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. 

The Toronto Historical Jukebox: "Honkin' At Midnight" by Frank Motley & His Motley Crew

MP3: "Honkin' At Midnight" by Frank Motley & His Motley Crew

1960s R&B from the Yonge Street strip

Frank Motley started off his career in the United States, learning to play the trumpet from jazz legend Dizzie Gillespie. And not only that: soon, he could play two trumpets at the same time. In the late 1950s, he headed north to Toronto, where he made a name for himself playing bluesy jazz and swinging R&B in downtown clubs like the Zanzibar and the Sapphire Tavern. That made him one of the pioneers of our city's very earliest rock scene, which would soon be shaking the Yonge Street strip to its foundations, earning Toronto a reputation as the hardest rocking city of its time.

"Honkin' At Midnight" may very well be Motley's greatest track, but it's far from his only memorable tune. His version of "Hound Dog" is at least as good as the version Elvis recorded — maybe even better. And when his next band — The Hitchhikers — backed singer and drag queen Jackie Shane at the Sapphire, the result was one of the best live albums Toronto has ever produced.

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This is a recent post from my Toronto Historical Jukebox blog. You can check out the rest of the songs I've written about here — or any time by clicking the Jukebox tab on the menu at the top of this blog.

Yonge & Richmond in 1899

This is the north-west corner of Yonge & Richmond in 1899. Today, that corner is home to the Hudson's Bay building — the Bay took it over in the early 1990s after they bought out the old Simpsons department store. Simpsons and Eatons were the two big department stores in Toronto for more than 100 years; their flagship locations stared each other down across Queen Street. But by the end of the 1990s, Eaton's was dead too, bankrupt and bought out by Sears.

You can see a Simpson's sign in the top-left in this photo — the Bay/Simpsons building is actually a complex of buildings and the first of them was built just three years before this photo was taken. The big Art Deco addition that dominates the corner today was added in 1929. It was designed by Chapman & Oxley, the same architectural firm responsible for a bunch old buildings around Toronto, including many of the icons of the lake shore: the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion, the Palais Royale, the Princes' Gates, the old Maple Leaf Stadium and the Toronto Harbour Commission Building.

Photo via the Toronto Public Library here.

The Yonge Street Wharf in 1920

My friend Laurie and I have a game where we try to find words that start with "wh", because that's an awesome way to start a word. Thus, I am pretty giddy having found this photo, which reminds me that wharf is a word. (I mean, how much better can you get? "Wh" and "arf" in five letters!)

Also, it's a pretty picture. I don't have much too say about the Yonge Street Wharf, expect, of course, that it sits at the bottom of what may very well be the longest street in the world. And that after William Lyon Mackenzie's failed Rebellion of 1837, some of the captured rebels where shipped off into exile from this spot. (Or, at least, they were going to be sent into exile — they made a stop at Fort Henry in Kingston first, and a bunch of them escaped. The Star has the full story here.)

Wharf!

The Great & Deadly Snowstorm of 1944

One of the biggest snowstorms in the history of our city came on December 11, 1944. The forecast called for just a few inches, but instead Toronto got two straight days of wintery fury. The storm killed 21 people. One died when the Queen streetcar was blown over by strong winds. More than a dozen met that most Canadian of ends: death by the shoveling of snow.

The Toronto Star headline the next day declared, "Whole City Stopped as if by Giant Hand." People were trapped inside their homes behind snow drifts. Even the ammunition factory was forced to close — a pretty big disaster in its own right during those final days of the Second World War.

blogTO has more photos and information thanks to a post by Agatha Barc here. And as for this particular picture, I can tell you that we're looking north up Yonge Street toward Richmond just after the storm. That building on the left is gone now, but that other one just up the street is still there. It was the Simpson's Department Store once upon a time. Now, it's home to another one of our oldest companies: The Bay.

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 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.

The Red Lion Inn, One Of Our First and Most Important Buildings

The Red Lion Inn

Okay, so I'm pretty excited about having stumbled across this photo. That's the Red Lion Inn – one of the very first buildings anyone ever built in Toronto. You come across it pretty often while you're reading about the early history of our city, but it's so old — and was torn down so long ago — that it never occurred to me there might actually be a photo of it out there somewhere.

It was on east side of Yonge Street, just north of Bloor. When it was built in 1808, our little town of York was still only 15 years old, far away to the south, just a few muddy blocks along the shore of the lake. The inn was built by one of Toronto's earliest settlers, Daniel Tiers, who seems to have come here as part of a group of mostly Germany immigrants. You hear a lot about those Germans when you read up on Toronto's early history too. They were promised free land in return for clearing Yonge Street out of the forest, from Eglinton all the way up to Lake Simcoe. They built the road, but never got their land, screwed over by the racist, rich British folk who ran our town back then.

When Tiers first built his inn, it would have been surrounded by an immense wilderness, an oasis in the middle of a forest thousands of years old. There were still wolves and bears in these parts back then, bald eagles and deer and foxes and flocks of passenger pigeons so thick they could block out the sun. But things changed fast. And even though it was well outside town, the intersection of Bloor and Yonge, with Davenport Road nearby, was already an important crossroads on the way down into the tiny new capital, where government business, the St. Lawrence Market, and a port to the rest of the world were waiting. Before long an entire village had sprung up around the Red Lion. They called it Yorkville. The settlement was founded by Joseph Bloor (who owned a brewery nearby and was extremely scary-looking) and our very first sheriff, William Botsford Jarvis (whose country estate, Rosedale, was just across the valley and who would play an important role in defeating William Lyon Mackenzie's famous rebellion).

Soon, the picturesque little village was functioning as an early suburb of Toronto, with people living there, but working downtown. And so, by the mid-1800s, our city had gotten its very first horse-drawn bus line. It was founded by a cabinet maker, who had the carriages made in his cabinet-making shop. Every ten minutes, another coach would leave the Red Lion Inn heading down Yonge Street into the capital. A couple of decades later, they were replaced by Canada's very first streetcar line.

The Inn was also, like most places where you could get drunk, an important meeting place. They say that in the lead up to that famous Rebellion of 1837, William Lyon Mackenzie's supporters would gather at the inn to plan their attack. And when Mackenzie had been undemocratically kicked out of parliament by the democracy-loathing Tory Party, it was at the Red Lion Inn that he was immediately re-elected — an important moment in the struggle to make Canada a true democracy.

Yorkville carried on as a quiet residential village of Victorian homes until the 1880s, when it was finally officially swallowed up by the city of Toronto. Nearly a hundred years later, in the late 1950s, those same homes would be converted into the smoke-filled coffee houses of our Beatnik scene — where poets like Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee and Gwendolyn Macewen got their starts. Before long, the Beats gave way to the hippies and those coffee houses were turned into rock 'n' roll and folk music clubs, home to the likes of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot. It wasn't until the late-'60s that the authorities decided to "eradicate" the scene, driving the hippies out to replace them with the high-end boutique shopping district that dominates Yorkville today — one of the most expensive retail strips in the world.

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I found the photo on Wikipedia here. And there's a page about that first bus line here. You can read little bits and pieces about the Inn and its owner here and here and here and here and here.

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837

Revolution! ish!

John Rolph

This is the fifth in a series of posts about William Lyon Mackenzie and the birth of Canadian democracy. Part one here. Part two here. Part three here. Part four here.

It was only Saturday, but John Rolph was already worried. On Thursday, he was supposed become our very first President. William Lyon Mackenzie had personally asked him to do it. After the rebel army marched down Yonge Street and triumphantly seized power, they were going to "spontaneously" ask Rolph to lead them until they could hold elections. Rolph was a famous doctor, one of the leading figures of the Reform movement. He'd almost been picked over Mackenzie as our first mayor. And he — along with another Reformer, Robert Baldwin — had famously been picked by the dumbass conservative Lieutenant Governor, Bond Head, to sit on his Executive Council when he first got to Toronto. They only made it three weeks before they resigned in protest because he wasn't listening to them. It had been one of the most important moments in the build-up to the revolution. But now, with only five days left until the Reformers were supposed to seize power, Rolph felt like it might all be slipping away. As the rebel army gathered north of Toronto, he was still downtown. And he didn't like the look of things down there. It kind of looked like the government was finally starting to get organized.

Rolph knew about the emergency Executive Council meeting where Colonel FitzGibbon had burst in with news of the rebel preparations. He figured they were bound to have already seen Mackenzie's handbills calling for revolution; people had been coming in from the countryside to warn them. There were rumours that they were finally preparing the militia. And that the militia was going to be armed with the weapons stored at City Hall— the very same weapons the rebels were planning on stealing to use themselves. Worst of all, bad news from Quebec: the revolution in Lower Canada was falling apart. Two days after their first victory, the rebels had been overrun, massacred by British troops. Louis-Joseph Papineau and Wolfred Nelson had fled to the United States. Many of the other Patriotes were in prison. Rumour had it that a warrant for Mackenzie's arrest had been issued, too. The way things were going, it could all be over before Thursday.

So Rolph sent word to the rebels north of the city. They were gathering at Montgomery's Tavern on Yonge, a couple of blocks up from Eglinton. If they were going to do this thing, he told them, they needed to do it soon. Like on Monday. Otherwise, it might be too late.

But changing the date of the revolution was not such an easy thing to do. Things were already getting pretty confused up at the tavern. No one, for instance, had thought to tell John Montgomery, a big Reform guy, that they were going to use his place. And he'd leased it out to another guy who didn't give a crap about the revolution. He gave a crap about getting paid for all the food they wanted to eat. The rebels didn't have much money; so they didn't get much food. There weren't enough weapons either. And hell, until Sunday night, Mackenzie wasn't even there yet. He was still traveling around, telling people to show up on Thursday. When he finally did get there, he was furious. He wanted to stick with the original plan. He wanted to wait for more men. And he especially wanted to wait for Anthony Von Egmond, the Dutch dude who was going to lead the army, who had real experience, who had fought in the Napoleonic wars, and who was going to meet them there on Thursday.

Finally, on Monday night, John Rolph rode up from the city to convince Mackenzie in person. Eventually, all of the rebel leaders were on the same page. New plan: they would let the men rest overnight and then march in the morning. The Canadian Revolution was being moved up to Tuesday.

Robert Moodie gets shot

But they couldn't even wait that long to start killing each other.

The first to go was Robert Moodie. He was a retired army officer. And a conservative. He lived in Richmond Hill, where he'd heard all about Mackenzie's plans. And he was ballsy, too, so as far as he was concerned, he was going to go right ahead and warn Bond Head. That night, he and a couple of other guys rode straight down Yonge Street at the rebel barricades. They had blocked the road and were making prisoners out of anyone who might warn the city. But Robert Moodie wasn't going to be taken prisoner. He charged right at them screaming, "Who are you, who dare to stop me upon the Queen's highway?" He fired his pistol above their heads to drive them off.  They fired back.

People say that while he lay there bleeding on Yonge Street, he moaned, "I am shot—I am a dead man." He was right. The rebels lifted him up out of the road and into the tavern. It took him two hours to die.

Now, William Lyon Mackenzie wasn't there for that. He'd been all antsy and nervous; he couldn't just wait around all night without doing anything, so at about ten o'clock he'd left with a scouting party. He rode south with four other men: Captain Anthony Anderson (who was going to lead the troops in Von Egmond's absence),  Joseph Shepard (who I'm really only mentioning because his family owned a farm near  Yonge and Sheppard — the street is named after them with an accidental second "p") and two other dudes who we don't really care about.

Meanwhile, down in Toronto, FitzGibbon was also antsy and nervous. He didn't sleep at home that night, worried that the rebels would come kill him in his sleep. Instead, he set up shop at the Parliament Buildings on King Street and before calling it a night, he too led some men out on a scouting mission. A couple of them were sent on ahead. One of them was John Powell. He was a pretty famous judge and politician, a hardcore Tory. He was the one who let Samuel Jarvis off scot-free after Jarvis killed Jean Ridout in their famous duel. That was about a year before Jarvis married Powell's daughter. It was exactly the kind of conflict of interest bullshit that drove the Reformers crazy.

The second death of the night came when the two scouting parties ran into each other. Mackenzie's men caught Powell by surprise and took him prisoner. But the way that Mackenzie made sure that Powell wasn't carrying any weapons was by asking him politely if he was carrying any weapons and then taking his word as a gentleman. Powell lied. And then, once Mackenzie had turned him over to Captain Anderson to be taken back to the tavern, he pulled the pistols he was carrying, shot Anderson in the back and escaped. The bullet severed Anderson's spine. He died instantly. The rebels had lost their back-up commander.

Toronto was in chaos for the rest of the night. Powell rushed downtown to warn Bond Head; Bond Head rushed to get his family on a steamer out of town and then ran around like a lunatic for a while. While he was doing that, the students of Upper Canada College went to ring the school's bells in warning. But their headmaster told them to go back to bed. When FitzGibbon went to ring the bells of St. James Cathedral, no one could find the keys to the bell tower. He was about to break down the door with an axe when they finally found them. In the end, a couple hundred men answered the call, taking up arms and rushing to King Street to defend City Hall and the Parliament Buildings.

The March of the Rebels Upon Toronto

By morning, on what was supposed to be the dawn of their glorious revolution, the rebels were feeling more than a little discouraged. They could hear the bells ringing in the city below. They'd lost the element of surprise. Plus, they'd heard about what was happening in Quebec. That very day, martial law was declared in Montreal. Von Egmond wasn't showing up until Thursday, Anderson was dead, and Mackenzie's next pick for commander, Samuel Lount, was a blacksmith who didn't really feel up to the challenge of leading an entire army. So when the men — 500 strong now — finally did start marching down Yonge Street just before noon, it was Mackenzie who was at their head, riding a white horse and wearing as many jackets as he could possibly squeeze into, apparently trying to make himself bulletproof. A lot of the people who marched with him that day agreed: he was acting even crazier and more erratic than usual. Which was saying something. It seems Mackenzie might have been coming a bit unhinged.

It was a long, slow march. They'd only made it to St. Clair before Mackenzie had them stop for lunch. He went to the postmaster's house and forced the postmaster's terrified wife to make a meal for his troops. Some never bothered marching any further south than that — they just hung out on the lawn eating boiled beef and drinking whiskey. Then came the emissaries from Bond Head. The government was trying to stall the rebels by getting them to talk about a truce. But since they had to send men who the rebels wouldn't shoot, they chose Robert Baldwin and John Rolph. Not exactly the crown's most loyal subjects. Rolph warned the rebels to hurry the fuck up; the government was still disorganized. But Mackenzie didn't really listen: he paused again near Bloor to burn down the house of a Tory who had pissed him off once. And then he tried to burn down the house of the sheriff, who was yet another member of the Jarvis family: William Botsford Jarvis. His wife had named their flowery hillside estate Rosedale. Lount was barely able to talk Mackenzie out of it.

So with all of these delays, it was dusk by the time the army had gotten all the way down to College. And  it was there, for the very first time, that the rebels would face off against government troops. FitzGibbon had sent the sheriff and 26 other men there — against Bond Head's orders — to hide behind some shrubs and ambush the rebels. It worked. They fired a volley into the rebel ranks. They even hit a couple of them. And then, as the front line of rebels returned fire, the loyalists all ran away as fast as they could. Sheriff Jarvis called after them to stand and fight, but it was no use.

Sheriff Jarvis and his family

Luckily for the loyalists, the rebels were just as inexperienced. When the front line of their ranks dropped to one knee to reload their guns, the guys behind them figured they'd all been shot. So they ran away, too. Most people seem to think that if the rebels had kept marching south into the city, they'd have captured it that night. But they also seem to think that if they had, things might have gotten really bloody. Once the monarchy-loving army in Quebec was finished with the rebels there, they could have easily marched west to attack Mackenzie in Toronto. That could have been a horrifying mess. Not to mention that Mackenzie had already started vengefully burning things to the ground. But instead of marching south, most of the rebels headed back to the tavern to regroup. Some kept going all the way home.

And that brings us to Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the rebels didn't do very much. They decided to wait for Von Egmond after all. Mackenzie did lead some men out to rob a stagecoach and a tavern to help pay their bills. And John Rolph decided it was time to save his own skin. One of the other big-name Reformers in the city was arrested for treason that day. Rolph escaped. He made it to the States by pretending he was going to visit a patient. It be would another six years before he could come home to the city that had almost made him President.

But Wednesday went much, much, much, much better for the government. Their reinforcements arrived. They came from Hamilton and from Pickering and from Niagara and from Peel and from a host of other towns. By morning there were more than a thousand of them. Enough to go crush the rebels. So that's what they decided to do.

That Thursday was a clear, bright day in an unusually warm December. The army's muskets and cannons glinted in the sun. Bond Head climbed up on his white horse in his white uniform and led his army north. It was commanded by some of the richest, most powerful men in the history of our city. John Strachan, our first Anglican bishop, Toronto's great hero from the War of 1812, the guy who sort of founded U of T and was the figurehead of the Family Compact, rode at Bond Head's side. Samuel Jarvis, one of Strachan's former students, whose family had been here since allllll the way back in 1798, whose incompetence and corruption had been pissing Reformers off pretty much ever since, and who had even broken Mackenzie's newspaper press and thrown the typeface into the lake, well, he headed up a group on one of the flanks. Colonel FitzGibbon, the guy who had received Laura Secord's legendary warning in the War of 1812 and helped us defeat the Americans, who had once saved Mackenzie's life and had, until a couple days ago, been the lone voice calling for the government to take the threat of revolution seriously, led another group. Judge Jones, who had scoffed at FitzGibbon's warnings to the Executive Council, was there, too. Even Bond Head's aide-de-camp was a future mayor. And as the army marched up Yonge Street out of the city, loyalist citizens cheered them on. They leaned out their windows waving flags. A military band joined the troops, with the drone of bagpipes filling the air.

Up at Montgomery's Tavern, the rebels were just plain not ready. Von Egmond had finally arrived that morning, took one look at his men, and declared Mackenzie's plan to immediately attack the city  "stark madness". Mackenzie almost shot him for that. Instead, they sent a farmer, Peter Matthews, off with some men to burn a bridge over the Don as a decoy. It didn't work. Bond Head's army kept coming. Soon, the rebels could see the metallic gleam of their enemies' guns as they crested the hill down at St. Clair. At the spot where Mount Pleasant Cemetery is now, the government's cannons let loose with their first volley. The cannonballs crashed through the woods. They were still too far south. But soon, they were close enough.

The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern

The second volley smashed through the tavern's dinning room window and brought down three of the building's chimneys. Men scattered and poured of the building. The government troops surged forward and opened fire with their rifles and muskets. A few rebels were hit. A few would die. Mostly, they ran away. Fifteen or twenty minutes after it started, the Battle of Montgomery's Tavern was already over. The government had won. The rebels had lost. The Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 had failed. Democracy would have to wait.

As Bond Head's men began to loot the area, the Lieutenant Governor ordered the tavern burned to the ground. Some rebels were arrested. Others just got a stern lecture and were sent home.  As for Mackenzie, he was one of the leaders lucky enough to escape to the United States. With a price on his head, he slipped across the border and settled on Navy Island in the Niagara River. He declared a new Republic of Canada and led an irrelevant government in exile. It would be more than a decade before he could come home. 

The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern marked the beginning of a dark time for Torontonians who believed in democracy. Bond Head and the Tories cracked down. Even people who had never supported the rebels were denounced as traitors. Some were fired from their jobs. Some were arrested.  Some were deported to Australia. Von Egmond was captured and died of pneumonia in a shitty jail cell. Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews were tried and convicted and sentenced to hang. Lount's wife personally delivered a petition with thousands of signatures and begged for her husband's life. Even Sheriff Jarvis was moved to tears. But she was ignored. "I'm not ashamed of anything I've done," Lount declared on the gallows just before the rope snapped his neck. And he was the fortunate one. Matthews kicked around for a good minute before the last of his life drained out of him.

The Reform movement was left in tatters. The next mayor of Toronto would be super-Tory John Powell — hailed as a hero for having shot Anthony Anderson in the back of the neck. It would be nearly ten years before another liberal ran the city. In just about every single way you could possibly imagine, the revolution had been a complete and total failure.

But here's the thing. The fight for democracy in Canada was far from over. And the Reformers were going to win it. Mackenzie's ridiculous, poorly-planned, poorly-executed disaster of a rebellion actually ended up being one of the major catalysts for change. After more than fifty years under dictatorial British rule, we were finally going to seize power over our own affairs. Canada, you see, was about to get responsible fucking government.


Continue reading with Part Six, The Bloody Aftermath of the Bloody Rebellion, here.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

There a million great resources to learn about the events during the Rebellion of 1837. I leaned especially heavily on a few of them. There's a great book about it all, written in the late-1880s, that you can read online here. I also took a lot from The Toronto Story and Toronto: The Place of Meeting. There's also some information here and here and all over the Wikipedia pages of the people involved. You can see the poster offering a reward for Mackenzie's capture here.

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837

This post is related to dream 12 John Rolph's Beard John Rolph, 1867

An Army Gathers On Yonge Street

This isn't Yonge Street. It's Quebec. Louis-Joseph Papineau speaks to L'Assemblée des six-comtés, 1837

This is the fourth in a series of posts about William Lyon Mackenzie and the birth of Canadian democracy. Part one here and part two here and part three here.

1837. Crazy huge giantassedly important year in the history of Canada. Just massive. And it had been a long time coming. In the few decades since our city had been founded, Toronto and the rest of Upper Canada had been ruled by a series of dictatorial Lieutenant Governors and a few families of rich, conservative, mostly incompetent, frequently corrupt government officials: the Family Compact. They were appointed by the British to run the colony without much say from ordinary Canadians, and even when the conservatives in England lost power to the liberal Whigs, things didn't really change. Canadians who wanted real democracy, with power over our own affairs, were getting really flipping frustrated. And in 1837, those frustrations boiled over.

The momentum built all year long. The whole continent was in the grips of a depression. Crops were failing.  People were even angrier than usual. And William Lyon Mackenzie, who had completely given up on negotiating with our British overlords, did everything he could to fan the flames. He wasn't exactly subtle about it. "Canadians," he wrote, "Do you love freedom? ... Do you hate oppression? ... Then buckle on your armour, and put down the villains who oppress and enslave your country... Up then brave Canadians. Ready your rifles and make short work of it."

Hundreds of protesters showed up at Mackenzie's rallies. When they were attacked by supporters of the Family Compact, they armed themselves. Farmers polished up old muskets. Blacksmiths forged new pikes. They held military drills. Before long, Mackenzie had declared independence from Britain and drafted a new constitution. He'd done everything short of firing the first shots.

And that's about the time when the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, decided to send away all of his troops. Every single last soldier marched out of Upper Canada. He'd left Toronto without any organized defenses at all.

You see, we weren't the only ones fighting over Canadian democracy. In Lower Canada — Quebec — very very very very very similar things had been happening. They had their own version of the Family Compact: the Château Clique. They had own version of the Reformers: les Patriotes. And they had their own fiery leaders: dudes like Louis-Joseph Papineau and Wolfred Nelson. That spring, the Whig government in England had rejected every single last one of their demands. People were pissed. Francophones and anglophones. Reform rallies in Lower Canada got bigger. And angrier. British products were boycotted. There was talk of revolution. That summer, the government banned all public meetings. That fall, les Patriotes responded with the biggest rally they had ever held. (That's what's going on in the painting I posted above.) Six thousand people were there as Nelson roared, "The time has come to melt our spoons into bullets!" Within weeks, Papineau and Nelson were leading a makeshift army of volunteers through rural Quebec, poised to strike at the British-backed government in Montreal.

The Governor General in charge of Lower Canada freaked the fuck out. He just up and quit. So in the face of revolution everything was left to John Colborne — the very same guy who had been fired as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada for being too conservative and then was accidentally replaced with the also-super-conservative Bond Head. He asked Bond Head for help. And Bond Head responded by sending him all the troops he had.

Now, nobody seems be entirely sure why he did it. Bond Head claimed (especially after the fact) that he wanted to trick Mackenzie into attacking. Then they could arrest him and hang him and have done with it. But most people seem to think that he was just a complete idiot. Even with reports of rebel activity pouring in, he simply didn't believe that enough people were pissed enough to support Mackenzie's revolution. He didn't make any plans for Mackenzie's arrest. Or for the defense of the city. He did spend lots of time ignoring the people who were worried. There was a whole crapload of weaponry stored at old old old City Hall (at King and Jarvis, where St. Lawrence Hall is now). And Bond Head didn't have anyone guarding it. If it fell into rebel hands, the government would be screwed.

With the Lieutenant Governor being useless, all rational thinking was left to Colonel James FitzGibbon. He was a hero from the the War of 1812 — the guy Laura Secord ran to warn when the Americans were going to attack — and had actually saved Mackenzie's life once from an angry mob of Family Compact folk. He was convinced Mackenzie's threats were real and he started making preparations behind Bond Head's back. He ran training drills with a bunch of militia volunteers. He wrote up a list of every loyal Tory he could think of and went from door to door warning them all to keep their guns loaded and ready. He worked out a warning system: at the first sign of an attack, they'd ring the bells of St. James Cathedral and Upper Canada College. And he assigned a group of his men to protect City Hall every night.

James FitzGibbon

Maybe most importantly, when Bond Head's Executive Council held a meeting to discuss (and dismiss) the possibility of an attack, FitzGibbon burst into the room with more troubling updates from north of the city: of rebels staging military drills and of blacksmiths working day and night to forge enough weapons for an army. (The scene is hilariously described in an old book about the rebellion, especially amusing if you imagine that they're speaking with the silly voices from the historical episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia: "'You do not mean to say,' queried Judge Jones, turning towards him with a scarcely repressed sneer in his voice and tone, 'that these people are going to rebel?' 'Most distinctly I do,' responded Colonel Fitz Gibbon; upon which the Judge turned towards the Lieutenant-Governor, and in a contemptuous tone exclaimed, 'Pugh, pugh!') Despite the fact that most of Toronto's leaders thought FitzGibbon was batshit insane, by the end of the meeting he'd finally convinced Bond Head to take at least a little bit of action. Dispatches were sent to some of the other towns in Upper Canada asking for volunteers.

It was a good idea. Les Patriotes had won their first battle against Colborne's troops and Mackenzie was rushing to follow in their footsteps. He told his rebels to meet at John Montgomery's tavern, on Yonge Street just north of Eglinton, which was still a few kilometers north of the city in those days. That weekend, they began to arrive. There were hundreds of them. Farmers and blacksmiths and clerks and craftsmen. Mackenzie had even chosen a commander for his army: Anthony Von Egmond, a Dutchman who had fought both for and against Napoleon during the wars in Europe. He was supposed to arrive on Thursday. December 7, 1837. That was going to be the day of the Canadian Revolution. They would march down Yonge Street, head over to City Hall, seize the weapons, capture Bond Head and declare a new Canadian republic.

Well. That was the plan anyway. But the plan would go to shit long before Thursday.


Continue reading with Part Five, Revolution! ish!, here.

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You can read Mackeznie's "Rebellion Proclamation" here. You can read other stuff about the road to rebellion here. And here. Learn more about FitzGibbon here. And read a book that gives a detailed description of the rebellion, including a first-hand account and the scene when FitzGibbon burst into the Executive Council meeting here.

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837

Photo: A Dapper Traffic Cop in 1912

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

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

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

The Yonge Street Riot of 1992

Queen Street during the G20

Lord knows there were plenty of ignorant things said during the G20 in 2010. Among them was the suggestion that Toronto had never seen violence like that before. Pfft! Anyone who bothered to check their Google would find that our city has had riots like that on a regular basis pretty much since the day Toronto was founded. We've had Protestants riot against Catholics. Nazis riot against Jews. Conservatives riot against liberals. We've had police riot against unions, against Communists, and against firemen. We've had firemen riot against firemen. We've even had firemen riot against circus clowns. We've seen riots that brought more than 10,000 people into the streets and we've seen riots where people died. In the mid-1800s, we were averaging more than one violent riot a year for twenty years.

But our riots aren't a thing of the distant past. In the late-1980s and early '90s, we'd riot every time the Ex closed for the year. We rioted on New Year's Eve to ring in 1992. And then, a few months later, when white cops beat a black man in Los Angeles and were acquitted, we rioted again. As South Central L.A. exploded into flames and destruction, a small group in Toronto protested the Rodney King case outside the U.S. consulate on University. Soon, the crowd had swelled and some turned violent. Something like a thousand people marched up Yonge Street, smashing windows, overturning hot dog carts and generally being destructive assholes. From the footage, it looks like some were even throwing molotov cocktails.

Somehow, that time, the police managed to handle the situation without completely ignoring due process or arresting more people than ever before in the entire history of the country. There were about 30 arrests, a few injuries, and—despite the usual warnings that "we might just see the face of downtown Toronto changing forever"—things got back to normally pretty quickly. So much so that  twenty years later most people seem to have forgotten it ever happened.

Here's the Citytv coverage from the day after, complete with painfully punny titles and an adorably young Ben Chin:

Tragedy At Hogg's Hollow

Rescue efforts

Toronto has been, in the most literal way possible, built by immigrants. English hands raised the timbers of Fort York. Germans carved Yonge Street out of the forest. Irishmen and Italians, Ukrainians, Poles and people from all over the world have built our bridges, paved our streets and erected one of the tallest buildings in the history of the world. 

In return, generally, they've been treated like shit.

The example that comes up most often is from March 17, 1960. That night, in a tunnel more than 10 meters beneath the snowy ground near Yonge and York Mills—in the not-in-any-way-related-to-the-Harry-Potter-franchise Hogg's Hollow neighbourhood—a dozen construction workers were putting in a new water main. The sandhogs, as they were called, were working in stupidly unsafe conditions, unprotected by any meaningful safety regulations. There were no fire extinguishers. No flashlights. Weak support beams. Inadequate equipment. And no way of communicating with the outside world. Supervisors who complained were fired.

It was around six o'clock that they first noticed the smoke. Half of the workers escaped quickly to safety, but six men were trapped below as the fire spread. The heat was intense. The smoke was toxic. And the tunnel was filling with water.

"I tore my shirt off, soaked it in water and covered my face with it," remembered one of the workers (a Belgian, the only non-Italian in the group). "The other five did that but kept their heads up. They started screaming 'Mama Mia.' They got down on their knees and started to pray. I couldn’t keep them quiet. I told them to stay put, that the boys upstairs would come down and get us out. They wouldn’t keep their heads down and conserve energy. The smoke was awful and then the water hit us. It came up to our knees. I was scared but I knew they would come and get us out. But the heat was draining our energy. There was a glimmer of hope; I could see a light from the shaft and I just knew we would be all right. I started back toward the shaft. The other five wouldn’t come with me. They were screaming and down on their knees praying. I grabbed Pasquale Allegrezza by the shirt and started dragging him along the pipe. There was no room to carry him and I couldn’t fight the smoke any longer. I had to let go of Pasquale. Another few feet and I had to put my face down on the pipe. I was sleepy. And then I guess I passed out. Just before I passed out I was afraid for the first time that I would not get out."

Meanwhile, on the surface, rescue workers were in disarray. Their equipment wasn't working either,  there was no back-up plan, and no one could get to the men.  The fire was just too hot; the valve to clear the tunnel of smoke was stuck and there was a risk the whole thing would collapse. A couple of men who did crawl in only made it far enough to hear the moaning voices before they were forced to turn back. It would be more than an hour before anyone else could enter the tunnel. And by then, Pasqualle Allegrezza, Giovanni Fusillo, Giovanni Correglio, Alessandro Mantella, and Guido Mantella were all dead. The Belgian was the only survivor, miraculously dragged to safety, disoriented but alive, hours after the fire had started.

The city's Italian community was devastated. In the wake of the disaster, a fund was set up to help the victims' families and Johnny Lombardi (the friendly old fellow who ran CHIN until he died a few years ago) held a benefit concert at Massey Hall.  On the political front, the Toronto Telegram  led the charge, running one front page story after the other with headlines like "SLAVE IMMIGRANTS" until, finally, the provincial government ordered a Royal Commission to investigate. In the end,  stricter safety and labour laws were passed.

And that's pretty much been it. As the Toronto Star pointed out in an article last year, the laws haven't really been updated since.  More than 400 construction workers in Ontario have died on the job since 1990—most of them in gruesome and preventable ways: crushed by equipment, fallen from scaffolding, drowned, electrocuted, sliced open. And as employers continue find ways around the fifty-year old  laws, those numbers are expected to go up.

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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

I can't stress enough how much this post owes to Jamie Bradburn's Historicist article about the tragedy over at Torontoist, which you should totally read, here. You can find more info and pictures on the city's website here, and from a Toronto Star article about the commemorate quilt that now hangs in York Mills Station here. 

Oh and if you're wondering why the neighbourhood around Yonge and York Mills is called Hogg's Hollow, it's cuz of a dude named Joseph Hogg, a Scotsman who ran a whiskey distillery there back in the 1800s. 

This post is related to dream 03 The Death of Giovanni Fusillo Giovanni Fusillo, 1960