Six Hit Songs From 1960s Yorkville

During this week in 1967, there were six songs with ties to the Yorkville music scene sitting in the Top 50 of the CHUM Chart. From the folk of Gordon Lightfoot to the psychedelic garage rock of The Ugly Ducklings to the summertime pop of The Mamas & The Papas. I wrote about them in my column for the Canadian Music Hall of Fame this week. And since I promised to start sharing links to my Toronto history-related writing over there, you can check it out and listen to the songs right here. I also talk a bit about the very start of Neil Young's career, which began during his time in Winnipeg: between going to high school in Pickering and playing the coffeehouses of Yorkville in a band with Rick "Super Freak" James.

A National Guerrilla Register of Historic Places in Brooklyn

National Register of Historic Places, 2013 Additions

An article from Hyperallergic alerted me to a neat guerrilla history project in Brooklyn. In some ways, it's kinda like a much better version of my sticky plaque project, so I thought I'd share. An artist by the name of Anna Robinson-Sweet has silk-screened plaques made to look just like the official ones from the National Register of Historic Places. She puts them in NYC in spots that haven't been added to the official register, which she picked at random off a fire insurance map, but have all revealed interesting stories as part of the history of the neighbourhood. Her first round of plaques highlighted ten different locations: an old baseball field, a roller rink, a bath house, factories...

Robinson-Sweet has more information, photos and a map of the locations on her blog, which you can check out here.

An excerpt of some of my favourite bits:

"New York City’s history is shaped by what has survived constant destruction and remaking. Collective memories are often lost along with the alteration or destruction of buildings. National Register seeks to bring ten places back into the visual history of our city, in a borough that finds itself the new playground of developers and speculators... The contrast between these vanished buildings and what now stands in their place is often stark: where the bath house once stood is a glazed condominium tower; a self-storage complex now occupies the footprint of the rink where roller disco was born. This contrast between our contemporary urban environment and that of the past can be more informative than the physical remnants of the past that still remain...

"As the title suggests, National Register adopts the official language and plaque format used by the National Park Service (NPS), which sets supposedly stringent guidelines for what may be deemed nationally significant. Yet official historic designation is often arbitrary, subjective and corrupt. The NPS’s self-written history tells the story: “like any government program it has not been immune to extraneous influences. Such influences are manifest in landmarks illustrative less of American history than of the force behind their designation...

"Taken as a whole the ten plaques suggest that every lot on any block can reveal historical understanding of place; the historical narrative told by the structures that survive the ravages of time or are intentionally preserved is only one of many."

The Dreams Project & Spacing Magazine's Blog

The magazine whose blog I'm now cross-posting to

Oh hey, so if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter (which you should! and on Instagram too!) you probably already know this, but I should mention it here for those who don't: some of the best posts from The Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog are now getting posted to Spacing Magazine's blog too. (If you're not already reading their blog, you should be: they post all sorts of Toronto-related urban and public space awesomeness.) A few of my posts have been published over there already — the stories of drunk William Faulkner in a bi-plane and Toronto's first cat and the 11,000 year-old footprints on the bottom of Lake Ontario among others. You can check them out here. And I've got a new one going up every couple of weeks or so.

They've also just had the launch party for the brand new issue of their print publication. You can get subscriptions and stuff over 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.

"O my tiger city!": A Few Neat Paragraphs From Morley Callaghan

Morley Callaghan

Oooh, cool new discovery. Kevin Plummer is one of the two fellows who writes the always awesome Historicist columns over at Torontoist. And it turns out he's also got a new Toronto history blog, Second Drafts, where he shares tidbits that didn't make it into his Torontoist pieces. He's already got some neat stuff up: super-old aerial photographs of the city here; bits about the old Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team here; a photo of Toronto's old downtown slum, The Ward, here. But I think my favourite post so far is a passage written by Morley Callaghan, which I'm going to shamelessly re-post.

I wrote about Callaghan in the very first story I told on this blog. He was a Toronto writer who became good friends with Ernest Hemingway while they were both living here and working for the Star. They were both in Paris in the '20s, too. That's where Callaghan and Hemingway had a famous boxing match which ended the friendship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (You can read my post about it here.) But after that, Callaghan ended up back in Toronto, where he grew old in Rosedale.

These paragraphs come from an essay he wrote in 1954 called "Why Toronto?":

"To the professor from St. Louis who asked me why I lived in Toronto, I tried saying casually, ‘Why, I was born in Toronto.’ For a moment he was silent and I thought I might have found the right easy answer. ‘How odd,’ he said finally. ‘You’re the only writer I know who lives in the place where he was born.’

The English-speaking people of Montreal are pretty much like the people of Toronto, in fact, walking along the Montreal streets I’m always meeting somebody who used to live in Toronto, and they all swear they are much happier than they were in the Ontario Athens; but they look just the same to me and they talk just the same and they have the same ideas and the intellectual structure of their lives was clearly shaped in Toronto and they can’t get away from it.

But they don’t fool me–Toronto is on the mind. The notion that Montreal has a dazzling intellectual life like that of Paris, which makes the intellectual life of Toronto seem pathetically provincial, is a myth.

[...] but the truth is that the English-speaking people of Montreal and Toronto think the same thoughts. This they refuse to believe.

There is one other aspect of the matter. I have tried wandering into other cities, and pressing on to distant shores, and have found after a few weeks in a strange place, the urge to move on grows strong, the old weariness gripping me, makes me believe that each new place will be charming because it is new. Well, a writer can stand only so much of this restless boredom; he will go and on, once he starts wandering, seeking the unexpected scene, the new lovely face, with the charm of novelty always pulling him on and finally wearying him to death. If you stay in Toronto, the longing remains deep in the soul, and since it can’t be satisfied you can’t be wearied, and your mind and your imagination, should become like a caged tiger. O Toronto! O my tiger city!"

You can check out the original post on Second Drafts here and should absolutely head on over here to check the whole blog out.

Toronto Before

King Street, looking east from Yonge

Thought I'd post a quick link to one of the other Toronto history blogs I've stumbled across during my research. Toronto Before is run by Aiden Cudanin. It's mostly old photos—some of the TTC, some cleverly photoshopped to show you what familiar parts of the city used to look like.

And, in a weird coincidence, just as I signed in to write this post, I noticed that he's also now also lending his services to the always kickass Spacing.