Come To The Ex! Watch Us Slice Open A Pet!

The Ex had never been more popular than it was in 1962 and ’63. More than three million people walked through the gates during those years. The crowds set new attendance records for Canada’s biggest fair — less than half as many visit these days. Many of those flocking to the Exhibition Grounds were about to see one of the most bizarre exhibits the CNE has ever displayed.

It was called Vetescope. The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association organized it. They wanted to show Canadians that vets were more than just “horse doctors” – that they were a vital part of modern society, using cutting edge technology to keep our animals healthy. They billed it as “the biggest public relations venture that organized veterinary medicine has undertaken on this continent.”

It was huge. The full exhibit sprawled over 9,000 square feet in the gorgeous Hydro Building (they call it the Music Building now) and cost $1 million to prepare. There were more than 250 vets on hand to answer questions from the public, manning 18 displays about their profession. There was information about “radiology, anatomy, embryology, histology, pathology, bacteriology and parsitology”. But that’s not all. They also featured some attention-grabbing displays about the modern innovations in veterinary science.

You could, for instance, learn about the role of animal medicine in space exploration. And as part of the Large Animal display, members of the public could meet “Maggie the magnetized cow”. It seems she was equipped with one of the latest breakthroughs in bovine science: a cow magnet. It rested in her gut, collecting all of the metallic odds and ends a cow accidentally consumes over the course of her lifetime, thus preventing troublesome “hardware disease”. It was a brand new development back in the early 1960s; today the use of cow magnets is commonplace.

But it wasn’t the space age exhibit or the magnetized cow that grabbed the biggest headlines. The organizers of Vetescope had put together an even more dramatic demonstration of their profession. They had veterinarians perform live surgeries in front of crowds of curious onlookers.

People loved it. Thousands upon thousands of Torontonians and tourists showed up to witness the surgeries. So many, in fact, they couldn’t all get close enough to see through the windows into the operating room. Those who were too far away to see inside watched on a closed circuit television system.

For some of them, it was all a bit too much. As the doctors made their incisions into the tiny, furry patients on the operating table, many of those who were watching grew dizzy and weak in the knees. In one day alone, at least a dozen people fainted. One man passed out twice. Another recovered only to walk straight into a tree. One American newspaper called the operations “too realistic,” reporting that an average of three audience members were fainting during every surgery. “More than 50 visitors have been carried or helped out, and a few have required hospital treatment.” The organizers, fearing for public safety, made sure there were “fainting assistants” on hand to help those who did keel over.

Despite the queasy combination of cotton candy, corn dogs, roller coasters and live surgery, Vetescope was, by all accounts, a smashing success. Nearly 400,000 people came to see it in the first year alone. “[T]he general reaction could almost be described as one of astonishment,” a supporter later recalled. “It became apparent even to a child that medical care of animals is on par with that of humans.” The veterinary masterminds behind the exhibit were lauded for their public relations success.

In fact, it was such a big hit they made sure to capture it on film:

A version of this post was originally published on August 23, 2010.

Toronto's Most Deadly Disaster: The Nightmare on the SS Noronic

It was late. The Noronic was quiet. The ship was docked at the foot of Yonge Street, gently rocking in the dark waves. Almost everyone on board was already fast asleep. It was two-thirty in the morning; most of those who had enjoyed a night out in the city had come back to their rooms and gone to bed. Hundreds of passengers were tucked beneath their sheets.

Don Church was still up, though, heading back to his room from the lounge. He worked as an appraiser for a fire insurance company, so he knew what it meant when he found a strange haze in one of the corridors. He followed it back to its source: smoke billowed out from under the closed door of a linen closet. The most deadly fire in Toronto's history was just getting started.

The Noronic had first set sail all the way back in 1913: in the glory days of Great Lakes cruise ships. In the late-1800s and early-1900s, the Great Lakes were filled with luxury liners. The ships carried hundreds of passengers from ports on both sides of the border, steaming across the lakes in style. It was a major industry for nearly a century. As a member of the Toronto Marine Historical Society put it: "At one time there were more people asleep on boats on the Great Lakes than on any ocean in the world."

The SS Noronic was one of the biggest and most decadent of them all. They called her "The Queen of the Lakes." She had a ballroom, a dining hall, a barber shop and a beauty salon, music rooms and writing rooms, a library, a playroom for children, even her own newspaper printed on board for the passengers.

But as fancy as it all was, taking a cruise was also very risky. The Noronic was christened just a year after the unsinkable Titanic sank. And even on the Great Lakes, where there weren't any icebergs lurking in the dark, there was still plenty of danger.

The SS Noronic in 1930ish

In fact, the Noronic's own maiden voyage had almost been a disaster. She was scheduled to set sail for the first time in November of 1913, just as the biggest storm in the history of the Great Lakes rolled into the region. For three straight days, it lashed the lakes with hurricane-force winds, waves fifteen meters high, and torrents of rain and snow. The Noronic was lucky: she stayed in port where it was safe. But more than two hundred and fifty people would die in the storm. So many ships were destroyed that there's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to listing them.

Storms were far from the only danger. Ships capsized or collided with each other. They sank. Many — like one of the Noronic's own sister ships, the Hamonic — burst into flame. In the early days of the industry, there were essentially no meaningfully-enforced safety regulations at all. And even when the first new laws were introduced, there were loopholes for existing ships. The Noronic was shockingly unprepared for an emergency. But no one seemed to think that was a big deal: for 36 years, she sailed without incident.

Right up until 1949. That September, the Noronic left Detroit for a week-long trip to the Thousand Islands. The cruise brought her to Toronto on a cool Friday night, docked at Pier 9 (right near where the ferry terminal is today). Her passengers and crew streamed ashore to enjoy the city. And when they came back at the end of the night, all was quiet and calm. For a while.

By the time Don Church discovered the source of the smoke, it was already too late. And when he finally found a bellboy to help him, the bellboy didn't pull the fire alarm; instead, he got the keys to open the closet door. A hellish backdraft burst into the corridor. The flames spread quickly. When Church and the bellboy tried to use a fire hose, the hose didn't work. Neither did any of the others. Even worse, the ship's hallways were lined with wood paneling: for decades now, the wood had been carefully polished with lemon oil. It was the perfect fuel for the flames. Meanwhile, stairwells acted like chimneys, funneling oxygen to the blaze.

Eight minutes later, the ship's whistle jammed while issuing a distress signal and let loose with one endless, piercing shriek. By then, half the ship was already on fire. In a few more minutes, the rest of the Noronic was in flames, too. Survivors later said the whole thing went up like the head of a match.

Firefighters fighting the fire

On board, there was chaos and panic. The safety equipment didn't work. There weren't enough emergency exits. Only a few crew members were on duty and they had no training in case of an emergency like this one. Most of them fled the ship immediately, leaving the sleeping passengers behind. People were burned alive in their beds. They were suffocated in their rooms. They rushed along the decks and hallways in flames. A few were trampled to death. Some smashed through windows in their bid to escape, leaving blood pouring down their faces. The most desperate started to jump over the sides of the ship, the lucky ones hitting the water where rescuers — police, firemen and passers-by — were pulling people from the lake. One person drowned. Another hit the pier and died from the impact. Other jumpers didn't make it clear of the ship; they smashed into the decks below, making them slippery with their blood. When the first ladder was finally hoisted up against the burning ship, passengers pushed forward in such a rush that the ladder snapped, tossing people into the water. They say the screams of the victims were even louder than the whistles and sirens. It was one of the most horrifying scenes Toronto has ever witnessed.

At about five in the morning, just as the first light began to appear on the horizon, the blaze finally died out. Two hours after that, the Noronic had cooled off enough for people to begin the grizzly search though the wreckage. Bodies were everywhere: skeletons found embracing in the hallways, others still in bed, some turned entirely to ash by a heat so intense it could incinerate bone.

At first, the dead were pulled from the wreckage and piled up on the pier, but there were so many that eventually the Horticultural Building at the CNE was turned into a makeshift morgue. (Today, that same building is home to the Muzik nightclub.) For the next few weeks, the authorities struggled to identify the bodies. It was next to impossible. No one even knew how many people had been on board the ship. Some of them were unregistered: guests from Toronto visiting friends. Some had registered under fake names: taking a romantic cruise with someone who wasn't their spouse. Most of the passengers were American, so their families would have to make the grim journey north to see if they could identify any of the charred remains. Even then, many of the bodies were burnt so badly they were unrecognizable. Entirely new techniques of x-ray identification had to be developed. It was one of the very first times that dental records were ever used forensically. Eventually, the death toll was pegged at 119 lives. To this day, no one is entirely sure that number is quite right. But if it's anywhere close, it's the most people ever killed by a single disaster in the history of Toronto.

In the wake of the fire, Canada Steamship Lines paid more than $2 million to the victims and their families. And it didn't take long for safety laws to be overhauled. For the first time ever, all ships sailing on the Great Lakes would have to meet real, enforced safety regulations. But it wouldn't be cheap. It cost a lot to sail a big ship that wasn't a death trap; it was expensive to keep a luxury liner afloat if it wasn't allowed to burst into flames every once in a while. In the wake of the tragedy in Toronto, the industry collapsed. The golden age of cruising on the Great Lakes in style had come to a bloody end.

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WARNING: THE LAST TWO PHOTOS IN THIS GALLERY INCLUDE COVERED BODIES

The Noronic (via blogTO)

The Noronic in Sault Ste-Marie, 1940 (via the Vancouver Archives)

Dining in style on the Noronic (via Torontoist)

On board the Noronic in 1941ish (via the Vancouver Archives)

The Noronic burns (via Cities In Time)

The Noronic burns (via the Toronto Star)

The Noronic burns (via the Toronto Archives)

The skyline watches over the wreckage (via the Toronto Archives)

The wreckage of the Noronic (via the Cleveland Plain-Dealer)

The Royal York, in the distance, took in survivors (via the Toronto Archives)

The wreckage of the Noronic (via the Toronto Archives)

The Noronic sank in the shallows (via Citizen Freak)

A diver searches the wreckage (via the Toronto Star)

The wreckage (via Wikipedia)

The wreckage (via the Toronto Archives)

A body gets pulled from the wreckage (via the Cleveland Plain-Dealer)

The makeshift morgue at the Horticultural Building (via the Toronto Star)

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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

A version of this post was originally published on September 23, 2010. It has since been updated to be more awesome, with a bit more detail and some structural changes. 

There's a memorial to the victims in Mount Pleasant Cemetery and a plaque has been erected near where it happened. You can also see the ship's whistle on display at the Marine Museum on the waterfront near Ontario Place.

Ellis McGrath wrote a song about it, which you can stream here.  

The top image comes via Urban Toronto (thanks to this post by user Goldie). The second comes from via the Toronto Archives. And the third via the Toronto Star, which has an article about the fire by Valerie Hauch here.

The story of the Noronic has also been told by Chris Bateman on blogTo here, by Kevin Plummer on Torontoist here, and by Michael J. Varhola and Paul G. Hoffman in their book "Shipwrecks and Lost Treasures, Great Lakes: Legends and Lore, Pirate and More!" which you can find on Google Books here. The Maritime History of the Great Lakes shares a Toronto Daily Star article from the week of the fire here. The CBC Archives shared a radio clip about the fire here. The "What Went Wrong" blog discusses the issue of the (lack of) safety regulations in detail here. You can read more about the Noronic disaster in a couple of interesting articles from the Walkerville Times and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And Library and Archives Canada has a whole online exhibit about the SS Noronic fire here. 

Muzik In The Days Before Ford

Music Day at the CNE, 1959 (via)

As you might have noticed, Muzik Nightclub has been in the news a lot recently. For one, they successfully lobbied the Board of Directors of the CNE to make a moronic decision: banning electronic dance music parties on the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto's latest bid to become the town from Footloose. It was an especially worrying decision given that Rob Ford is on the Board of Directors of the CNE and is also a familiar, drunken face at the club that wanted to ban their competition. The owner of Muzik argued that EDM parties encourage underage drug and alcohol abuse — a giant fucking fudge cake of irony now that the most recent drug scandal from our crack-smoking mess of a Mayor involves that very same club. Ford's recent appearances at Muzik have allegedly included snorting lines of coke, puking in the bathroom, and getting in an argument with Justin Bieber.

But Muzik hasn't always been Muzik. Until recently, it was the CNE's Horticulture Building. It was built all the way back in 1907 — with an iconic glass dome — as a showcase for "agricultural, horticultural and floricultural displays." I came across a couple of photos of the building back in 2012, when I was digging through archives for photographs to leave at the Ex as part of the Toronto Dreams Project's Department of Photographic Hauntings. So I thought I'd take the chance now to share them on the blog.

The building also has a tragic connection to the worst disaster in Toronto's history. In 1949, the S.S. Noronic caught fire while it was docked downtown. More than 100 people died in the flames; more than in any other disaster to ever happen in our city. So many died, in fact, that the Horticulture Building was turned into a makeshift morgue. Some of the bodies were so badly burned that the authorities were forced to develop new techniques of dental X-ray identification in order to ID the victims.

It's quite possibly the saddest thing to ever happen in Toronto — and it happened on the exact same spot where more than 60 years later, our Mayor got into a stupid fight with a pop star about his drug use. (Um, the Mayor's drug use, that is, not the pop star's.)

The Horticulture Building, 1920 (via Toronto Then And Now)

The Horticulture Building in 1927 (via Chuckman's always awesome postcard blog)

Inside the Horticulture Building in 1950 (via Toronto Then And Now)

Victims of the Noronic fire in 1949 (via the Cleveland Plain Dealer)

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You can read my old post about the Noronic disaster here. And learn more about the Toronto Dreams Project's Department of Photographic Hauntings here. Metro has the story of the CNE's EDM ban here. The Star has the story of Ford's alleged coke-snorting, puking and Bieber fight here.

I'm Head Over Heels In Love With This Photo From The Ex in 1906

I really am. I just love it. Especially if you look close — click here and then on the photo that pops up to make it full-sized and scroll around looking at the expressions on the faces of these people from 190freaking6. Just amazing.

They're sitting on a spot in the Exhibition Grounds that's now probably actually just a littttle bit outside the Exhibition Grounds, pretty much where Lake Shore Boulevard is now. Behind them, in a sliver on the left-hand side of the photo, you can see just a bit of the Manufacturer's Building. It was built a few years earlier and would burned down in the 1960s. They built the modernist Better Living Building to replace it. It's still there today.

There's a bit of interesting history related to monument behind them, too. It was built by the Independent Order of Foresters, a fraternal organization (kind of a little like the Masons) with roots going all the way back to the royal English forests of the 1300s, when people used to band together for safety. The Foresters spread to Canada thanks to Oronhyatekha — a Mohawk from the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation, near Brantford, who was the first indigenous student at Oxford, the second indigenous doctor in Canada, a member of our national rifle team and the very first indigenous member the Foresters ever had. A bunch of the indigenous artifacts at the ROM come from his collection; he'd started a museum of his own in the Foresters Temple at Bay & Richmond. He died about six months after this photo was taken. And he'll totally be getting his own post someday.

 I came across this photo here.

Photo: Ass-Grabbing At The Ex

I'm thinking this photo kind of speaks for itself. I found it over at The National Post, posted with an article about sex at the CNE. You can read the whole thing right on over here. (It's got more photos, too, including one of the old "Striporama" exhibit. Wait, what?)

The Very First Ride At The CNE

The CNE's first ride, 1892ish

It all started back in the mid-1800s, as a relatively small provincial fair. They held it in a field out behind Upper Canada College, which in those days was on King Street (on the northwest corner of Simcoe, across from where Roy Thompson Hall is now). It was a very agricultural affair. They had cows and sheep and horses and blankets and knitting and needlework. The cheese was very popular. So was the wax fruit. The day ended with a big dinner at the Lieutenant Governor's residence across the street. The city's bigwigs were all there; they declared it a success.

For the next few decades, the fair toured around the province, moving from one city to another each year.  Mostly, it came here and to Kingston and London and Hamilton. And as it grew, we started putting up permanent buildings for it. A Crystal Palace was the first to go up. And we set aside some land for it, too, part of the old Garrison military reserve that the government had held on to ever since our city was founded. A century and a half later, the Ex is still held on that same ground.

It wasn't until 1879, though, that we decided to have the fair here every year. And that we'd call it the Canadian National Exhibition. The CNE was officially born. By then, the fair was a huge freaking deal. There were 23 permanent buildings on the site. Thousands of exhibits. It drew more than 100,000 visitors that first year. 

Now, no one, it seems, is quite sure exactly when the CNE's first ride opened. It might have been that year, or, at the very least, soon after. It was a tiny little Ferris Wheel. Just 15 feet high. It had four buckets; they could hold two people each. And the whole thing had to be powered by hand. It was such an early prototype that people didn't even call them Ferris Wheels yet. That didn't happen until about a year after this photo was taken, when George Ferris Jr. unveiled his enormous creation at the Chicago World's Fair. Tens of thousands of pounds of iron and steel. Enough room for more than two thousand people. All powered by steam engines. The world of amusement park rides had changed forever. And the Ex didn't waste any time following suit. The very next year, our fair boasted "Ferris Wheels, Carousals, Swings and other amusements for young and old." Soon, there would be an entire midway.

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I got more of this info from Once Upon A Century: 100 Year History of the 'Ex', a book my most CNE-obsessed friend gave me last year.

Link: Old CNE Posters

The poster for the Ex in 1937

Tonight I'm heading down to the Ex for the first time in like a bazillion years, so it seems like a perfect time to direct your attention to a small online archive of old CNE posters collected by a geography professor at York University. You can check them out over here. They range from 1884 to 1939. I'm especially struck by the Communistic worker imagery in a couple of the designs from the '20s and '30s. And the way the kid in the last one looks like an enraged mini-King Kong, ready to swat a plane out of the air.

There are some other cool ones here and here and here.

Marilyn Bell Kicks America's Ass

In 1954, Florence Chadwick was one of the world's most famous swimmers. The 34 year-old American had crossed the English Channel in record time. She'd been the first woman to swim the 26 miles (of shark habitat) between Catalina Island and the California coast. She appeared in movies and on television. She was a celebrity. And in 1954, that's exactly what the Canadian National Exhibition was looking for.

The CNE had started off as a farmer's fair all the way back in 1879, but in the years after WWII it was moving away from those agricultural roots toward a more modern feel. And that involved things like promoting the 1954 edition of the fair by offering Chadwick $10,000 if she successfully became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario.

Of course, the idea of a Canadian icon like the Ex offering the prize to an American seemed like an insult to some, including at least a couple of Canadian swimmers. Winnie Roach and Marilyn Bell were younger than Chadwick, but they were already accomplished long-distance swimmers. (Roach had actually been the first Canadian to swim the Channel—as she stood dripping on the beach at Dover in her bathing suit, her face all messed up from a jellyfish sting, a British customs official asked her if she had anything to declare.) Annoyed at the CNE's snub, both Roach and Bell decided that they would try the 52 km crossing at the same time as Chadwick. And so, on the night of September the 8th, all three women entered the waters of New York State and aimed for Toronto.

The water was rough. Strong winds whipped up the waves, which towered nearly five meters high. Below the surface lamprey eels—hideous and parasitic, some nearly a meter long and armed with round, toothy mouths used to latch onto fish and feed off their body fluids (their Wikipedia page actually says that, "body fluids")—were everywhere, attacking legs and arms and bodies. After only a few hours, stomach cramps forced Chadwick from the water. Soon after that, Roach followed, leaving the 16 year-old Bell as the last swimmer in the lake.

She had been pushed off course by the winds and, on at least one occasion, had been disoriented enough to swim in the wrong direction. But she kept on, through the night and into the next day. Radio stations began providing regular updates on her progress. Local newspapers printed one extra edition after another. And finally, at about 8:15 pm, nearly 21 hours after she first entered the water, a cold and exhausted Bell reached a breakwater just south of Sunnyside. She had officially become the very first person to swim across Lake Ontario.

A roaring crowd of three-hundred thousand was waiting to welcome her home. 

The CNE eventually decided to give her the $10,000 they had offered to Chadwick, but for Bell, of course, that had never been the point. "I don’t think I was sure I could make it," she later admitted, "but I wasn’t so sure Florence Chadwick could make it either. The challenge for me was to go one stroke further than the American. As corny as it sounds… I did it for Canada.”

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You can listen to her being interviewed by the CBC after the swim, here. Or watch a different interview and some silent footage over here. Or, if you're looking to kill even more time, how about an hour-long documentary on YouTube?