The True Story of Toronto's Island Ghost

They say that on some dark nights, as an eerie mist creeps over the Toronto islands, you can still hear him moaning somewhere in the distance. On others, you might hear him walking up the steps of the old lighthouse, even though there's no one there — or see a ghostly light shining up top, even when the lantern isn't lit. Sometimes, you might find his fresh blood spilled on those old wooden stairs. Or even catch a glimpse of him yourself: a spectre stalking through the undergrowth, or wandering the paths around the lighthouse, bloodied and beaten, his arms missing. They say he's the ghost of Toronto's first lightkeeper and that he's searching for the pieces of his body that were hacked off more than two hundred years ago and buried somewhere in the sand.

The story of John Paul Radelmüller came to a bloody end in Toronto, but it began more than six thousand kilometers away — in the royal courts of Europe.

He was born in Bavaria — which is part of Germany now — in the town of Anspach, not far from Frankfurt. This was in the middle of the 1700s. Back then, the British royal family were all from Germany. King George II had been born in Hanover; Queen Caroline came from the very same town where Radelmüller grew up. And even though they were ruling England, the royal family kept close ties to their homeland. Many of their servants were German, too.

That's how Radelmüller ended up in England. He was a teenager when he got a job as a royal servant during the reign of "Mad" King George III: he attended to the king's younger brother, Prince William. But as luxurious as the royal quarters were, it can't have been an entirely easy life. The king was suffering from bouts of severe mental illness and frequently clashed with the prince. At the same time, the prince's son was such a jerk that even members of his own family called him "The Contagion". After sixteen years serving the prince, Radelmüller finally quit. He headed back home to Bavaria to become a farmer. 

But this was 1798. The French Revolution had plunged Europe into decades of chaos and war. Radelmüller's farm was caught right in the middle. He was forced to flee, becoming a refugee. Knowing he would be welcome back in England, he returned to the royal court.

Prince Edward

This time, he served as a porter to one of the "mad" king's sons: Prince Edward. The Prince Edward. The father of Queen Victoria. The guy Prince Edward Island and Prince Edward County are named after.

Edward was a huuuuuge fan of Canada. In fact, he's the very first person who ever used the word "Canadians" to refer to both anglophones and francophones. By the time Radelmüller joined his staff, the prince had already spent years living in Québec and in Nova Scotia; he was only back home in England to recover after falling off his horse. Soon, he headed back across the Atlantic to Halifax. And his new porter went with him.

It didn't take long for Radelmüller to fall in love with Canada, too. When Prince Edward fell ill and was forced to return home to Britain, Radelmüller stayed at his side — but he came back to Canada as soon as he got the chance. He landed a gig as a steward for the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia.

Still, he dreamed of becoming a farmer again. Someone had told him the best farmland was far to the west, in the brand new province of Upper Canada. He was determined to make a new life for himself out here on the Canadian frontier. And no one was going to stop him. The Governor was reluctant to let him go — promising to give him letters of recommendation and then holding them hostage at the very last moment, hoping his trusted steward could be convinced to stay on for another year. But Radelmüller's belongings had already been loaded onto a ship ready to set sail. So he left anyway, making the grueling five-week trip up the St. Lawrence in the dead of winter.

Radelmüller arrived in Toronto on New Year's Day in 1804. He knew nobody. He had no job. No land. No letters of introduction. It wouldn't be easy. Our city was still just the tiny little town of York back then. The population was still counted in the hundreds. It had only been ten years since John Graves Simcoe and his British soldiers had first arrived to carve the muddy capital out of the ancient forest towering over the northern shore of Lake Ontario. This was still very much the frontier.

But Radelmüller succeeded anyway. First, he headed north up Yonge Street to Markham, founding a school where he taught English to the Germans who had recently settled there. Before long, he was recognized as their official translator for all government business.  

Soon, there would be an even better opportunity.

Toronto Harbour, 1793

Simcoe had picked this spot as the place to build his city because of the Toronto islands. Back then, they were still connected to the mainland: they were just one big, long, sandy peninsula stretching out from a marsh where the Port Lands are today. The sandbar wouldn't become an island until a big storm created the eastern gap in the 1850s. The peninsula created a natural harbour with only one way in: through the narrow western gap. That entrance would be easy to defend. In fact, Simcoe was so excited that he called the spot Gibraltar Point — named after the rocky fortress at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Simcoe declared that a lighthouse was one of the very first buildings they should build in Toronto. Right there on Gibraltar Point.

About ten years later, construction finally began on the south-west corner of the sandbar. The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse was the very first permanent lighthouse built anywhere on the Great Lakes. It was the first stone building in Toronto. When it opened in 1808, it towered over the beach right next to the water, stretching sixteen meters into the air. That's about five storeys. It would be the tallest building in our city for almost fifty years. At the base, the walls are nearly two meters thick, built of limestone shipped north across the lake from a quarry at Queenston — high on the heights at Niagara, which you can still see from Toronto on a clear day. At the top of the lighthouse, a bright lantern shone out as a beacon to the ships sailing through the dark waters at night. It burned two hundred gallons of sperm whale oil every year.

As Toronto's first lightkeeper, Radelmüller's job was to light the lamp every evening and extinguish it at dawn. Plus, he would be in charge of signaling the city every time a big ship pulled into the harbour. He flew a Union Jack for every vessel arriving from Kingston. And the British Red Ensign for ships sailing north from Niagara. (That's the flag you can see in the painting at the top of this post.)

He lived in a small wooden cabin next to the lighthouse. And soon, he was joined there by his family. A couple of years into his new job, Radelmüller married his wife, Magdalena. The wedding was held at Toronto's first church: St James', a little wooden building at King & Church Streets — the same spot where St. James' Cathedral stands now. Before long, they had a daughter: little Arabella was born.

Detail from a Canada Post stamp

It was a quiet, peaceful life. At least at first. They say Radelmüller even made some extra money on the side by brewing beer in the German style he'd learned to make back home. But it didn't take long for the chaos that had driven him out of Germany to find him far on this side of the Atlantic. The wars sparked by the French Revolution led to the rise of Napoleon. And while the might of the British Empire was distracted by the tiny French Emperor, the Americans seized their opportunity. They invaded Canada. The War of 1812 had begun. Just a few short years after Radelmüller had started his new job as our city's first lightkeeper, Toronto was in the middle of a war zone.

The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse was suddenly even more important. The Great Lakes were a key battleground. Control of Lake Ontario was most important of all. Keeping the British fleet safe from the treacherous shoals near the harbour was an essential job — one lost ship could turn the tide of the entire war. And it seems that Radelmüller was up to the task, playing his vital role far out on his lonely sandbar as the war dragged on for nearly three years.

Tragically, he wouldn't live to see the end of it. On Christmas Eve of 1814, a peace treaty was finally signed. But negotiations were held in Belgium, which meant that it would take weeks for the news to cross the ocean and finally reach Toronto. By the time it did, Radelmüller was already dead. He'd been murdered.

It happened after dark on the second day of 1815. The story of that terrible winter night has been told over and over again, passed down from one generation of Torontonians to the next over the course of the last two hundred years. The details are vague; there are many different versions of the tale. But it goes something like this:

Radelmüller and his family weren't the only ones on the sandbar. Hunters and fishermen used it too. First Nations families occasionally camped nearby. And not far from the lighthouse, there was a new military blockhouse. To this day we still call that spot on the islands "Blockhouse Bay". It was built during the War of 1812, armed with a gun designed to the protect our harbour against the Americans. And it was manned by soldiers from Fort York. They spent most of their time keeping watch and preparing for an attack. But they were also friendly with the lightkeeper. Sometimes, they'd row down Blockhouse Bay to visit the lighthouse and drink some of Radelmüller's beer.

On that cold January night at the very beginning of 1815, two of those soldiers came for a visit. They were called John Henry and John Blowman. At first, everything seemed to be going well. They all drank long into the night. But at some point, Radelmüller decided the soldiers had had enough. He cut them off. And that's went everything went horribly wrong.

CBC Archives

The soldiers were angry; they got violent. One took off his belt, the other grabbed a rock, and together they attacked the lightkeeper. Radelmüller ran, bleeding and afraid, scrambling up the steps of the lighthouse in a desperate bid to escape. But the soldiers followed, relentless. They broke down the door and chased him up the narrow wooden stairs to the very top of the lighthouse. That's where the lightkeeper made his last stand: up there, high above the ground as his flaming beacon shone out across the dark lake. There was a final skirmish. Radelmüller was pushed over the railing and fell to his death. It was over. The lightkeeper lay still.

The two soldiers knew they were in deep trouble. The penalty for murder was death. And so, they worked quickly to cover up their crime. They found an axe and used it to hack the body into pieces, severing the limbs. Then, they buried what was left of John Paul Radelmüller, bit by bit, in a series of shallow graves dug in the frozen sand. Their grisly job finished, they ran. 

That, it seems, was a mistake. It was more than a little suspicious: disappearing the very same night the lightkeeper did. Less than two weeks later, the York Gazette announced their arrest. "From circumstances there is moral proof of [Radelmüller] having been murdered," the paper reported. "If the horrid crime admits of aggravation when the inoffensive and benevolent character of the unfortunate sufferer are considered, his murder will be pronounced most barbarous and inhuman. The parties lost with him are the proposed perpetrators and are in prison."

It took more than two months for the case to come to trial. When it did, the soldiers were acquitted. There was little evidence. No one had ever found the body. There would be no justice for the lightkeeper.

And so, his soul was doomed to haunt his lighthouse for the rest of eternity.

At least, that's what people like to say. The details, as you might imagine, are more than a little bit sketchy — right down to the inconsistent spelling of Radelmüller's name. It's hard to find a single record of anyone who has ever claimed to have actually seen the ghost. Even the story of the murder itself is hard to verify. The tale was passed down from one generation of lightkeepers to the next. The first concrete record of the story seems to have been written down by the Toronto newspaperman and historian John Ross Robertson — but that was a hundred years after the killing took place. It was told to him by another lightkeeper at Gibraltar Point — George Durnan — whose family manned the lighthouse for more than seventy years (from the 1830s right up until 1908). Durnan didn't mention a ghost at all. And Robertson suspected that even the murder had probably never happened. He found no record of the crime in the archives of the York Gazette. "There is no doubt that it has been garnished in the telling," he admitted. "It may be a fairy tale..."

The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, 1900

Decades later, the last of the island lightkeepers — a woman with the awesome name of Dedie Dodds — spoke to the CBC. "There may be a ghost," she told them, but there were plenty of rational explanations for everything. "The cooing of the pigeons is very eerie on a dark night. And the wind howling through the lighthouse gives you the shivers. When the moon is full, it's reflected back from the top of the lighthouse." Just a few months earlier, even she had been momentarily fooled. "It gave me quite a start."

Still, it made for a very good story. And Durnan did claim to have found a piece of related evidence. He said that one day, he went looking for Radelmüller's remains around the spot he'd been told he could find them. There, buried in a shallow grave about a hundred and fifty meters to the west of the lighthouse, he found a coffin. Inside, there was a human jawbone.

It was all more than enough to fuel the legend. By the time Dodds became the lightkeeper in the 1950s, the phantom had become part of the myth — and the grisly tale of the haunted lighthouse had become one of Toronto's most beloved ghost stories. In fact, by the end of that decade, it would earn official recognition. After a century and a half of continuous service, the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse was finally going to be decommissioned. To honour the old building's new life as an historical monument, a new plaque was going to be erected. 

The Ontario Archaeological and Historical Sites Advisory Board decided to include the ghost story as part of the official story of the building. It was the final sentence on the new plaque:

"The mysterious disappearance of its first keeper, J.P. Rademuller, in 1815 and the subsequent discovery nearby of part of a human skeleton enhanced its reputation as a haunted building."

That line sparked a heated battle. The Advisory Board might like it, but the Metro Toronto Parks Committee disagreed. The councillors on the committee were appalled by the idea that such fantastical nonsense was going to be officially recognized. One councillor dismissed the story of Radelmüller's ghost as "a myth... an old wives' tale" unworthy of inclusion on a plaque. "I can't see it would make the place attractive to children," another councillor worried, completely misunderstanding children. Even the Metro Chairman himself, Fred Gardiner, the guy the highway is named after, weighed in. "That," he declared, "would only scare people."

The plaque in 2015 (photo by me)

But the Advisory Board refused to back down. The plaque went up anyway and the story of Radelmüller's ghost was preserved. Today, you can still find it there on the side of the lighthouse, giving the people of Toronto a colourful connection to one of our most interesting — but most easily forgotten — landmarks.

Today, the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse is the oldest lighthouse anywhere on the Great Lakes. Some people consider it to be the oldest in all of Canada. The only older lighthouse is in Nova Scotia — but it's been repaired and renovated so much that even Lighthouse Digest suggests that it might not really count anymore.

For more than two hundred years, our first lighthouse has kept watch over our city. It's the oldest building in Toronto that still stands in the same place where it was originally built. It has borne witness to all of our greatest and more terrible moments. It saw the American invasion during the War of 1812. The raging storm that turned the sandbar into the islands. The Great Fires of 1849 and of 1904. The arrival of the first steamships and of the first trains. It has helped thousands of sailors bring thousands of ships safely into our harbour, carrying countless new Canadians into our city to make this place their home. Once the tallest building in Toronto, the lighthouse has watched our skyline grow into one of the most impressive in the world, topped by one of the tallest buildings humanity has ever built.

It's easy to forget the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, out there alone on the island. The light was turned off long ago. The cottages where the lightkeepers and their families once lived have now all been demolished. The shoreline has evolved, grown with silt, moved more than a hundred meters away. Even with an 1830s extension taking it another few meters into the air, the lighthouse has nearly disappeared among the trees. It has been swallowed up by the same city it helped bring to life.

But the story of the lightkeeper's ghost helps us to remember — to remember not just the history of that building, but of what this place used to be.

Today, the guardian of the lighthouse is a volunteer. His name is Manuel Cappel. He too is from Germany, just like Radelmüller was. He lives on the islands, where he also builds bicycles; he used to run the Rectory Café. Torontonians today ask him the very same question they've been asking the island lightkeepers for generations now: is the lighthouse really haunted?

He gives them the same answer he gives everyone. An answer that couldn't be more true.

"It is," he tells them, "if you want it to be."

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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

The story of Toronto's island ghost will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead, coming from Dundurn Press in the fall of 2017.

Edward Butts uncovered much of Radelmüller's true history in his book Murder: Twelve True Stories of Homicide in Canada. You can borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here, or buy it from Dundurn Press here.

The story of the lighthouse and its ghost has been told many, many times. Gary Miedema told it for Spacing. Chris Bateman told it for blogTO. Jordan Pipher told it for the Hogtown Crier. Sarah B. Hood told it for Adventures in Upper Canada. Jacqueline Martinz told it for Torontoist. Wikipedia tells it here. Lighthouse Digest tells it here. Urban Toronto tells it here, with an assist from Heritage Toronto. The Friends of Toronto Islands tell it here. The Toronto & Ontario Ghosts and Hauntings Society tells it here. A TV show called Creepy Canada told their own version of the story, which you can watch on YouTube here. 

John Ross Roberton's original version appeared in volume two of his "Landmarks of Toronto" books. You can find in online thanks to Archive.org here. 

The Ontario Catholic Paranormal Research Society (which seeks to either debunk ghost stories, or re-contextualize them as religious events) did their own investigation of the lighthouse. They found no evidence of paranormal activity and raise many of the most convincing doubts about the story of Radelmüller's ghost here.

The Toronto Star talks to the current guardian of the lighthouse, Manuel Cappel, here. And in PDFs, which I think you're able to access if you have a Toronto Public Library card here and here. You can check out the website for his bike-building business here.

The Star also covered the story of the battle over the plaque here. And they talk to Dedie Dodds here.

The CBC talked to Dedie Dodds and a member of the Durnan family in the 1950s. You can watch that video online here. 

The main image is a slightly cropped version of "View of York" which was painted in 1816ish by Robert Irvine. It's on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario and has been featured on their website here. 

The old map of the harbour comes from the awesome Historical Maps of Toronto site here. And the photo of the lighthouse in the year 1900 comes from the Toronto Public Library's digital archives here.

This post is related to dream 25 The Lightkeepers' Daughter Arabella Radelmüller, 1815

Toronto's Greatest Second Baseman Ever (Isn't Who You Think It Is)

When you ask Google who the greatest second baseman of all-time was, a few names pop up. Rogers Hornsby is a popular pick, a star for the St. Louis Cardinals back in the 1920s and '30s. Some people say it was the Dodgers' Jackie Robinson or the Reds' Joe Morgan or the great Eddie Collins who played for the A's and White Sox. Roberto Alomar's name comes up, too — the Blue Jays Hall of Famer is easily one of the best ever. But he's not the greatest second baseman to ever wear a Toronto uniform. That honour goes to the man who played second base for the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1917.

His name was Napoleon Lajoie and he was very, VERY good. No one in the history of the American League has ever had a higher batting average than he did in 1901 — he hit .426 for Philadelphia that season. He led the league in home runs and RBIs, too; one of the few players to ever win the batting "Triple Crown". That year, he stuck out only nine times, which is just plain silly. And it wasn't a fluke. By the end of his career, he'd become one of the first players in baseball history to collect 3,000 hits.

Modern stats love him, too. By Wins Above Replacement (which tries to judge a player's total value), Lajoie is ranked as the third most valuable second baseman in the history of the game — the 19th greatest player of all-time. Better than Joe DiMaggio or Pete Rose or Mark McGwire. He was one of the first players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

"Lajoie was one of the most rugged players I ever faced," Cy Young once said. "He'd take your leg off with a line drive, turn the third baseman around like a swinging door and powder the hand of the left fielder." Sports writers said he was so effortlessly graceful that he made even chewing tobacco look good. He was so dedicated to the craft of hitting that he never went to the movies or read a newspaper on a train for fear of hurting his eyes. As a player-manager in Cleveland, Lajoie was so popular they literally named the team after him: they became the Cleveland Napoleons. Naps for short.

Even as a grizzled veteran at the age of 38, Lajoie was still great: he was worth 5 Wins Above Replacement that year (better than anyone on the 2013 Blue Jays). But after that, his skills began to seriously decline. For a while, he kept playing anyway, chasing the dream of his first championship — one had slipped away when he was cut by an opposing player's spikes, got blood poisoning and nearly lost his foot; another in a heartbreaking loss on the final day of the season. But at the age of 42, after 21 years in the Major Leagues, age had finally caught up with him. Lajoie called it quits having never won a pennant.

Hanlan's Point Stadium, 1918ish

That's when he came to Toronto. He might not have been good enough to play second base in the Majors anymore, but he had a lot of knowledge to pass down to younger players. And so, he signed on as the manager for one of the most storied franchises in the history of the Minor Leagues: The Toronto Maple Leafs.

By then, our city already had a long history of success on the baseball field. Toronto's first championship came all the way back in the 1880s, at beautiful Sunlight Park overlooking the eastern slope of the Don Valley (just south of Queen). The Maple Leafs were founded soon after that, in the 1890s; before long, they'd moved to a new spot on the Islands. When an early, wooden version of the stadium burned down, they got a gorgeous new ballpark. Hanlan's Point Stadium was hailed as the biggest in the Minor Leagues when it first opened in 1910: it boasted more than 17,000 seats. Over the next few years, it witnessed two more championships and the very first professional home run by a young pitcher named Babe Ruth. His blast soared over the fence into the lake. 

Now, Hanlan's Point would be home to Lajoie. And it wasn't his first connection to Canada: his parents were both Québecois; his older siblings had been born there, growing up on a farm outside Montreal. Lajoie signed on as the Leafs manager, responsible for signing and trading players, as well as decisions on the field. He also said he'd play "a little" second base. But that's not the way things turned out.

The old second baseman had slowed down considerably, but he still had something left in the tank. Against the younger, less experienced, less talented minor leaguers, Lajoie thrived. He hit clean up for the Leafs that year, and did a hell of job of it. He led the league with a .380 average, racked up a league-leading 221 hits and 39 doubles. At one point, he put together a 21-game hitting streak. And he did it all in the face of adversity: his fear of water made the ferry to the Islands an ordeal; the freezing temperatures of an usually cold Canadian spring meant games were being cancelled as late as Victoria Day that year; and with the First World War raging overseas, some players were being drafted halfway through the season. Others rebelled against Lajoie's leadership; one pitcher just up and left the team. Lajoie got suspended twice for arguing with umpires. But he was still so popular that everywhere the Maple Leafs went, opposing teams held "Lajoie Days" and showered him with gifts. He was playing so well in Toronto that Major League teams started showing an interest again. That summer, both the Washington Senators and the Chicago Cubs offered him a chance to come back to the Majors, but he turned them both down. He wanted to finish what he'd started in Toronto.

The 1917 Toronto Maple Leafs (enlarge)

After a slow start to the season, the Maple Leafs were right in the thick of the pennant race by the end of August — battling it out with Baltimore, Providence and Newark over the last two weeks of the season. Lajoie led the way as the manager and as the team's star player. He went 6 for 8 in one double-header against Buffalo, belted two home runs in an extra innings win against Montreal, and then went 6 for 8 again in another double-header on the last weekend of the season. "Lajoie was himself worth four ordinary players," the Globe gushed. With two games left to play on the very final day, the Toronto Maple Leafs were in the driver's seat: if they won both games, they'd finish in first place.

In the opening game, it was their ace — Harry Thompson — who carried the team. He shut out the Rochester Hustlers over the course of nine innings, only giving up three hits on the way to his 25th victory of the season. The Maple Leafs won 1-0.

The second game started off as a tense, scoreless battle over the first five innings. Then Lajoie — who was playing first base that day — doubled two men home. It proved to be all they needed. Toronto went on to win 5-1. It was all over. And at first base, Lajoie was the last to touch the ball.

"A broad grin overspread Lajoie's features as he took the throw from Murray to record the 27th out," the Globe reported. And that grin came with good reason. After more than 20 years in baseball, he'd finally done it. Napoleon Lajoie had won a pennant.

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Top photo: Napoleon Lajoie in 1908 (via Wikipedia). Photo of the 1917 Maple Leafs via David L. Freitz.

David L. Freitz tells the story of the 1917 Toronto Maple Leafs in his book, Napoleon Lajoie: King of Ballplayers, which you read excerpts from on Google Books here. Henry Grayson raved about him in 1943 here. And he gets a few paragraphs in the book I first learned about this story from, Baseball's back in town: From the Don to the Blue Jays A history of baseaball in Toronto by Louis Cauz. You can check out Napoleon Lajoie's stats on Baseball Reference here. Or the stats for the 1917 Toronto Maple Leafs here. Check out Hanlan's Point Stadium on Wikipedia here. Spacing's got a post about it here, along with a photo old the old wooden ballpark. Napoleon Lajoie's page is here.

I used the FanGraph's version of WAR for this piece — there's another version created by Baseball Reference, which still ranks Lajoie as the third-best second baseman ever, but drops him a couple of slots lower on the all-time player list. Bill James, the father of modern baseball statistics, talks about some of the problems in assessing Lajoie's value by WAR here. Mostly, there are problems accurately determining the value of his defensive contribution, though that's a relatively small portion of his overall contribution — and one which may have already been accounted for since James wrote about it.

You can read my post about Babe Ruth's famous Toronto home run here. And my post about Toronto's first championship baseball team, in 1887, here. I wrote about the bizarre tradition of Donkey Baseball here. And there's a photo of folks playing baseball in Riverdale Park in 1914 here. Watch Joe Carter win the World Series here. Or learn about the next stadium the Maple Leafs called home here.

The Islands In Winter

The Toronto Islands are, of course, one of our city's most popular attractions. But not so much during the winter, when the cold and snow and ice and lack of ferry service tend to keep most people away. So, as the polar vortex loosened its grip last week, a friend and I decided to head out across the harbour for the first time in the winter. It was a pretty remarkable experience. In the fresh snow and ice, the Islands were absolutely gorgeous. And while the ferry folk did warn us that the boat might get stuck in the ice — the Ward's Island ferry is the only one in service during the off-season — we didn't run into any trouble. We even got a private tour of the barn at Far Enough Farm (next to the deserted Centreville) and had a close encounter with some remarkably friendly mallards. I've uploaded a gallery of my photos from our excursion, along with a few archival pics, to Facebook, which you can check out here (whether you have a Facebook account or not):

FULL GALLERY

I've also got a little video of those ducks, which you can watch here. And, as always, you can follow me on Instagram at @todreamsproject.

Toronto's Coal-Choked Skyline in 1908

Once upon a time, Toronto was a filthy, coal-choked mess. Not that long ago, you couldn't even spend a day out-and-about without coming home with a collar blackened from all the soot in the air. Our buildings were coated with the stuff — Derek Flack, over at blogTO, has a whole post about it and even wonders if that might be part of the reason we were so willing to demolish so much of our heritage: it looked pretty gross. Even after the TransCanada natural gas pipeline came to Toronto in the 1950s, it was a long time before things got cleaned up. According to Flack, it wasn't until the '80s and '90s that our oldest buildings were finally cleansed of our coal-burning past. At the same time, new environmental regulations were introduced as a way of protecting our health — and ensuring that our skyline would never again look like this 1908 shot from the Island.

By the end of 2013, Ontario will shut down the last of our big coal-burning power plants — leaving only one "small backup generator" which will be closed next year. Coal plant closures here and in Québec are reducing carbon emissions by about the same amount that the tar sands are raising them. But smog is still an issue: in 2012, Toronto saw full-day smog alerts on 16 different days.

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You can check out more filthy Toronto photos thanks to Derek Flack's post here and another one looking specifically at coal here. I've got another smog-photo post here. The photo was taken by William James, one of Toronto's most important early photographers; Flack's got a post about him here too.

The Old Island Airport Terminal, In Limbo

This is the old Island Airport terminal. It's sitting out there at Hanlan's Point, all by itself, as Porter planes take off in the background. It was built by in the 1930s — by the federal government as part of a Trans-Canada airway — back when passenger planes were still something of a novelty. And that's one of the reasons the building has been officially recognized as a National Historic Site: it's one of the few terminals to have survived from those early days of air travel.

It used to be right in the thick of things, but last year it got in the way of the construction of the new tunnel to the mainland they're building so that Porter customers don't have to take the ferry. The building was uprooted and moved out here (despite, it seems, the historical designation — which specifically includes "the building on its footprint"), where it waits on blocks for someone to decide what to do with it.

At the time of the move, a spokesperson from the Toronto Port Authority told the Star, "We are looking to make sure it's properly used as a heritage building, whether it's to move it or keep it on site and make it accessible long term... We haven’t had a final firm offer but we're confident that there will be interest."

A year later, as Porter looks to expand the airport even further, it seems that the fate of the old terminal is still up in the air. Shawn Micallef recently wrote about some of his ideas for the building — and his memories of it — in his column for the Star. You can check that out here. And the website for Canada's Historic Places has more detail on the building's history and architectural significance here.

Photo by me on Instagram: @TODreamsProject.

The Frozen Eastern Gap in 1912

Fuck that looks cold. It's 1912 and we're looking down the pier of the Eastern Gap — the opening from the harbour into the lake between the eastern side of the islands and Cherry Beach. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, the gap didn't always exist. When Toronto was founded back in the late 1700s, the islands weren't islands at all — they were just a sandy peninsula still attached to the mainland. It wasn't until a couple of big storms in the 1850s that the gap was created and widened and the islands became the islands. We've artificially enlarged and shaped them since then.

The photo comes via a great blogTO post by Derek Flack, all about Toronto in winter. You can check it out here.

The Scarborough Bluffs Looking Like They Belong In A John Ford Film

I can't seem to find any information about this photo online — like, say, when it was taken — but I like it so I'm posting it anyway. It almost looks like a shot of Monument Valley, where John Ford shot his iconic Westerns, but this is, of course, our very own Scarborough Bluffs. They were apparently originally formed thousands of years ago as part the shoreline of the ancient Lake Iroquois, the giant lake left behind when the last Ice Age ended and the enormofuckingus glacier that used to cover this land melted away. (The big hill that runs through Toronto just north of Davenport Road was also part of that shoreline.) The cliffs been gradually moving north as they erode away, and the sand that gets washed off them is what formed the Toronto Islands (which were nothing more than a sandy peninsula when our city was founded — before they got separated from the mainland by a storm and then enlarged artificially).

There are some cliffs that look a little like this on the northeast coast of England, at Scarborough, which is why Elizabeth Simcoe,  the wife of the guy who founded Toronto, named our cliffs Scarborough, too. The name obviously stuck. And ended up being used not just for the Bluffs, but for the entire east-end suburb that was eventually swallowed up by the Megacity.

Photo: Rowing Around The Islands in 1908

Derek Flack has a tendency to nail it over at blogTO when he posts galleries of old Toronto photos. His most recent collection is a visual history of the Islands, stretching all the way back to the 1830s. In those early days, the Islands weren't islands at all, but a sandy peninsula still connected to the mainland. Giantass storms in the 1850s finally severed them from the rest of the city. I've re-posted what might be my favourite photo from his gallery — of these folks rowing sometime around 1908 — but, really, you're going to want to scroll through the whole collection to get a sense of how one of our city's awesomest features has evolved over the years. And you can do that by clicking right here.

Babe Ruth's First Home Run

Hanlan's Point Stadium

1914 started out as a pretty darn good year for George Herman Ruth. In 1913, he had just been an 18 year-old kid playing baseball at an orphanage in Baltimore. But by the start of the 1914 season, he'd caught the eye of the Orioles, had been signed to a contract for $250 and took his place as a rookie pitcher in a professional rotation. It didn't take long for him to become a rising star, quickly winning 14 games, leading the Orioles into first place and earning himself two big raises in the process.

But the Orioles were in financial trouble. Halfway through the season they were forced to trade him the Red Sox and, unfortunately for Ruth, the Red Sox already had more than enough great pitching. And so, only a few months into his very first season, the Babe was sent down to the minors.

Despite the setback, the young pitcher didn't miss a beat with his new team. He won nine game in his first two months with the Providence Grays and led them into first place ahead of outfits like the Jersey City Skeeters, the Montreal Royals and the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The Maple Leafs had been playing baseball in Toronto since 1885, back when they were known as the Toronto Baseball Club and played their games on an old lacrosse field at Jarvis and Wellesley. By 1914, though, they had already gone through a whole series of real stadiums and—once most of them had burned down—built the biggest ballpark in the minor leagues: a gorgeous 17,000-seat facility on the island called Hanlan's Point Stadium.

It was on September 5, as the season was drawing to a close, that the Providence Grays came to town with their new star pitcher. He threw a one-hit shutout that day, winning 9-0, but that's not what people remember. What they remember is that he hit a home run right into the lake, the first he had ever hit in his professional career. The ball must still be rotting away at the bottom of the lake somewhere.

A year later, Ruth would be back in the majors with the Red Sox, helping them to win the World Series. Four years after that, as he started to focus on hitting rather than pitching, he would set the single season home run record for the very first time.

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You can see more photos of Hanlan's Point Stadium here and here, which I got from this website with a bunch of historical images of the island. You can also take a look at Babe Ruth's 1914 Baltimore Orioles rookie card over here.