickling along the same path it has followed for more than ten thousand years.

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I wrote more about Hemingway and his ties to Toronto here. They also had their only child while they were living here. Jack Hemingway (eventual father to Muriel) was born at the Wellesley Hospital in 1923.

I first discovered this photo while I was reading the awesome book HTO: Toronto's Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost River to Low-flow Toilets. You can buy the book for yourself from Coach House here or borrow it from the library here. It's got chapters from Shawn Micallef and John Lorinc and everything.

And you can learn more about Castle Frank Brook and all of our buried creeks on the Lost Rivers website, which is an absolute-freaking-lutely amazing resource for all this kind of stuff. Really. Seriously. Neat stuff.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

This post is related to dream 07 The Lake Sturgeon Ernest Hemingway, 1923

Toronto's Oldest Tree

The oldest tree in Toronto (and a tiny person on a roof)

When John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant-Governor who founded Toronto, first sailed into our bay in 1793, what he found, of course, was an untamed wilderness. An ancient forest covered almost all of the area, right up to the shore of the lake in places, with enormous oaks and pines towering hundreds of feet into the air, lush canopies of maple and ash, streams and brooks and rivers filled with salmon and trout, plus deer and bears, wolves and foxes, bald eagles and flocks of passenger pigeons so thick that they blocked out the sun.

Simcoe picked out a spot on the shore for Fort York, laid out ten blocks of a new town, and ordered his men to begin the arduous task of clearing the trees and building a city in their place. The clear-cutting would continue decade after decade as vast stretches of open land were carved out of the wilderness. (The scale of it was enough to shock some people even in those days—nearly 150 years before the birth of environmentalism. After her arrival in Toronto in 1836, the outdoorsy wife of the Attorney-General complained, "A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means.") But that, of course, was just the beginning. Despite our "city within a park" slogan, Toronto's total canopy coverage today sits at just 17%. That, depressingly, is about the same as Los Angeles'—less than half of the 40% boasted by other unlikely American cities like Washington, Atlanta and Houston.

Still, amazingly, a few of those same ancient trees that stood in the lush forest of Simcoe's day have survived more than 200 years of Toronto. The oldest of them all is a giant Bur Oak. It stands in the backyard of a house in the Annex, more than 35 meters high with a trunk almost 6 meters around. It's somewhere between 350-400 years old, which means it had already been there for 150 years when Simcoe first arrived, and must have started growing right around the same time that Étienne Brûlé is said to have become the very first European to visit these parts alllllll the way back in 1615.

And that, my friends, is nothing. The oldest tree in Ontario—a White Cedar on the Niagara Escarpment—germinated in 688 AD. That makes it 1322 years old—only about 50 years younger than Islam.

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Back in November, the Toronto Star published a profile of that Bur Oak, which I borrowed the photo from and you can read here. And back in 1923, they published an article by Ernest Hemingway, worrying about the effect car exhaust was having on Toronto's oaks in general. It's over here. Long before that, Simcoe's wife Elizabeth painted watercolours of the ancient forest, some of which you can find here and here and here. And, in a happy coincidence, NOW published an article about Toronto's trees today, including the city's current efforts to get the canopy coverage up to 30-40% by planting more than 100,000 trees a year. It's here.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

Punching Ernest Hemingway Right In The Face

Hemingway in 1923

I sort of get the impression that a lot of people who met him probably wanted to punch Ernest Hemingway in the face at one point or another, but Torontonian author Morley Callaghan was one of the lucky few who actually got to do it.

Apparently, the story goes something like this: The two writers became friends in Toronto in the '20s, while Hemingway was living on Bathurst Street and they were both working for what was then called The Toronto Daily Star. It was as a foreign correspondent for the Star that Hemingway had first lived in Paris and since, drunken lout that he was, he hated the then-still-more-than-a-little-bit-uptight Toronto, it wouldn't be long before he headed back to France

Callaghan was now living there, too, and one night the pair of reporters was hanging out with F. Scott Fitzgerald, having an argument about boxing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald thought Hemingway was good enough to be a professional. Callaghan had his doubts. To settle the argument, Fitzgerald convinced the two to spar while he served as audience and timekeeper.

As it turns out, Hemingway could not have been a professional boxer. Callaghan, though smaller and an amateur himself, was better. Not only did he get to punch Ernest Hemingway right in the face, he knocked him down to the mat.

A moment later the legendary friendship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald was over. Fitzgerald, who had gotten caught up in the action and lost track of the time, exclaimed, "Oh, my God! I let the round go four minutes."

“All right, Scott,” Hemingway shot back. “If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.”

And that was it; he never forgave Fitzgerald. He was still bitching about it in the last letter he wrote before he killed himself, nearly 40 years later.

Callaghan wrote about it too, in his memoir, That Summer In Paris. And, as if this story hadn't already filled its quota of asshole writers, that memoir was then reviewed in The New York Review of Books by Norman Mailer. The review was called "Punching Papa" and you can read it online right over here.

This post is related to dream 07 The Lake Sturgeon Ernest Hemingway, 1923