What Happened At Toronto's G20 Kettle, According To The RCMP

When the Mounties got to Queen & Spadina, the kettling had already started. About half an hour earlier, the Toronto Police Service — who were in charge of everything outside the G20 fence — had given the order to "box in" everyone at the intersection and arrest them all for "conspiracy to commit mischief." The RCMP unit, who were assisting them, arrived at about 6pm; protesters and passers-by would be kept there, in the street, in the rain, surrounded by police in riot gear, without any possible exit, without food or water or access to a washroom, for hours to come. The Mounties would help keep them there. They would kettle them despite the fact that RCMP policy forbid them from kettling anyone. And that they weren't trained to do it. And that some officers were openly questioning the orders.

That's all according to a report from the RCMP Public Complaints Commission — it was released in May of 2012, almost two years after the G20 summit turned downtown Toronto into an armed camp patrolled by nearly 20,000 police officers. The Commission, meant to "hold the RCMP accountable to the public," investigated a series of complaints against the Mounties, including what happened during the kettling at Queen & Spadina.

According to the report, things were already confusing by the time the RCMP arrived on the scene. They couldn't, for instance, find the on-site Commander — for two whole hours. The RCMP's own Commander — knowing that kettling was against RCMP policy, unable to find the on-site Commander — confirmed the order with the Toronto Police command centre and finally agreed to help with the kettle. He didn't talk to anyone higher up at the RCMP. "In the absence of somebody telling me what to do," the Commander explained to the Commission, "we just worked it out amongst ourselves."

His Mounties marched into the crowd, splitting the kettle in half. Over the next two hours, they would play their part alongside the Toronto Police Service and the OPP, surrounding 300 people with a wall of shields and riot gear. Not a single person who was kept in the kettle and was later interviewed by the Commission said they had heard any kind of warning to clear the area before they were surrounded. Many had been peaceful protesters; others were just curious onlookers. Some were local residents, out walking their dogs or getting ice cream. Scores of them would be arrested. YouTube footage showed how some of the arrests happened: a sudden break in the wall of riot gear, an officer rushing forward to grab someone from behind, roughly dragging them out of the kettle as they scream in terror, and then the row of riot police closing in again. 

According to the report, during the two hours the Mounties assisted with the kettle, they arrested five people. The RCMP Commander told the Commission they were arrested "because it was felt that they may pose a risk". What he didn't tell the Commission was that two of those five people turned out to be undercover police officers. He later explained that he didn't think that information was "significant".

He also didn't shed any light on the specific justifications for those particular arrests — whether the undercover police officers really were doing something that could "pose a risk," or whether they were arrested without just cause. The notes of the officers who did the arresting weren't any help: they hadn't even bothered to take down the names of the people they were arresting, never mind recording the fact that they were accidentally arresting fellow officers. According to the report, "It was only through an inadvertent comment that the Commission was made aware of the incident."

Toronto Police along Queen the day before the kettle

Finally, at about 8pm, the RCMP managed to track down the on-site Commander¹. By then, even the riot police were soaked from standing in the downpour. The Mounties asked to leave so they would have time to dry out their equipment before heading home to Vancouver in the morning. Their request was granted; they left. When the RCMP Commander asked why — with the G20 pretty much over — people were still being held in the kettle, he was told the Toronto Police were still planning on arresting them all.

According to news reports, it would be another two hours before Toronto's Police Chief, Bill Blair, ordered that anyone still under arrest at Queen & Spadina should be released. By the time they were let go, nearly five hours had passed since the kettling had started. And many of those who had been held would continue to suffer for years to come: from post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks, estranged from friends and family members who refused to believe their story, their faith in Canadian justice deeply shaken.

A year later, the Toronto Police would promise never to kettle anyone ever again.

But kettling wasn't the only issue investigated by the RCMP Complaints Commissioner. The Mounties, according his report, were not involved in much activity outside the fence — they weren't the ones attacking protesters at Queen's Park, arresting people without warrants at the University of Toronto, or running the detention centre on Eastern Avenue. But as the police force with "primary responsibility" for general security at all international conferences, the Mounties were heavily involved in the planning for the event. And the report raises plenty of questions about that planning².

It was rushed. And the Commission found that the various police forces involved didn't do enough to coordinate their operations. At the G8, for instance, which was held outside Toronto just before the G20, they had co-organized everything and put together a joint "Concept of Operations" document. Neither of those things was done for the G20 and it caused major problems — like the confusion around the RCMP's involvement in the kettling³. The RCMP Commander at Queen & Spadina wasn't clear on what he was supposed to do, disconnected from the Mounties' chain-of-command. They hadn't addressed the kettling question in the lead up to the event even though it was one of the highest profile issues heading into Toronto's G20 — there had been an inquiry into the use of a kettle by the London police during the G20 held in England the year before

And yet somehow, despite all of this, the report clears the RCMP of responsibility. The Complaints Commissioner concludes that "on balance" they did "a pretty good job." Their actions "were, in a general sense, reasonable and appropriate." The planning "was robust and thorough."  There was "attention paid to ensuring the rights of demonstrators." And the Complaints Commissioner's conclusions were echoed in headlines all over the country. The CBC: "report clears RCMP." CTV: "RCMP acted reasonably." The National Post: "Report exonerates RCMP."

Some of the report's recommendations make those conclusions sound particularly strange. The report says the RCMP should "make best efforts to establish, together with its partners, clear operational guidelines prior to an event where integrated policing will occur." It also reminds them that "there is at least some onus on the RCMP to ensure that any actions taken—even at the command of another police force—have a reasonable basis in law and some justification from a policing perspective." What the Commissioner doesn't explain is how a lack of "clear operational guidelines" and failure to ensure their actions had "a reasonable basis in law" can still be called "a pretty good job."

Spadina, south of Queen, on the day before

Of course, there's plenty of reason to believe that the Complaints Commissioner didn't know what he was talking about. Mostly because when he got the job, he told reporters that he didn't know what he was talking about.

The RCMP Complaints Commissioner used to be a man by the name of Paul Kennedy. He was a career civil servant with 35 years of relevant experience, including time working with CSIS (the Canadian intelligence agency). He was reappointed by Stephen Harper's Conservatives when they first came to power and initially everything seemed to be going well. His contract was renewed every year; the Conservatives praised his "commitment to achieving excellence in policing through enhanced accountability." They even promised to expand his powers.

But then, he said some things the Conservatives didn't like. He suggested the Mounties shouldn't be allowed to police themselves when they killed or injured someone. He investigated claims they might have illegally helped Harper win the 2006 election. And that they were barring liberals from Conservative events during the 2011 election. When four Mounties tasered a man to death at the Vancouver airport, Kennedy released a scathing report, laying out a long list of all the mistakes they had made. When they tasered a fifteen year-old girl while she was lying handcuffed on the floor being held down by three officers (and then tried to cover it up, and then investigated and cleared themselves for it), he released another scathing report. He complained when the Conservatives slashed the Complaints Commission budget. And he complained, over and over again, when the RCMP refused to cooperate with his investigations, wouldn't answer his questions, wouldn't allow him see documents, and took years to respond to his requests. More than anything, he complained that he didn't actually have any real power to hold the RCMP accountable at all.

So he was replaced. Harper's government let Kennedy go and in his place they appointed a man by the name of Ian McPhail. (He is still the Chair of the Commission today.) McPhail's background was in real estate and wills. He had no experience with criminal law or civilian oversight. As he explained to reporters when he was hired, "Look, you probably know more about the background there than I do."

But he did happen to be a long-time Conservative ally, with ties to the party going all the way back to the 1970s. When Mike Harris wanted to chip away at environmental regulations, he appointed Ian McPhail as Chair of the Environmental Review Tribunal. When he wanted to chip away at public broadcasting, he named Ian McPhail as the head of TVO. And when Harper wanted to curb criticism of the RCMP, he named Ian McPhail as the RCMP watchdog³. And he did it right around the same time that he announced the G20 would be coming to Toronto.

Still, even the most experienced and objective Complaints Commissioner would have trouble holding the RCMP to account. As McPhail's report points out, the RCMP Act "does not require the RCMP to cooperate with a Commission public interest investigation." It was the RCMP who got to "[set] out the conditions under which the Commission would be permitted to view RCMP documentation" and "crafted a protocol" for viewing them. Almost all of the information McPhail refers to in his report comes from the RCMP themselves: from interviews with officers (who, as we've seen, didn't always include significant information they claimed to be insignificant) and the notes they took (which the report repeatedly mentions as being inadequate and poorly prepared). One RCMP officer refused to talk to the Commission altogether⁴.

Police along Queen Street the day before

So in the end, the report's greatest contribution is to highlight all of the ways in which the report is woefully inadequate. The Commission could only interview Mounties who wanted to talk, could only see RCMP documents the RCMP wanted to share, and relied on notes that were never taken, or were incorrectly taken, or were poorly organized. It was put together by an inexperienced Complaints Commissioner with no relevant background in this kind of law, with deep political ties to a ruling party that has been accused of their own improper ties to the RCMP. (In fact, one of jobs of the report was to look for evidence the Conservatives had inappropriately interfered with summit security.⁵) The report couldn't address questions about the RCMP's undercover intelligence gathering because they were currently being sued over it. And maybe most importantly, the report could only address the RCMP's role — one part of a massive operation involving 20,000 police officers from many different police forces and questionable decisions made by three different levels of government.

There is a lot to investigate. In the first two years after the G20, there were at least ten separate reports launched into the police actions during the summit, all of them with their own specific concerns. (Ontario's police watchdog released his own report just a week before the RCMP report, slamming the police forces involved for using "excessive force," having "ignored basic rights citizens have under the charter," adopting inflammatory rhetoric⁶, and making "unlawful" arrests. That watchdog called what happened at Queen & Spadina "unreasonable and unnecessary.") But none of them had the power to investigate the entire story⁷. Many of the reports point to problems with the way the police forces worked together, but none of them was able to fully examine those overarching issues — or the fundamental decisions that may have caused them.

That's why groups like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association called for a full public inquiry into security at the G20. They've demanded a comprehensive investigation of exactly what happened, who made what decisions, and which decisions were the right ones and which were the wrong ones — all the way from the Prime Minster's Office down to the frontlines at Queen & Spadina. They want an explanation of how we got to a point where violent anarchists ran free through the streets, police cars burned, and more than 1,100 people were arrested⁸. Because a full investigation, from top to bottom, with real power, led by an experienced and impartial Commissioner, is the only way to truly learn what happened. And we're going to have to learn what happened if we want to make sure it never happens again.

Five years later, we're still waiting.

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You can read the full RCMP Complaint Commission report here. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association's response is here.

To read the footnotes, hover your cursor over them.

A version of this post originally appeared on The Little Red Umbrella in 2012.

All photos by Adam Bunch.

A Tour of Queen & Spadina A Hundred Years Ago

It has been nearly two hundred years since the intersection of Queen & Spadina was born. When the two roads first met, Toronto still wasn't even a city yet: it was the town of York, home to less than two thousand people. Queen Street had been one of the very first roads the British built when they got here, part of the original plans for Toronto all the way back in 1793. They called it Lot Street back then, the northern edge of the first few blocks built in the new town (right around the St. Lawrence Market). A few decades later, it was renamed in honour of Queen Victoria.

By then, Spadina had also been built. It was laid out as a wide avenue by William Warren Baldwin, a doctor and lawyer who also designed Osgoode Hall and would play a leading role in the political struggle for Canadian democracy. He had just built a brand new house on his sprawling country estate; it stood on the hill above Davenport: the original Spadina House. Baldwin had the grand avenue carved out of the forest south of his home in order to get a better view of the lake. The estate, the house and the new road would all be given the same name: Spadina. It's an Anglicized version of an Ojibwe word: "Ishpadinaa" ("a place on a hill").

So it was when Baldwin built his avenue in the 1820s that the intersection of Queen & Spadina was first created.

Back in those early days, the intersection was way off on the outskirts of town, just outside the official border of the tiny new Upper Canadian capital. But it didn't stay that way for long. Toronto grew quickly over the course of the 1800s. By the time the early 1900s rolled around, Queen & Spadina was at the heart of a bustling metropolis.

By then, some landmarks that are familiar to us today were already there. The Bank of Hamilton opened on the north-east corner in 1902. It's been there ever since; it's home to a CIBC branch now. You can see it in the photo above (from 1908 or '09) and in this photo from 1912:

You can also see it in this photo from a night in the early 1920s. The new streetlamps had just been installed about ten years earlier — at the same period when power lines from Niagara were bringing public-owned electricity to Toronto for the very first time:

And the Bank of Hamilton isn't the only building to have survived the last hundred years. The building on the south-east corner — today it's a Hero Burger — was already there a century ago. It's been there since the 1880s, originally a dry goods store designed by the architectural firm of Langley & Burke. (They're the same fellows behind the Bloor Street Viaduct, the Necropolis Chapel, and churches and cathedrals like Metropolitan United, Trinity St. Paul's, and the spires of St. James and St. Michael's.) It's been there so long, in fact, that the column in front of the door to the building has been worn away by the countless hands that have touched it over the last hundred and thirty years. Right now, it's protected by plywood and propped up until it can be restored.

You can see the building, with its iconic turret, in this photo from 1910, which was taken looking east down Queen Street toward the intersection:

But of course not every building overlooking Queen & Spadina in the early 1900s has survived the last century. The building that stood on the north-west corner back then is gone today. The spot is now home to McDonald's. But back in the early days of film, it was a movie theatre that stood on that same corner.

The Mary Pickford Auditorium was named after Toronto's first big movie star. She had been born on University Avenue (where Sick Kids is now) back in the late 1800s and launched her acting career as a young girl on the stages of the theatres of King Street. Before long, she'd moved to the United States, where she quickly became one of the very first superstars of the silver screen. At the time the Mary Pickford Auditorium was charging people a nickel to watch movies at Queen & Spadina, Mary Pickford was one of the most famous people in the entire world.
 

You can see both the Mary Pickford Auditoirm (on the left) and the Bank of Hamilton (on the right) in this photo from 1910. It also gives you a good view of just how wide the sidewalk used to be on that north-west corner outside the theatre:

The pole in the middle of the photo seems to be a streetcar stop — right on the very same corner where we still catch the Queen streetcar today. They were rumbling through the intersection back then just like they do in the 21st century.

Here you can see some streetcar track work being done in the spring of 1912 — much like the track replacement that shut down the intersection for two weeks a hundred years later, during the summer of 2012:

And here again in 1922:

And here is the Queen streetcar itself, picking up passengers at Queen & Spadina during the First World War. We're looking at the south-east corner of the intersection — that's the Hero Burger building behind them:

But one of the most interesting features of Queen & Spadina had nothing to do with buildings or transit. It was in the middle of the intersection, buried beneath the ground: a public washroom. You got to it by descending a subway-style staircase in an island in the middle of Spadina, just a bit south of the intersection. It's at about the same spot where you get off the southbound Spadina streetcar today. Here's someone heading down to relieve himself during the 1890s:

You can also see the entrance to the washroom in this photo, looking south from the intersection in the winter of 1914:

And in this one, we're looking north up Spadina at the intersection, with a tree-lined streetcar right-of-way heading up the middle of the street. You can also see the Mary Pickford Auditorium (on the left), the Bank of Hamilton (on the right), and some other buildings in the distance that still survive to this day:

Finally, you can see what the washroom looked like on the inside here. The signs on the stalls read "Please do not use closets as urinals" — an attempt to spare the toilet seats:

But even with warnings like that in place, many found the public washrooms distasteful. They soon went out of fashion. By the end of the 1930s, Queen & Spadina's underground loo had been sealed off and filled in: sinks, stalls, urinals and all.

It was just the beginning of a long century of change, which has given us the Queen & Spadina of today: an intersection that would seem both familiar and strange to the Torontonians who passed through it a hundred years ago.

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All photos from the Toronto Archives, except the washroom interior, the Queen streetcar, the streetcar work in 1922  (which are all from Library & Archives Canada) and the main image (from Wikipedia). 

You can check out more old photos of Spadina thanks to Derek Flack at blogTO right here. And take a virtual iTour of Spadina thanks to Heritage Toronto over here. The Toronto Archives have posted a whole set of old Queen West photos on Flickr here. And Lost Toronto has a bunch of neat then-and-now posts about the intersection here. There's also a little bit more about the turret/Hero Building building here.

You can read Chris Bateman's post, "What happened to all the public washrooms in Toronto?" here. And his history of public toilets in our city here.

You'll find Doug Taylor's post about the washroom at Queen & Spadina here. His post on the intersection with a focus on the Mary Pickford here. And a photo of the theatre from the 1930s on his blog here. 

Lost Rivers shared some information about Spadina here. And the Toronto Historical Association has some about William Warren Baldwin and the Spadina estate here. William Warren Baldwin is on Wikipedia here. Spadina House is here. And Spadina Avenue is here.

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.

Toronto's First Great Baseball Team — the old-timey Toronto Baseball Club of 1887

Today, the Blue Jays start yet another new season trying to capture their first World Series in more than 20 years. But those glory days of the early 1990s weren't the first time a Toronto baseball team won a championship. To find the city's first baseball heroes, you have to look back more than 125 years, to the star-studded old-timey Toronto Baseball Club of 1887.

Baseball was still brand new back then. So new, in fact, that some of the rules were still being sorted out. That year, a pitcher needed four strikes to get a batter out. He could throw five balls before giving up a walk. He was also allowed to hit the batter with a pitch — luckily the ball was softer back then. Umpires were still allowed to ask players and fans for their advice. Sacrifice flies didn't exist yet. For the very first time, every home plate would be made of rubber instead of marble. And the International League — which included the Toronto team along with 11 others — would become the very first professional baseball league to declare themselves as officially racist: halfway through the season, they introduced a new rule banning the signing of Black players.

The Torontos, as they were called, played in a beautiful brand new stadium on a spot overlooking the Don Valley. Spectators could walk in off Queen Street or ride up in their carriages and park their horses on the grounds. Admission was a quarter — or an extra ten cents to sit in the best seats in the house. The sheltered grandstand had enough room to seat more than 2,000 people. The stadium was originally known as the Toronto Baseball Grounds, but would soon be nicknamed Sunlight Park in honour of the nearby Sunlight Soap Works factory. When it opened in 1886, even the Lieutenant Governor came to see the first game. Someone in his entourage had their hat knocked off by a foul ball.

But 1887 was the season to remember. The International League might have only been a Minor League — it still is: the Blue Jays' AAA affiliate in Buffalo is one of the current teams — but the Torontos were stacked with star players and memorable characters. 

There was outfielder Mike Slattery. He was as fast as anything. He stole 112 bases that year, setting the International League Record. It still stands to this day. Only a handful of professional baseball players in any league at any level have ever stolen more. And as if that wasn't impressive enough, he and another one of his teammates — August Alberts — both hit for more than a .350 batting average that year. (John Olerud is the only Blue Jay to have ever pulled it off — back in that magical 1993 season.)

Then there was the catcher, Harry Decker. He's best remembered for inventing a new kind of catcher's mitt — some people still call them "deckers" — and also, for his life of crime. After a brief stint in the Major Leagues, including time with the Phillies, Pirates and Nationals, he popped up as a star player for San Quentin Prison.

The Torontos' other catcher was George Stallings. He would go down in history as a Major League manager — "The Miracle Man" who led the hapless 1914 Boston Braves from last place in July to a stunning World Series sweep of Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, a team filled with future Hall of Famers. Bill James (the man behind the modern "Moneyball" revolution in baseball statistics) gives Stallings credit for being the first manager to successfully use a platoon — realizing that left-handed hitters tend to do better against right-handed pitchers and righties better against lefties. Managers still use his technique to this day. After Stallings retired, he would come back to Canada and help bring the minor league Royals to Montreal.

But none of those players was as incredible or as memorable as Cannonball Crane.

They say he was a giant: big and tall and incredibly strong. He once threw a baseball farther than anyone else ever had before. And he threw it faster than just about anyone else too. In 1887, he was by far the best pitcher on Toronto's Baseball Club. He won 33 games that year — more than any other pitcher has ever won on any Toronto team. At one point, he won 16 in a row. His "deceptive drop ball" completely fooled opposing hitters — and not just for Toronto; he'd go on to have an excellent 3.80 career ERA in the Major Leagues.

That's not all he was good at, either. When Cannonball wasn't pitching, he was playing at second base or in the outfield, because he was also Toronto's best hitter. In fact, he was the best hitter in the entire league that year. He hit for a .428 average. It's still considered to be the best batting average by a pitcher in professional baseball history. (If he'd hit that in the Majors, it would put him 6th on the all-time list for any position.)

His greatest moment in Toronto came right at the end of the year. The race for the pennant came down to the very last weekend of the season. On Saturday, the Torontos played two games. Cannonball pitched in the first one and won it. Then, in the second one, he not only pitched but also drove in three runs with his bat and launched the game-winning home run. The next day, he came back to pitch again — and he won again. It was over. The Torontos had clinched the 1887 International League pennant and the city of Toronto celebrated our first baseball championship.

It would not, of course, be our last. For the next few decades, Toronto was a major hub for Minor League baseball. The Toronto Maple Leafs are listed five times on the official MLB list of the top 100 greatest Minor League teams ever. Some of the biggest stars in the history of the game played in the new stadiums that replaced Sunlight Park — three of them were built at Hanlan's Point over the years. Babe Ruth famously hit his first professional home run right into our harbour.

Toronto's last Minor League ballpark — the majestic Maple Leaf Stadium at the foot of Bathurst Street — was finally torn down in the 1960s, when the team was sold off and moved to Kentucky. But a decade later, the Blue Jays came to town. Twice they've been crowned as champions. And tonight, at what was once the futuristic SkyDome, the newest cast of star players and memorable characters will try to carry on the winning tradition that started on the banks of the Don River all those years ago.

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Image: Mike Slattery (left); Harry Decker (centre); Cannonball Crane (right); Yonge Street in 1885-1895 by Frank Micklethwaite (background) via the Wikimedia Commons and some liberal Photoshopping.

I first learned about this team thanks to the book Baseball's Back In Town: From the Don to the Blue Jays A History of Baseball in Toronto by Louis Cauz. You can buy it here or borrow it here.

Yonge & Queen at 5 O'Clock, 1940

Of all the old Toronto photos I've ever posted to Facebook or Instagram (which you can follow me on, by the way, here and here), I think this might be the one that got the most likes. It's called "Five o'clock Rush, Queen & Yonge Streets, 1940". And it was taken by Charles D. Woodley. They've got a bunch of his stuff on the Stephen Bulger Gallery website, including a biography, which is where I've learned the few things that I've learned about him:

He was born in Toronto, in 1910, and he lived here his whole life. He got his first camera as a boy, in 1920 — even started a camera club at his high school, Bloor Collegiate, at the corner of Bloor & Dufferin. He once rode a bicycle home all the way from North Bay after a trip to Temagami — 200 kilometers down an unpaved Yonge Street. He liked to hitch rides on freight trains, too, took them across Canada and the United States. Over the course of his life, he would take photos in every province and territory in our country and in more than 50 countries around the world. He got married and had kids and was a teacher, too — he taught Geography at Western Tech.

He died, an old man, in 2003.

What Queen and Gladstone Looked Like in 1893

Wow. Well, here you go hipsters, this is what it looked liked right outside the Gladstone Hotel in 1893. The Gladstone (which isn't in this photo, just out of sight to the right) would have only been four years old when this was taken. But the awkward "Dufferin jog" was already in place -- created by the railroad running by over the bridge in this photo. The bridge only had an underpass built on Queen, not Dufferin, meaning traffic traveling up and down Dufferin had to take a detour up Gladstone Avenue instead. It would take more than 100 years for a second underpass to be built; it just opened back in 2010.

Maybe even more interesting than that, though, is that in 1893 Toronto was in the middle of switching for horse-drawn streetcars to an electric system. According to the Wikipedia, the very first electric streetcar had started running just the year before; the final horse-drawn streetcar would be retired the year after. This photo captures that brief transition. The guy in the foreground is laying down Queen Street's first streetcar tracks, with the soon-to-be-obsolete horse-drawn transportation behind him.

I came across this photo in a TTC gallery put together by the Toronto Star, which you can check out here. I'll probably post another couple of photos from it over the next few weeks.

What Yonge & Queen Looked Like in 1915ish

This photo is looking north up Yonge Street from Queen Street in 1915ish. I don't have too terribly much to say about it, but here are a few tidbits. The entire left-hand side of the photo, the west side of Yonge, is now, of course, the Eaton's Centre. But the H. Knox and Company store you see here (which eventually become Woolworths) is still partially preserved. Across, the street from it, on the very right of the photo is the Bank of Montreal building which is also still there on the north-east corner of the intersection, though now it has a giant glass tower rising out of it. Behind that, you can see part of the sign for the Heintzman piano company, which will get its own post someday. Theodore August Heintzman came to Toronto from Germany in the 1800s and built a piano in his kitchen. When he sold it, he used the money to start his own company, which soon gained an international reputation for producing some of the highest quality pianos in the world. In 1915, Heintzman had recently bought the building you see here to use as a head office; we still call it "Heintzman Hall". These days, it's a heritage property and home to a Home Sense.

Photo: A Monster Atop Old City Hall, 1920

Someday I'll have a full post about Old City Hall and E.J. Lennox—the mustachioed architect who built it, Casa Loma, the King Edward hotel and some of the other most beautiful buildings in the Toronto. But I just came across this neat photo of one the gargoyles which used to sit near the top  of the clock tower and wanted to share it. The photo was taken in 1920, 20 years after the building opened and nearly another 20 before the gargoyles were taken down due to wear and tear. It was just a few years ago that bronze cast replicas were added back where the originals once were, keeping a monstrous vigil over Queen Street and Bay.

Photo: Eaton's Racist Christmas Display in 1955

Eaton's window, Christmas, 1955

Oh boy. So. According to the Archives of Ontario, Eaton's was pretty hesitant to start using religious imagery in their famous Christmas window displays. At first, they played it safe, sticking with Santa Claus and toys and gifts, worried that Christian church leaders would be offended if the department store mixed Jesus with commercialism. But in 1945, they were feeling ballsy: they added some religiously-themed Christmas carols to the mix, playing them over a loud speaker to accompany their displays. It was a hit. Church leaders, far from being upset, actively encouraged their congregations to head down to Yonge and Queen. After that, it was open season. There were nativity scenes and baby Jesuses all over the place.

And so it was that in 1955, with their fears of religious insensitivity far behind them, T. Eaton & Co. decided to decorate their windows with scenes of what it would have been like if other cultures around the world had been witness to the Christmas star. There were Africans in a thatched-hut village, Inuit in the frozen north and, dropping to their knees in prayer, aboriginals outside their tee-pees. (Also, for some reason, Dutch people.)

The Archives of Ontario have photos of each of them (Africans here, Inuit here and the Dutch here) as part of a brief history of Eaton's Christmas displays, which you can find here.

Photo: Yonge and Eglinton in 1922

Eglinton Avenue, 1922

Yesterday, blogTO posted an article full of nice photos of Toronto during the 1920s. If you're interested in that kind of thing (and since you're reading this blog, I'm thinking there's a good chance you are), it's well worth checking out. 

The photo I've posted above was taken in 1922 looking west from Yonge Street down a very different Eglinton Avenue. It's something that I hadn't really realized until I started this research: just how undeveloped midtown was even in the early 20th century.

I'll post another couple of my favourites from the article below as well. The first is  looking north at the intersection of Queen and Bay in 1923. You can see Old City Hall on the right (along with the small set of steps that are still there) and, in the middle of the photo, buildings standing on what would  later become the flat expanse of Nathan Phillips Square.

Below that is a pretty photo of Sunnyside, the brand new amusement park which had just been built on the south side of Lakeshore Boulevard. It would be demolished in 1955 by the geniuses planning the Gardiner Expressway, leaving just a few buildings behind, like the Palais Royal and the Sunnyside swimming pool. (The merry-go-round, kind of awesomely, was also saved: moved to Disneyland and renamed the King Arthur Carousel.)

But really, again, you should probably just go check out the original article.

Queen and Bay, 1923

Sunnyside Amusement Park, 1922