Toronto On The Day Before Christmas, 1853

Hello all! Hope you're having a wonderful, snowy holiday season. I'll get back to regular posts in the new year, but figured I'd quickly share this drawing by one of our city's most famous historical artists, C.W. Jeffreys. (Dude even has a high school named after him.) He drew this in 1944, but it shows King Street a block west of Yonge on Christmas Eve in 1853. You can see the headquarters for George Brown's Globe newspaper (they'd just started printing their new daily edition that fall) in the  middle of the image, along with George Brown himself right outside the office, a newspaper tucked under his arm and a top hat atop his head.

I'm not so sure about the shops next to the Globe, but Toronto's first Surveyor General was named D.W. Smith. He made lots of the city's earliest maps, provided one of the most famous early descriptions of York back in the late 1700s, and built one of the very first houses in Toronto, Maryville Lodge, sort of near Front & Sherbourne, in 1794.

I found this on the Toronto Archives site, here.

Celebrating The False End of the Great Boer War at Yonge & King in 1901

I recently posted this photo as part of the gallery at the end of my piece about J. Cooper Mason and the Great Boer War (which you can read here), but I wanted to highlight this photo in particular, since I was especially fascinated by it while I was writing that post. It's crammed full of interesting details.

It's the summer of 1901 and we're looking east down King Street (Toronto's earliest main street) from the intersection at Yonge. (You can see what the same view looks like today here.) The event is a parade to celebrate the return of the one of the Canadian units who volunteered to fight in South Africa in support of the British Empire's colonial war there. It seems at the time this photo was taken, as if the war is over and the British have won — although in truth it will take another couple of years filled with guerrilla warfare, a brutal scorched earth campaign and the death of tens of thousands of South Africans in British concentration camps. The Canadians forces, however, will all be home before that part of the war really gets going.

(Some of the details in this photo are a bit hard to see, so you might want to save it to your computer so that you can open it and zoom in more closely.)

Here we go:

01. In the middle-bottom of the photo, you can see the men of 'C' Company marching towards us with their rifles over their shoulders. You can make out a few of their faces and a couple of early 1900s moustaches.

02. The beautiful buildings which lined King Street back in the day are hung with bunting and flags. People in the crowd are waving them too. Almost all of them display the Union Jack or England's St. George's Cross — a reminder that it would be more than another 60 years before we got our own flag, that many people in Toronto still very much saw themselves as members of the British Empire, and that the war these men had just come back from fighting was very much a British one.

I really like the details in the cheering, too:

03. You can see men lifting their bowler hats in celebration.

04. If you look really closely at the building on the far right, you can see people leaning out the windows to shout through old-timey bullhorns.

05. This is probably my favourite detail in the whole photo. Outside that building on the right, on the telephone pole next to the fancy clock, a kid has climbed up (on the pole itself? on some kind of box or something?) to get a better view out over the crowd. Neat moment. Meanwhile, the building itself belongs to the Canadian Pacific Railway. A sign reads "CANADIAN PACIFIC TICKETS" and a glittery "CPR" logo is embedded in the middle of a crest above the door. That railroad, which famously helped to forge the Confederation of our nation, had been built just 20 years earlier. And only ten years after this photo was taken, that building would be torn down and replaced with the much bigger Canadian Pacific Building. (Designed by Darling & Pearson, one of the most important architectural firms in the history of our city, it would be the tallest building not only in Toronto, but in the entire British Empire: a whole 15 storeys high. It's still there now, home to the Shopper's Drugmart on the south-east corner of the intersection.)

06. The Canadian Pacific Railway isn't the only easily recognizable brand represented in the photo: there's also a sign for Holt Renfrew. The fancy Canadian department store started out as a hat shop in Quebec City in the 1830s.

07. You can see some other people who have also climbed up some telephone poles on the left-hand side of the street. One guy in the distance, just above where I've put the number 07, has managed to get up pretty darn high.

08. But some people have managed to find a spot even higher — you can see a few spectators standing on the roof of one of the buildings on the left.

09. And finally, in 1901 just like today, the pigeons of King Street East soared through the air above the crowd.

The City "Intends to Designate" King Street's Beautiful Victoria Row

Oh, well here's some promising news. The city "intends to designate" beautiful Victoria Row on King Street East, justjust west of Church. They've got a notice up on their website here. I stumbled across the news while I was actually looking for a page I could link to about how those buildings might be at risk. (Hopefully, all goes well — and they don't, say, mysteriously burn down like some of Toronto's other about-to-be-saved properties have had a habit of doing.)

The Row was originally designed all the way back in the 1840s by John Howard, one of Toronto's most important old-timey architects and amateur painters, who is also the guy who gave us High Park. It's been updated over the years. It played a vital role on King Street back in the days when it was our city's earliest main street. And it's still full of shops and restaurants and even the Albany Club (the secretive official Conservative Party hangout, which I wrote about here). This photo is from around 1890, when a statue of Queen Victoria was part of the facade.

King & John in 1961

Here's the Eclipse Whitewear Building on the corner of King & John in 1961. It was built in 1904 for the underwear company after the Great Fire wiped out a huge chunk of downtown Toronto. And it's one of the listed heritage properties they're planning to demolish to make way for the new David Mirvish/Frank Gehry towers.

Where Conservatives Have Been Getting Drunk For 130 Years

Sir John A. Macdonald

It all started in 1882. Canada had only been around for 15 years, but Sir John A. Macdonald had already been Prime Minister for ten of them. He'd only lost one election — the one right after the Pacific Scandal. He and his Conservatives had taken a MASSIVE bribe from a railway tycoon in return for promising to give him the contract to build the railroad across Canada. And then they'd spent the money on bribing people to vote for them. Macdonald resigned in disgrace and got crushed in the next election. But a few years and one recession later, he was back in power. And with Toronto proving to be one of the key battlegrounds in federal politics, his supporters decided to start a brand new club in the heart of the city — somewhere where right-wing businessmen and politicians could come together, get drunk and plan their campaigns: The Albany Club.

The super-exclusive gentlemen's club was named after Queen Victoria's eighth son — the epileptic hemophiliac Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany. He was pretty famous back then and had recently met Macdonald and other high profile Tories on a trip to Canada. The club immediately became a secretive swank-fest of cigars and smoking chairs and brandy and oak paneling and alcoholism — a place for rich white guys back in the days when rich white guys were pretty much the only people allowed to vote. And it was for Tories only. That was kind of the point, right there in the bylaws: "No person shall become a Member of the Club unless a Conservative.” Those are their italics, not mine.

At first, the Albany Club was in a building on Bay Street, but before the 1800s were over, it had moved to a spot on King just a couple of blocks east of Yonge. There's an old stretch of buildings there — Victoria Row — built all the way back in the 1840s by one of Toronto's earliest architects: John Howard, the same guy who gave High Park to the city. The Albany Club is still there, like it has been since 1898, quietly serving as one of the powerful headquarters of Canadian conservatism.

And I do mean quietly. "We nurture our exclusivity and with that our privacy," the club's website says. There's no big sign outside the building, just a discrete "AC" emblem. "Nobody but an archaeologist accustomed to ferreting out old important things in secret places ever could discover the Albany Club," the Star wrote in 1921. Even the building's historical plaque is mounted inside the entrance, where only members and guests can see it.

There was a time when all the political parties had clubs like this. A few blocks away on Wellington, the Liberals had the Ontario Club. The Canada First Party had the National Club on Bay. But now, even the clubs that have survived have dropped their political affiliation. The Albany Club is the very last old school political club in Canada.

Every single Conservative Prime Minister from Macdonald to Mulroney has been a member of the Albany Club. And every single Conservative Premier of Ontario, too. Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty and Peter McKay and Jason Kenney and Jim Prentice and Maxime Bernier have all given speeches there. So have Tim Hudak and Hazel McCallion and Preston Manning and Christie Blatchford and Rex Murphy and David Frum. John Tory was the President of the Club for a while. Tony Clement is on the Board of Directors. So is Peter Van Loan. And Janet Ecker. And Denzil Minnan-Wong. And a whole bunch of lobbyists. In fact, they all got in a bit of trouble last year when Harper's government invited the Albany Club to host a private reception on Parliament Hill. Conservative politicians and registered lobbyists all got to hang out — and since it was a private party, they didn't have to worry about all those pesky lobbying laws.

For its part, the club is happy to admit the role it plays in the running of our country. "We believe in conservative values," the website says. "We will assist the conservative movement by being the forum for public policy discussions and decisions."

This time, those are my italics.

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There is at least one conservative politician who has publicly distanced himself from the club. In fact, that Rob Ford publicly distanced himself from them as part of his whole man-of-the-people shtick. "It’s not Bay Street or the Albany Club that's behind me," Rob Ford claimed during the last municipal election as part of his man-of-the-people shtick. "It’s Main Street."  Which hints at just how deeply the Albany Club is an entrenched part of Conservative power politics in Canada. 

The Albany Club was part of Doors Open a few years ago. You can see photos from inside here. There's Sir John A. memorabilia all over the place. You can learn more about the club's history on their website here. Their original bylaws are here. Read their historical plaque here.

You can learn more about the Ontario Club here and the National Club here. 


The Albany Club also does stuff like teach children proper table etiquette. 


Harper's Conservatives were investigated and eventually cleared by the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner for that private function on Parliament Hill. Because, amazingly, "There is no section in the Conflict of Interest Act that deals specifically with relations between registered lobbyists and Members of Parliament." The Hill Times has the full story here.

The Battles at St. James

This is a photo of St. James Cathedral on King Street East, which towers above the park where the Occupy Toronto protesters are camped today, more than 100 years after this image (by old Toronto photographer guy Frank Micklethwaite) was captured. Since it's not actually in the financial district, St. James Park seems like an odd choice as the home of the protests. But historically speaking, there's some justification for it: that block of the city — from Church to Jarvis and Adelaide to King — has been at the centre of the battles over Canadian democracy for about 200 years. Last week, I wrote a piece about it for Torontoist, complete with war, riots, rebellion and plague. You can read it here.

Photo: A Dapper Traffic Cop in 1912

I don't have much to say about this photo taken at Yonge and King sometime around 1912, other than to wonder when our cops lost their sense of style. And to mention that you could not pay me enough money to stand in the middle of the intersection at Yonge and King with nothing for protection other than a little hat, some white gloves and a thin pole thingy.

It was Agatha Barc over at blogTO who posted this as part of an article about the Toronto Police Force's old "Morality Department". You can read it here. And all of her "Nostalgia Tripping" columns here. (There are a few other great photos in there, too.)

And, as always, if you'd like see more old Toronto photos that I like, you can check out my Toronto Dreams Project Historical Photostream here.

"The Best Known Woman Who Has Ever Lived"

Mary Pickford

In the days before University Avenue was extended south of Queen, there was a row of buildings where there's now the intersection at King Street. One of them was the Princess Theatre. Built in the late 1800s, the Princess was the first prestigious home for "legitimate" theatre in Toronto—and the only one until the Royal Alex opened down the street almost twenty years later. It brought all the biggest plays and most famous stars to the city. And in the year 1900, the Princess was showing a melodrama called The Silver King, which featured a small role for a young girl played by one Gladys Smith. It was the first time she had ever appeared on stage, but before too long, she'd be the most famous actress in the world.

She'd been born just a few years earlier and just a few blocks away, in a modest house on University, where Sick Kids is now. Her father died when she was four and her mother was talked into letting her children act as a way to bring in a little more money. She was hesitant—acting wasn't considered a respectable profession—but her daughter Gladys fell in love with it. She appeared in plays around Toronto before touring the States as a teenager and eventually landing in New York City on Broadway. It was there that a producer convinced her to change her name to Mary Pickford.

And it was there that her rise to fame really got started. She caught the attention of D.W. Griffith, a film director who would soon prove to be one of the most important men in the history of cinema. In a few years, he would make his "masterpiece", the unbelievably racist The Birth of A Nation, a silent epic about the founding of the KKK, whose members are portrayed as heroic figures battling a bunch of people in blackface. It was the highest grossing movie of all-time and such a landmark in the history of film technique that film schools still force students to sit through all three painful hours of it.

Griffith and Pickford made a powerful team. They produced 42 films together. In their first year. They helped prove that feature-length films could make money and though Pickford wasn't credited at first (no actors were back then), people were soon talking about the girl with the golden curls. As the popularity of film soared, and cinemas sprang up not only across the United States but the globe, her popularity  and power soared with it. Frustrated by the studios' stranglehold on the industry, she, Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks teamed up to form their own distribution company for independent films: United Artists. The very next year, Pickford would divorce her abusive, alcoholic husband. She and Fairbanks were in love. They got married and became Hollywood's first celebrity couple.

By then, Pickford was already one of the most famous people in the entire world—as far as actors go, they say only Chaplin rivaled her popularity. They called her "America's Sweetheart". One overzealous reporter even declared that she was "The best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman that has been in all history." Her honeymoon in Europe with her new husband caused riots when they were spotted in London and Paris. And when they returned home to the States, taking the train back across the country to Hollywood, huge crowds gathered to watch them go by. They say that after that, when foreign heads of state came to the White House, they also asked if they could visit the Pickfair estate in Beverly Hills, where Pickford and Fairbanks were playing host to dinner guests like Albert Einstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Amelia Earhart, Noel Coward and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

But then came the talkies. Sound films left countless silent stars behind, as they couldn't, or wouldn't, adjust. And for Pickford, who believed that adding soundtracks to movies was "like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo", it was a disaster. It didn't help one bit that she picked that very same time to pull a Keri Russell—cutting her beloved blonde curls in favour of a short bob. It was front page news in the New York Times. Her popularity plummeted.

In 1933, with her films making less and less money, she retired from acting. And three years after that, she and Fairbanks were divorced. (He'd had an affair with an English actress with a thing for rich and famous men—her other husbands included a baron, an earl, a Georgian prince/race car driver and Clark Gable.) Pickford kept producing movies, remarried and adopted children. But she was a cold and distant mother, became an alcoholic and died in 1979.

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Despite all that "America's Sweetheart" business, Pickford was still a Canadian at heart. She called herself "a real Torontonian" and fought to regain her Canadian citizenship later in life—although it turned out she'd never lost it. You can hear her talking about her memories of growing up in the city (and her love of biking downtown—take that Ford!) in a radio interview she did with the CBC in 1959, here. "At least once a month I dream I'm back again in Toronto, up in Queen's Park, High Park, up north on Yonge Street..."

You can watch clips from some of her silent films here, on the PBS website. And some of my favourite photos of her are here (with a bear cub), here (with a kitten) and here (with her short hair).

You can read more about the Princess Theatre and the fire that destroyed it in one of Jamie Bradburn's Historicist columns for Torontoist, here. Or about the theatre's rivalry with the Royal Alex, here.

If you're interested, you can watch a particularly offensive six-minute clip of The Birth of A Nation, here. And if you're really masochistic, you can watch all three hours of racist bullshit, here.


Update: Silent Toronto just published a post about the reaction in Toronto to The Birth of A Nation here. (Hint, apparently the Star's headline read: “Colored people appear to be only opponents of the film”. Ugh.

This post is related to dream 04 The Silver King Mary Pickford, 1900

Photo: Armistice Day in Toronto in 1918

Look up Armistice Day—November 11, 1918, the day the horrors of the First World War finally ended—on Wikipedia and the photo you'll find is this one, of ecstatic Torontonians celebrating at the intersection of King and Bay. It's far from the only one, though.  You can see crowds swarming Yonge Street at Queen here and again, just up the street outside the Elgin Theatre, here. A parade was organized, and you can see one of the floats photographed at the Gooderham & Worts distillery here. Eaton's department store closed for the day in celebration and remembrance, taking out a full page ad in the Globe, and, finally, you can see a family and friends enjoying the headline of the rival Toronto World newspaper here.

Photo: Downtown Toronto in 1857

York Street in 1857

That's York Street, looking north from King in 1857. These days, it's a just a block east of University, in the heart of downtown, lined with skyscrapers. That little white building the bottom right-hand corner of the photo is right where the Toronto Stock Exchange is now. The columned building you can see at the end of the street, at Queen, is Osgoode Hall, which was serving as the Superior Court of Upper Canada at the time. Back in those days it had two domes, only one of which you can see in the photo, but still hadn't been given the iconic black fence that surrounds it now.

You can see a bigger copy of the photo here, which I found via the always helpful History of Crime and Punishment in Canada website.

The T Dot's First Hanging

It seems that sometime around the turn of the 1800s, when our city was still just a town only a few years old, John Sullivan and Michael Flannery went out one night and got drunk together. Sullivan was an Irish tailor and they called Flannery "Latin Mike" because he liked to recite Latin proverbs, which I guess was a thing back then. At some point their drunk asses must have run out of money, because Latin Mike decided to forge a bank note worth about three shillings so that Sullivan could use it to buy more booze. Shockingly, their plan backfired and while Latin Mike managed to escape and fled to the States, Humphrey Sullivan landed in Toronto's first jail, sentenced to death. Which, you know, seems a little harsh.

The jail was brand new, built on the orders of the slave-owning gambling addict/politician, Peter Russell, who was running the young town while Lieutenant Governor John Simcoe (the dude who founded Toronto) was back in England, slowly dying. The "gaol" was built on King Street, where the King Edward hotel is now (there's a plaque) and as you may have guessed from the drawing above, it was a little wooden building with a log fence. Inside, there was just enough room for three prisoners and it seems that while Sullivan was there it was filled to capacity. Next door to him was John Small, on trial for having recently killed the Attorney-General in the city's first duel. And in the other cell was a Mr. McKnight. When the officials running Sullivan's execution ran into trouble finding someone willing to do the actual executing, it was McKnight they convinced to do it in return for $100 and a pardon.

McKnight, however, was not awesome at hanging people. He screwed up the first attempt. And then the second. By the third, even Sullivan was getting impatient, saying something along the lines of: "McKnight, I hope to goodness you've got the rope all right this time."

He 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

There seems to be some confusion about a few of this story's details, like whether John Sullivan's real name might have been Humphrey, but I've mostly cobbled that all together from The Toronto Story and Jarvis Collegiate's startlingly informative website, which are both fantastic. They've also got lots more about Peter Russell and John Simcoe and the city's first duel, which are all so getting their own posts sometime. (Update: I've written the Peter Russell post here.)

Photo: King Street in 1878

King Street

Here, quickly, just because I like it: a photo of King Street, looking east from Yonge, in 1878. (I found it here, in an amazing online database of old Toronto photos by the Archives of Ontario, which I just accidentally stumbled my way into.)