Christmas on University Avenue in 1963

The Toronto Star has a Facebook page for their archives, full of neat old photos and stuff. For the holiday season, they've made this beautiful image their cover photo. It's from 1963 and we seem to be looking down University Avenue from the steps of Queen's Park. You can check out the rest of their stuff on Facebook here.

The Dreams Project & Spacing Magazine's Blog

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

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

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

Thomas King's Massey Lectures Fucking Rule

Sky Woman & The Great Turtle, Museum of Civilization

The Massey Lectures, in case you're somehow unaware, generally totally rule. Every year they pick some super-interesting person to deliver a series of talks that get broadcast on the CBC. They've had Martin Luther King Jr., Noam Chomsky, Jane Jacobs, Douglas Coupland, Margaret Atwood, Northrop Frye, John Kenneth Galbraith, Stephen Lewis, Claude Levi-Strauss, John Ralston Saul... And in 2003, they had Thomas King. 

Thomas King has been a writer and editor and professor and photographer and filmmaker and created The Dead Dog Cafe radio show. He even ran for the NDP a couple of elections ago. He got the Order of Canada in 2004. Two of his books have been up for the Governor General's Award. And right now he's got a brand new book out; it's called The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (you can buy it here or borrow it here; the Globe and Mail reviews it here). The dust jacket calls it "at once a history and a subversion of history" and I just bought it and I can't wait to read it.

I'm especially excited about the book since I just finished listening to those Massey Lectures. They're amazing. Over the course of one week, he gave five different lectures in five different venues in five different cities across Canada: Montreal, Victoria, St. John's, Calgary and Toronto. They're collectively called "The Truth About Stories" and each one of them is great. They're about storytelling and history and Canada and the First Nations.

You can listen to them online here.

Each one of them is about an hour long. The time is very much worth it, but if that strikes you as too much of a commitment, I recommend listening to at least the fifth in the series. It's called "What Is It About Us That You Don’t Like". It's the lecture he delivered here in Toronto — at U of T's Massey College. It's a powerful conclusion.

And a timely one, too — as I write this, the Idle No More protests are gathering strength and Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence is about to enter the second week of her hunger strike.

New & Old Photos of Casa Loma

Over the last few weeks, I made a couple of visits to our magnificent, kitschy castle on the hill above Davenport: one while I was researching my big post about the history of the place, "Casa Loma & The Crooked Knight", which you can read here; and a second for the public consultation meeting discussing the possibility of turning part of the castle — or more likely the stables and/or potting shed — into a Toronto Museum.

I took my camera — well, um, phone — with me, so I could take photos and mix in some archival images, too. You can find the full gallery on Facebook here. (You should be able access whether or not you have an account.) And, as always, you can follow me on Instagram or Twitter to see my other photos as I post them: @TODreamsProject.

Celebrating The False End of the Great Boer War at Yonge & King in 1901

I recently posted this photo as part of the gallery at the end of my piece about J. Cooper Mason and the Great Boer War (which you can read here), but I wanted to highlight this photo in particular, since I was especially fascinated by it while I was writing that post. It's crammed full of interesting details.

It's the summer of 1901 and we're looking east down King Street (Toronto's earliest main street) from the intersection at Yonge. (You can see what the same view looks like today here.) The event is a parade to celebrate the return of the one of the Canadian units who volunteered to fight in South Africa in support of the British Empire's colonial war there. It seems at the time this photo was taken, as if the war is over and the British have won — although in truth it will take another couple of years filled with guerrilla warfare, a brutal scorched earth campaign and the death of tens of thousands of South Africans in British concentration camps. The Canadians forces, however, will all be home before that part of the war really gets going.

(Some of the details in this photo are a bit hard to see, so you might want to save it to your computer so that you can open it and zoom in more closely.)

Here we go:

01. In the middle-bottom of the photo, you can see the men of 'C' Company marching towards us with their rifles over their shoulders. You can make out a few of their faces and a couple of early 1900s moustaches.

02. The beautiful buildings which lined King Street back in the day are hung with bunting and flags. People in the crowd are waving them too. Almost all of them display the Union Jack or England's St. George's Cross — a reminder that it would be more than another 60 years before we got our own flag, that many people in Toronto still very much saw themselves as members of the British Empire, and that the war these men had just come back from fighting was very much a British one.

I really like the details in the cheering, too:

03. You can see men lifting their bowler hats in celebration.

04. If you look really closely at the building on the far right, you can see people leaning out the windows to shout through old-timey bullhorns.

05. This is probably my favourite detail in the whole photo. Outside that building on the right, on the telephone pole next to the fancy clock, a kid has climbed up (on the pole itself? on some kind of box or something?) to get a better view out over the crowd. Neat moment. Meanwhile, the building itself belongs to the Canadian Pacific Railway. A sign reads "CANADIAN PACIFIC TICKETS" and a glittery "CPR" logo is embedded in the middle of a crest above the door. That railroad, which famously helped to forge the Confederation of our nation, had been built just 20 years earlier. And only ten years after this photo was taken, that building would be torn down and replaced with the much bigger Canadian Pacific Building. (Designed by Darling & Pearson, one of the most important architectural firms in the history of our city, it would be the tallest building not only in Toronto, but in the entire British Empire: a whole 15 storeys high. It's still there now, home to the Shopper's Drugmart on the south-east corner of the intersection.)

06. The Canadian Pacific Railway isn't the only easily recognizable brand represented in the photo: there's also a sign for Holt Renfrew. The fancy Canadian department store started out as a hat shop in Quebec City in the 1830s.

07. You can see some other people who have also climbed up some telephone poles on the left-hand side of the street. One guy in the distance, just above where I've put the number 07, has managed to get up pretty darn high.

08. But some people have managed to find a spot even higher — you can see a few spectators standing on the roof of one of the buildings on the left.

09. And finally, in 1901 just like today, the pigeons of King Street East soared through the air above the crowd.

The City "Intends to Designate" King Street's Beautiful Victoria Row

Oh, well here's some promising news. The city "intends to designate" beautiful Victoria Row on King Street East, justjust west of Church. They've got a notice up on their website here. I stumbled across the news while I was actually looking for a page I could link to about how those buildings might be at risk. (Hopefully, all goes well — and they don't, say, mysteriously burn down like some of Toronto's other about-to-be-saved properties have had a habit of doing.)

The Row was originally designed all the way back in the 1840s by John Howard, one of Toronto's most important old-timey architects and amateur painters, who is also the guy who gave us High Park. It's been updated over the years. It played a vital role on King Street back in the days when it was our city's earliest main street. And it's still full of shops and restaurants and even the Albany Club (the secretive official Conservative Party hangout, which I wrote about here). This photo is from around 1890, when a statue of Queen Victoria was part of the facade.

Jane Jacobs On The Importance Of Downtowns

I've been slowly making my way through Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities over the course of the last few months. I've already posted one excerpt from it, about the importance of old buildings, which you can check out here. (There's also a wee bit more background information about Jacobs, her book, and her move from New York to Toronto in that post.) But I figured I'd share another quick little passage from the book. This time, a brief paragraph on why an entire city benefits by having a vibrant downtown core:

"When a city heart stagnates or disintegrates, a city as a social neighbourhood of the whole beings to suffer: People who ought to get together, by means of central activities that are failing, fail to get together. Ideas and money that ought to meet, and do so often only by happenstance in a place of central vitality, fail to meet. The networks of city public life develop gaps they cannot afford. Without a strong and inclusive central heart, a city tends to become a collection of interests isolated from one another. It falters at producing something greater, socially, culturally and economically, than the sum of its separated parts." 

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You can buy The Death and Life of Great Americans Cities here. Or borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. Or read more samples from it on Google Books here.