Toronto In Context (From Outer Space)

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (he's from Milton, just outside Toronto) took another great photo of our city while he was up there in outer space today doing his thing as the current Commander of the International Space Station. This photograph shows almost all of the Great Lakes, so I figured I'd throw a few labels on it and put our metropolis in context from an angle you don't usually get to see.

Click on the image to make it bigger. And you can see the original, without labels, here.

Spring Comes To Toronto in 1837

One of my favourite primary sources for old Toronto history is Anna Jameson's diary, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. She was a British writer and feminist who spent the winter of 1836-37 living here. She was in town to visit — and get a separation from — her husband, Robert Jameson, the Attorney General of Upper Canada. They lived down by the lake, he'd later own land where Parkdale is now. Jameson Avenue is named after him. That's her sketch of the harbour I've posted above. The view included the edge of the islands and the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, which is still standing there today, nearly 200 years later.

Anna Jameson wasn't exactly a fan of Toronto during the winter... for all the obvious reasons. The first entry she made in her diary after arriving in the fledgling city of about five thousand people was far from a glowing review. It was December:

"What Toronto may be in summer, I cannot tell; they say it is a pretty place. At present its appearance to me, a stranger, is most strangely mean and melancholy. A little ill-built town, on low land, at the bottom of a frozen bay, with one very ugly church, without tower or steeple; some government offices, built of staring red brick, in the most tasteless, vulgar style imaginable; three feet of snow all around; and the grey, sullen, wintry lake, and the dark gloom of the pine forest bounding the prospect: such seems Toronto to me now. I did not expect much; but for this I was not prepared."

She spent most of the winter making similarly miserable entries in her diary. They're full of snowstorms and sleet. One night, she writes that the ink is freezing in her pen and her fingers are growing stiff with cold. By morning, even her fireplace is a block of ice. Words like "dreary" and "monotonous" and "desolation" keep coming up. She'd later call it "the relentless iron winter." By the time January rolled around, she was having the kind of thoughts familiar to many Torontonians:

"I could almost wish myself a dormouse, or a she-bear, to sleep away the rest of this cold, cold winter, and wake only with the first green leaves, the first warm breath of the summer wind. I shiver through the day and through the night; and, like poor Harry Gill, 'my teeth they chatter, chatter still.'"

The cold weather carried on into April that year. For the first two weeks of the month, the lake was still covered in ice. But then, on this very day 176 years ago — April 15, 1837 — Jameson wrote that spring had finally come to the city:

"The ice in the Bay of Toronto has been, during the winter months, from four to five feet in thickness: within the last few days it has been cracking in every direction with strange noises, and last night, during a tremendous gale from the east, it was rent, and loosened, and driven at once out of the bay... The last time I drove across the bay, the ice beneath me appeared as fixed and firm as the foundations of the earth, and within twelve hours it has disappeared, and to-day the first steam-boat of the season entered our harbour. They called me to the window to see it, as, with flags and streamers flying, and amid the cheers of the people, it swept majestically into the bay. I sympathised with the general rejoicing, for I can fully understand all the animation and bustle which the opening of the navigation will bring to our torpid capital."

It was, of course, just the beginning. Over the course of the next month, as the weather slowly improved and flowers bloomed, Toronto began to work its way into Anna Jameson's heart. By the middle of May, her tone had very much changed: 

"This beautiful Lake Ontario!—my lake—for I begin to be in love with it, and look on it as mine!—it changed its hues every moment, the shades of purple and green fleeting over it, now dark, now lustrous, now pale—like a dolphin dying; or, to use a more exact though less poetical comparison, dappled, and varying like the back of a mackerel, with every now and then a streak of silver light dividing the shades of green: magnificent, tumultuous clouds came rolling round the horizon; and the little graceful schooners, falling into every beautiful attitude, and catching every variety of light and shade, came curtseying into the bay: and flights of wild geese, and great black loons, were skimming, diving, sporting over the bosom of the lake; and beautiful little unknown birds, in gorgeous plumage of crimson and black, were fluttering about the garden: all life, and light, and beauty were abroad—the resurrection of Nature! How beautiful it was! how dearly welcome to my senses—to my heart—this spring which comes at last—so long wished for, so long waited for!"

A month later, she was complaining about the heat.

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Images from Anna Jameson's sketchbook, via The Toronto Arts Foundation's website here. The Toronto Public Library Flickr page had a whole bunch more here.

You can buy Jameson's diary here or borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here. I've already pulled excerpts from it: about Canada's first race riot here; the Northern Lights here; deforestation here; and sledding across the ice here.

Stephen Otto has a piece about Jameson's villa here.

Toronto's First Great Baseball Team — the old-timey Toronto Baseball Club of 1887

Today, the Blue Jays start yet another new season trying to capture their first World Series in more than 20 years. But those glory days of the early 1990s weren't the first time a Toronto baseball team won a championship. To find the city's first baseball heroes, you have to look back more than 125 years, to the star-studded old-timey Toronto Baseball Club of 1887.

Baseball was still brand new back then. So new, in fact, that some of the rules were still being sorted out. That year, a pitcher needed four strikes to get a batter out. He could throw five balls before giving up a walk. He was also allowed to hit the batter with a pitch — luckily the ball was softer back then. Umpires were still allowed to ask players and fans for their advice. Sacrifice flies didn't exist yet. For the very first time, every home plate would be made of rubber instead of marble. And the International League — which included the Toronto team along with 11 others — would become the very first professional baseball league to declare themselves as officially racist: halfway through the season, they introduced a new rule banning the signing of Black players.

The Torontos, as they were called, played in a beautiful brand new stadium on a spot overlooking the Don Valley. Spectators could walk in off Queen Street or ride up in their carriages and park their horses on the grounds. Admission was a quarter — or an extra ten cents to sit in the best seats in the house. The sheltered grandstand had enough room to seat more than 2,000 people. The stadium was originally known as the Toronto Baseball Grounds, but would soon be nicknamed Sunlight Park in honour of the nearby Sunlight Soap Works factory. When it opened in 1886, even the Lieutenant Governor came to see the first game. Someone in his entourage had their hat knocked off by a foul ball.

But 1887 was the season to remember. The International League might have only been a Minor League — it still is: the Blue Jays' AAA affiliate in Buffalo is one of the current teams — but the Torontos were stacked with star players and memorable characters. 

There was outfielder Mike Slattery. He was as fast as anything. He stole 112 bases that year, setting the International League Record. It still stands to this day. Only a handful of professional baseball players in any league at any level have ever stolen more. And as if that wasn't impressive enough, he and another one of his teammates — August Alberts — both hit for more than a .350 batting average that year. (John Olerud is the only Blue Jay to have ever pulled it off — back in that magical 1993 season.)

Then there was the catcher, Harry Decker. He's best remembered for inventing a new kind of catcher's mitt — some people still call them "deckers" — and also, for his life of crime. After a brief stint in the Major Leagues, including time with the Phillies, Pirates and Nationals, he popped up as a star player for San Quentin Prison.

The Torontos' other catcher was George Stallings. He would go down in history as a Major League manager — "The Miracle Man" who led the hapless 1914 Boston Braves from last place in July to a stunning World Series sweep of Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, a team filled with future Hall of Famers. Bill James (the man behind the modern "Moneyball" revolution in baseball statistics) gives Stallings credit for being the first manager to successfully use a platoon — realizing that left-handed hitters tend to do better against right-handed pitchers and righties better against lefties. Managers still use his technique to this day. After Stallings retired, he would come back to Canada and help bring the minor league Royals to Montreal.

But none of those players was as incredible or as memorable as Cannonball Crane.

They say he was a giant: big and tall and incredibly strong. He once threw a baseball farther than anyone else ever had before. And he threw it faster than just about anyone else too. In 1887, he was by far the best pitcher on Toronto's Baseball Club. He won 33 games that year — more than any other pitcher has ever won on any Toronto team. At one point, he won 16 in a row. His "deceptive drop ball" completely fooled opposing hitters — and not just for Toronto; he'd go on to have an excellent 3.80 career ERA in the Major Leagues.

That's not all he was good at, either. When Cannonball wasn't pitching, he was playing at second base or in the outfield, because he was also Toronto's best hitter. In fact, he was the best hitter in the entire league that year. He hit for a .428 average. It's still considered to be the best batting average by a pitcher in professional baseball history. (If he'd hit that in the Majors, it would put him 6th on the all-time list for any position.)

His greatest moment in Toronto came right at the end of the year. The race for the pennant came down to the very last weekend of the season. On Saturday, the Torontos played two games. Cannonball pitched in the first one and won it. Then, in the second one, he not only pitched but also drove in three runs with his bat and launched the game-winning home run. The next day, he came back to pitch again — and he won again. It was over. The Torontos had clinched the 1887 International League pennant and the city of Toronto celebrated our first baseball championship.

It would not, of course, be our last. For the next few decades, Toronto was a major hub for Minor League baseball. The Toronto Maple Leafs are listed five times on the official MLB list of the top 100 greatest Minor League teams ever. Some of the biggest stars in the history of the game played in the new stadiums that replaced Sunlight Park — three of them were built at Hanlan's Point over the years. Babe Ruth famously hit his first professional home run right into our harbour.

Toronto's last Minor League ballpark — the majestic Maple Leaf Stadium at the foot of Bathurst Street — was finally torn down in the 1960s, when the team was sold off and moved to Kentucky. But a decade later, the Blue Jays came to town. Twice they've been crowned as champions. And tonight, at what was once the futuristic SkyDome, the newest cast of star players and memorable characters will try to carry on the winning tradition that started on the banks of the Don River all those years ago.

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Image: Mike Slattery (left); Harry Decker (centre); Cannonball Crane (right); Yonge Street in 1885-1895 by Frank Micklethwaite (background) via the Wikimedia Commons and some liberal Photoshopping.

I first learned about this team thanks to the book Baseball's Back In Town: From the Don to the Blue Jays A History of Baseball in Toronto by Louis Cauz. You can buy it here or borrow it here.

Toronto ♥s Stalingrad

It was the summer of 1942 and things were looking good for Hitler. The Nazis had already swept across Europe; now they were pushing on into Russia, marching toward Stalingrad. The Russians were in trouble. In just the first year of fighting, the Red Army had lost half of their men. And Stalin — a bloodthirsty lunatic of a dictator on his good days — was starting to get a little bit desperate.

The city that had been renamed in his honour was teeming with people. Stalingrad had been a major metropolis before the war; since then, refugees had doubled the population. But as the Germans prepared to attack, Stalin refused to organize an evacuation. While food and supplies were shipped away to safety, the people were left behind. His soldiers, he figured, would fight more passionately to defend a city full of innocent civilians. And in case that wasn't enough, he ordered that any officer found retreating should be tried or shot on the spot — "Not one step back!" — and that anyone who could carry a rifle should fight. And so, men, women and children would all be part of one of the bloodiest battles in history.

People in Toronto and all over the world watched as Stalingrad was turned into a living hell. The planes of the German Luftwaffe began by dropping more than 1000 tons of bombs, reducing most of the city to a burning pile of rubble. The fighting on the ground that followed was brutal, even by the horrifying standards of the Second World War. "The entire city became an inferno," the Toronto Daily Star reported, "but it put up the fiercest fight in modern warfare. The fight for each building lasted for days, even weeks, at a time. Each room, each floor, constituted a separate front within a front. Every structure became a fortress."

As two of the most powerful empires on earth brought their military fury down upon the city, corpses piled up in the streets. Civilians who tried to flee by foot or by ferry were bombed, massacred by the hundreds. Thousands of orphaned children were left on their own in the middle of the destruction; they lived in the rubble for months on end, starving and freezing to death, terrified, and easy targets for snipers. "Under constant bombardment, life went on;" the Star wrote, "the people clung to the ruins of the city, children were fed in the shadows of broken buildings, put to bed in dugouts, nursed in cellars when sick. Children were born in dugouts."

Children in Stalingrad, 1942

The bloodbath raged on for five straight months, through the autumn and on into the harsh Russian winter. At times, it seemed as if the Nazis were on the verge of winning, but they could never quite kill the last few Soviet soldiers. By February, the tide had turned. The Red Army retook the city and shifted the momentum of the entire war. Hitler's army was deeply wounded. The Nazis would never again win an important battle on the Eastern Front. And the following year, the Allies would land at Normandy.

But victory at Stalingrad took a terrible toll. Nearly two million people had been killed or wounded. Two million. And the suffering wasn't over yet. The city was a smouldering ruin. It would take years to rebuild. "Stalingrad, city of heroes, still shivers in the icy Russian winter," the Star told its readers in Toronto, half a world away. And there were orphans who needed help, the newspaper reported. "Many of them had been living for months during the siege in holes in the ground, and when they were found they were swollen with hunger and their limbs were frozen." They say 15 million Russian children lost their parents during the war. 

So Toronto decided to help.

Later that same year, Toronto City Council declared "Friendship With Russia Week" and then "Stalingrad Day". They followed that up by officially "adopting" Stalingrad. The next two winters in Toronto would see a massive outpouring of support for the Russians living in that ruined city more than 8,000 kilometers away.

The City of Toronto Stalingrad Committee was created. And a Stalingrad Fund, too. The Mayor, Robert Hood Saunders (the same guy who brought us Elmer the Safety Elephant), was made honourary chairman. "Citizens of Toronto could not support a more worthy cause than the noble people of Stalingrad," he declared. "These people have shown us the way to be real heroes. We must give thanks to the Soviet armies and the brave Russian people who gave us those armies. I sincerely hope that all Toronto will get behind this great cause in the name of humanity."

And they did. Millions of dollars were raised in donations. More than 150 different organizations came together to an organize an ambitious clothing drive, going door-to-door to collect whatever spare clothing and knitted goods they could find. They ended up collecting 30 tons of it, which was stored at a depot on Yonge Street and then shipped off to the Soviet Union.

Many of the most powerful people in Canada worked hard to improve our relationship with "our gallant allies" in Russia. A National Council for Canadian-Soviet Friendship was founded, with the active support of wealthy businessmen and Premiers and Lieutenant Governors and justices of the Supreme Court. The Prime Minster, William Lyon Mackenzie King, served as Chair.

Eaton's window display during WWII

In 1943, thanks in part to the Eaton family and the heir to the Maple Leaf Foods fortune, there was a three-day Congress of Canadian-Soviet Friendship at the swanky Royal York Hotel. In 1944, there was another one. The event ended with a rally at Maple Leaf Gardens and 17,000 people showed up. The Congress was billed as an exchange of information. Torontonians had the chance to learn all about Soviet advances in agriculture and science and education and art. Delegates urged that every university in Canada should start its own Russian Department. The free-flow and exchange of ideas with the Communists was hailed as a vital part of Canada's future. 

At Maple Leaf Gardens, a representative from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa thanked Torontonians for their support of Stalingrad: "your gifts are cementing the post-war relations of Canada and Russia," she said.

Of course, that's not exactly how things turned out.

In fact, some of the seeds of the Cold War could already be found at that rally. For one thing, there was still plenty of anti-Communist suspicion in Canada. Being a member of the Canadian Communist Party was still illegal. It had been for most of the 20th century — they had to run candidates as "Labour-Progressives" instead. Back in the 1920s, R.B. Bennett's Conservative government had arrested the party leader and then apparently tried to assassinate him while he was in jail. (I told that story here.) And even now, while Mackenzie King was heading up the Friendship Committee, his government was keeping tabs. The RCMP kept a close eye on the Friendship Congress and the rally at Maple Leaf Gardens, including a detailed assessment in their Monthly Intelligence Report, and taking care to note that 80% of the audience was "of foreign extraction."

But they did have some good reasons to be suspicious. Like, say, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin. He was one of the Soviet representatives who attended the Congress. He worked at the embassy in Ottawa. And he was a spy. He had been sent to Canada to collect secrets about the Allied attempts to build a nuclear bomb. And he was getting them. He used his position at the embassy to gain access to the Canadian government, charming officials into spilling the beans. One naive army officer even took him in a canoe down the Ottawa River, where Zabotin snapped photos of the construction of the Chalk River nuclear facility. Most importantly, he had an operative inside the British scientific team trying to build a bomb in Canada — who also slipped him secrets about the Manhattan Project in the United States.

It was only a month after the Americans dropped their bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Zabotin's spy ring was uncovered. Once the information became public, people were shocked. Those old anti-Communist feelings were stirred up once again. Some call the Zabotin episode "the spark that ignited the Cold War."

That spark caught fire quickly. Soon, the Communists were testing their own bomb and with Hitler defeated, people were remembering the true brutality of Stalin's regime: The Purges, The Gulag, The Great Famine. At Stalingrad, the Russians took 110,000 German prisoners. Only 6,000 survived Stalin's camps.

In North America, the attitude toward Russia swung hard the other way. And the hatred wasn't reserved just for Stalin and the Soviet leadership, but for every Communist or Communist sympathizer or supposed Communist sympathizer anywhere in the world. Some of the very same experts who had been asked to speak at the Friendship Congress were denounced as radicals and investigated as traitors after the war. At least one of them would be dragged in front of Joseph McCarthy's infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities. Just a few years earlier, the people of Stalingrad were being hailed by Canadian leaders as the saviours of democracy and the free world. Now they and their countrymen were being demonized by those very same leaders as the gravest threat to democracy the world had ever known.

And in Toronto, the city that had once adopted Stalingrad, where the people came together to help the Russians who had suffered at the hands of Hitler and of Stalin, the fact that it had ever happened was quickly and conveniently forgotten.

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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 first learned about Toronto having adopted Stalingrad as a fleeting mention in a book I'm reading at the moment: Warrior Nation. It's about Stephen Harper's attempts to remodel Canada as an aggressive military power. You can buy it here or borrow it here.

You can read about Toronto adopting Stalingrad in old archived newspaper articles from the Star here, here and here. And from the Ottawa Citizen here and here. The Hiroshima Day Coalition has a timeline of the history of "Making Peace in Toronto" in a PDF here.

There is an excellent video about the children who lived through the Battle of Stalingrad here.

Ice Boats on Toronto Bay in 1920

I'm not entirely sure exactly where this is, since the caption just says Toronto Bay. But it looks like one of the wharfs at the lakefront. Ice boating seems to have been a pretty big thing back in the day, sailing across the frozen harbour. And sledding across the lake was too. In Anna Jameson's book about her travels here in the 1830s, she writes about a trip to Niagara in which she had to cross Burlington Bay on the ice:

"The road was the same as before, with one deviation however—it was found expedient to cross Burlington Bay on the ice, about seven miles over, the lake beneath being twenty, and five-and-twenty fathoms in depth. It was ten o'clock at night, and the only light was that reflected from the snow. The beaten track, from which it is not safe to deviate, was very narrow, and a man, in the worst, if not the last stage of intoxication, noisy and brutally reckless, was driving before us in a sleigh. All this, with the novelty of the situation, the tremendous cracking of the ice at every instant, gave me a sense of apprehension just sufficient to be exciting, rather than very unpleasant, though I will confess to a feeling of relief when we were once more on the solid earth." 

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I've written a bit about her book before: her description of seeing the Northern Lights in Toronto here and the story of Canada's first race riot here. Plus, I've done a dreams postcard for her, too.

I found this photo thanks to Derek Flack's post of old Toronto winter photos here.

The House of Lords Back in the Days of Glam Rock

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.

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Photos via the House of Lords website.

You can buy Treat Me Like Dirt here or borrow it 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!