I'm reading a drop fucking dead awesome book at the moment: Treat Me Like Dirt by Liz Worth, an oral history of Toronto's punk scene in the late '70s. And near the beginning there's a tiny little bit about the House of Lords — the hair salon on Yonge Street south of Bloor — as told by Margaret Barnes-DelColle (who ran New Rose, Toronto's first punk store):
"I worked at these stores on Yonge Street... at the time it was the whole glam rock thing happening with David Bowie. Everybody was wearing satin pants and bright colours and lots of makeup; the guys were wearing lots of makeup and shag haircuts.
"There was that hair salon on Yonge Street called House of Lords. On a Saturday — nowadays you can't even imagine it — but imagine a hair salon having a lineup outside of people wanting to get a shag haircut. I lived thirty minutes outside the city and yet I took a bus into town to go stand in line at House of Lords to get a shag haircut. So there was that whole glam rock thing that everybody was really into."
And there was some pretty famous hair coming out of that building, too. The House of Lords website boasts that they've trimmed the locks of The Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Rod Stewart and David Lee Roth.
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.)
She dreamed they had cornered her in the basement at the university, dragged her into an operating theatre and forced her up onto the table. Three medical students, young and strong, held her arms and legs while the doctor drew his scalpel straight down the centre of her chest. She couldn’t feel a thing, but watched, helpless, as the blade cut clean through skin and muscle and bone. She fell open. There was a pop; her ribs came apart like a pair of storm cellar doors.
And from between them came her heart, angry, like a chained dog. It thundered and roared. Leapt halfway out of her chest with every beat. Spit blood like venom. Splattered boiling crimson across the walls and four surprised faces.
The men, they fell back, stunned, and were gone.
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Explore more Toronto Dreams Project postcards here.
So I've been watching Canada: A People's History (which some valiant hero has posted on YouTube here). And it led me to this neat discovery: a song called "Un Canadien errant", which was written after the Rebellions of 1837.
Torontonians remember the rebellions because William Lyon Mackenzie marched an army down Yonge Street. But the rebellion in Québec (Lower Canada back then) was an even bigger deal. The rebels there managed to win a couple of big victories over the British in the early going — making it seem for a brief while as if the idea of overthrowing our colonial overlords in favour of a new, independent, democratic republic wasn't that far-fetched an idea. Their success helped to inspire Mackenzie: he was in contact with the French-Canadian rebel leader, Louis-Joseph Papineau, and it was when every solider in Toronto was sent to fight in Québec that Mackenzie saw his opportunity.
Neither of the rebellions ended well. Here in T.O., Mackenzie and his rebels were overwhelmed at Montgomery's Tavern. In Québec, the biggest blow came at the Battle of St. Eustache. I've posted a painting of it above. That church in the background is particularly famous — the British trapped the rebels inside and then set fire to it. You can see the desperate men jumping from the windows to their deaths.
At the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa (which I visited back in December), they've actually got part of the door handle from the church on display (just below a reproduction of that very same painting):
And they've got some handcuffs from the 1830s, too:
Many of the rebels were arrested — both in Toronto and in Québec — and would have worn handcuffs like those. Some were hanged. Many more were sent into exile without trial. They were forced to leave their friends and family behind and live in the United States. Or Bermuda. Or Australia. And that's where the song comes in.
"Un Canadien errant" was written by a student at the Séminaire de Nicolet on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in 1842. It's a lament for those exiled rebels. The lyrics tell the story of a Canadian far from home, in a strange land, who sits beside a stream one sad day. He talks to the water, asking that if it should ever find itself flowing through Canada to tell his friends back home that he still remembers them. Some people even say that's where the Québecois motto "Je me souviens" comes from — it's in the lyrics of the song.
"Un Canadian errant" became an anthem, not just for the Lower Canadian rebels, but for Mackenzie's exiled rebels as well. (In English, it's called "The Wandering Canadian".) There's an Acadian version, too — the British forced them off their lands in the Maritimes during the Great Upheaval in the 1700s. And more recently, it has become a song for any Canadian who finds themselves homesick in some faraway land.
The song has been recorded many many times. There's a version from 1917 here. Nana Mouskouri does it here. Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland have a version here. It was even used as the Canadian theme music for the legendary geographic video game Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?
But I'll post three versions below. The first is by Ian & Sylvia. They were a famous folk duo in the '60s who got their start in Toronto as part of the Yorkville scene and helped launch a revival of the song. The second is maybe my favourite version of the tune, recorded by Laurena Segura, a teenager in Montreal who just signed her first record contract. (I just interviewed her for The Little Red Umbrella over here.) And finally, there's Leonard Cohen, listening to the song on his balcony in Montreal in the 1980 documentary, The Song of Leonard Cohen.
You can also find the lyrics and chords to "Un Canadien errant" here, so you can learn to play it yourself.
And I've got a much more detailed series of posts about Mackenzie, Papineau and the battle for Canadian democracy here.
There's a neat new documentary playing at the Bloor Cinema right now, which if you're reading this site, I imagine you might be interested in. It's all about urban waterways that have been buried underground. Toronto — and the Garrison Creek — play a big role. And there are also fascinating examples from London to Yonkers to Seoul to Brescia. The filmmakers venture down into the sewers with illicit underground explorers known as "drainers" (the group in Brescia have even been officially supported by the municipal government, giving tours beneath subterranean Roman arches or searching for long-lost medieval ponds). And the documentary raises all sorts of interesting questions about the strains placed on Toronto's sewer system — which was originally built back in the days when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, and hasn't been updated much since. (It's an especially pressing question as our population booms and as climate change threatens to bring us ever-more frequent bursts of intensive precipitation. We already dump raw sewage into the lake every time Toronto gets a particularly heavy rain.) There's also some very interesting discussion about daylighting buried streams — which is what you call it when you uncover a buried waterway and bring it back to the surface. They've done it in Yonkers and in Soeul and Lost Rivers takes an honest look at both the positive and negative effects those projects have had on their communities.
The film is playing at the Bloor until Thursday, March 7, and there's a Q&A session after some of them. You can find all the rest of the deets here.
This
is the "Toronto", the very first steam locomotive ever built in Canada.
It was made in 1853, in a foundry near Queen Street & Victoria, and
ran from here to Aurora and back. It was massive by 1853 standards, 25
tons, specifically built to withstand the punishing Canadian climate. (This is another photo I'd posted on Facebook a while ago, but hadn't gotten around to sharing here.)
