The Long-Lost Chestnut Trees of University Avenue

It's hard to believe, but this is a photo of University Avenue. Today, this stretch of road is "Hospital Row," lined with concrete and glass. But this is what it looked like in 1896. That's Queen Park off in the distance. The Legislative Building had only recently been opened, but the land — previously part of the University of Toronto — had been leased by the Province all the way back in the 1850s.

They turned it into a public park. It was opened by the Prince of Wales, the guy would who later become King Edward VII (the same King Eddie our hotel is named after, and who now sits astride his horse as a statue in the park). About 30 years before that, 500 horse chestnut trees were planted along University Avenue and a grassy promenade was built down the centre of the street. It became one of Toronto's grandest avenues. Even Charles Dickens was impressed when he came to town.

So by the time this photo was taken, the chestnut trees of University Avenue had already been there for something like 70 years. But soon, the street would change. Toronto General Hospital moved to this strip in 1913. And over the next six decades, it was joined by many more, including Princess Margaret, Mount Sinai and Sick Kids. The trees have been replaced with concrete, pavement and glass. Only a thin sliver of green survives along the island that still cuts the avenue in two.

As Shawn Micallef points out in Stroll, University's grand avenue-ish-ness echoes the royal promenades on the other side of the Atlantic, like the Long Walk outside Windsor Castle. That's one of the places I'm planning on leaving dreams as part of the Toronto Dreams Project's UK Tour. One of the most interesting figures from our city's past — Colonel FitzGibbon — spent the final forgotten years of his life at Windsor Castle, having fought the Americans in the War of 1812 (he's the guy Laura Secord warned) and William Lyon Mackenzie in the Rebellion of 1837 (he took the threat seriously when no one else would, organizing the city's defenses despite the Lieutenant Governor's orders to do nothing). FitzGibbon is still there, in fact, buried on the castle grounds at St. George's Chapel along with many of the most famous kings and queens from England's past.

I've got a new dream for him all ready to go. You can help me leave copies of it at Windsor Castle, St. George's Chapel and along the Long Walk by contributing to my Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign — and you can get your own copy too.

-----

That statue of King Edward VII used to stand in another park on the other side of the world. I told the story of how it came to Toronto from India here. You can learn more about FitzGibbon and the Rebellion of 1837 in my post here. Mary Pickford grew up in a house on the east side of University Avenue just a few years before this photo was taken. I told her story here. I also posted another old photo of the tree-lined street from 1907 here.

blogTO has a bunch more old University Avenue photos in a post by Derek Flack here. That's where I first found a copy of this photo. Canadian Tree Tours has a bit more info about the horse chestnut trees here. And you can find the relevant excerpt from Shawn Micallef's Stroll on Google Books here. There's a short history of University Avenue and Queen's Park here.

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.

Turning The Great Lakes' Biggest Wetland Into The Port Lands

Mostly I'm posting this because Wikipedia has an entire category of photos called "Dredges In Toronto" which I happened to stumble upon. Dredges are the crane-like things people use to dig up the bottoms of bodies of water. Wikipedia has 15 photos of them in Toronto and this is the oldest: from the 1890s. Up until that point, the land that's now the Port Lands at the mouth of the Don River was a big marsh. I'll write a full post about it someday — the Ashbridge's Marsh was the biggest wetland on the Great Lakes and plays a pretty interesting role in the history of Toronto — but for now I'll just mention that by the end of the 1800s, it was polluted as fuck. The nearby Gooderham & Worts Distillery flooded it with waste — including as much as 80,000 gallons of liquid manure a day. The City tried to ignore the problem for years, but eventually the threat of cholera and looming court cases forced them into action. One of the ways they tried to deal with it was by creating the Keating Channel, re-directing the Don into the harbour to the west and Ashbridge's Bay to the east so that the waste would be dispersed more quickly. That's what they're doing with the dredge in this photo: making "the Keating cut".

Eventually, the City decided to fill the marsh in entirely — and with it most of Ashbridge's Bay. Today, the Keating Channel is still there, regularly dredged by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority to keep it clear. It's far from picturesque, though, and not exactly an ideal habit for wildlife — the sides are lined with concrete. The new plans for the development of the Port Lands will renaturalize the mouth of the river and keep the Channel. The idea is to build a "sustainable mixed-use neighbourhood" around it, so that it "will be dramatically transform[ed] into an upbeat, unique canal destination. It will be lined with public space and traversed by a series of four new bridges for vehicles, transit, cyclists, and pedestrians... It will feature parks and promenades along its edge, water access for boats, plus it will have amenities such as shops and canal-side cafés."

-----

You can learn more about the development plans from Waterfront Toronto here. And more about the old-timey dredging of the Ashbridge's Marsh from the Toronto Public Library website here. 

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.

Bloor & St. George in 1892

Here's the Gooderham Mansion at Bloor & St. George in 1892, where George Gooderham (the whiskey-making millionaire distillery guy) lived. After he died, it turned into the swanky York Club in 1909 and it's still there today — behind that red brick wall across from Varsity Stadium.

Partying With An Architect and A Skeleton in 1896

Toronto, 1896

This photo was taken by a guy named J.J. Woolnough. He obviously had a pretty weird sense of humour for a Victorian dude. He was born in England, in Dickensian London, where he started an apprenticeship as an architect when he was just 14 years old. A couple of years after that, for some reason that Google doesn't want to tell me, he sailed across the Atlantic and settled in Toronto. Here, over the course of the next few decades, he worked for a bunch of different architectural firms – and also developed an interest in amateur photography (pun oh-so-very-much intended).

He took this photo in 1896 using cutting edge technology: flash lights. That's what they called those trays of magnesium powder that old-timey photographers had to hold up for a flash while they ducked their heads under a hood to look through the camera. The flash lights meant you could take photos in places that would otherwise be too dark. And only occasionally did they set those places on fire and burn them to the ground.

This photo was originally given the caption "Good Company... but he has seen better days!"

Woolnough's architecture, though, is what he's remembered for. In the 1920s, he was named official City Architect; he designed all of Toronto's city-owned municipal buildings for the next seven years. His Art Deco designs are still all over the place. Like, say, these ones:

The Horse Palace at the Canadian Nation Exhibition

The Riverdale Fire Station Toronto Fire Station #324 on Gerrard East

The Rosedale Viaduct the northern bridge on Glen Road

Montgomery's Police Station on Yonge north of Eglinton, at Montgomery; now the Anne Johnston Health Station

Gallery 1313 on Queen West in Parkdale

The Toronto Water Works Maintenance Department on Richmond West at the end of McCaul, just south of Java House

The Symes Road Destructor an old trash-burning factory near Weston and St. Clair, now rundown but apparently the subject of revitalization efforts, which you can read about in The Grid here

I came across the skeleton photo in a great book full of beautiful and fascinating images, Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s. You can buy it here or get it from the library here. The Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada has a brief biography of J.J. Woolnough here.