Photo: Redpath Sugar Construction in 1958

This is the Redpath Sugar refinery being built on Queen's Quay in the late '50s. According to what I can piece together from Wikidepdia and the website of the Redpath Sugar Museum, which is inside the complex, the company was started all the way back in the 1850s. James Redpath came over from Scotland penniless and walked barefoot from Quebec City to Montreal, where he'd build the company from scratch. When the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened up by a series of locks and canals connecting us to the Atlantic in the 1950s, Redpath Sugar built this refinery on our waterfront. Queen Elizabeth was even there to celebrate the grand opening. Inside, they process huge shipments of sugar cane that come up from the Carribean on massive tankers.

Also worth mentioning: I believe that's the spire of St. James Cathedral at King and Church in the distance, which I'll be mentioning a bazillion times on this blog since it plays in an important role in much of  Toronto's history. That was the highest church spire in all of Canada when it was finished being built in the 1870s. Oh and, of course, the Redpath Sugary Refinery now has a giant whale mural on the side of it, which was added fairly recently by an artist who travels around the world painting whales all over everything.

I stumbled across this photo on the forum at the newly redesigned Urban Toronto over here. They've got more photos of the construction and of Queen Elizabeth at the grand opening, too.

If you'd like to see more old Toronto photos, this seems like a pretty good time to plug my brand new and totally spiffy Toronto Dreams Project Historical Photostream, which you can check out over here.

Mr. Christie Makes Good Secret Chambers In Which To Imprison A Mistress

A Christie’s biscuit wagon in 1904, taken by William Notman in Montreal (via Wikimedia Commons)

Mr. Christie first came to Toronto in 1848. He was still a teenager back then, but he had already spent a few years as an apprentice to a baker back home in Scotland. When he arrived in Canada, he got a job working at a bakery on Yonge near Davisville. He’d spend his nights baking bread and in the mornings he would push a handcart down into the nearby village of Yorkville — still its own municipality back then — to sell his goods.

Things went well. Within a few years, he owned his own company. He partnered with his old boss and started winning awards for his cookies. In 1860, when he just was 30 years old, Mr. Christie already employed a staff of five people baking by hand. From there, the business expanded quickly. By 1874, the steam-powered Christie, Brown and Company factory took up an entire city block. (The building is still there between King and Adelaide a block east of Jarvis; now it’s part of George Brown College.) The business kept right on growing. By the time the 1800s drew to a close, Mr. Christie employed two out of every three people in the entire Canadian biscuit manufacturing industry.

When he died of cancer in June of 1900, William Mellis Christie was one of the most famous businessmen in Canada. He’d built a fortune, travelled around the world, and became a public figure in our city: a trustee of the University of Toronto and a member of the Board of Trade. Christie Street was named in his honour. His mansion stood in one of the highest profile spots in Toronto: across the street from Queen’s Park at the corner of Wellesley. That’s where he passed away. As he was laid to rest in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, his son Robert inherited everything: the money, the business and the Christie Mansion.

That, if you believe the rumours, is when things got weird. The grisly story has been told many times — most notably in the book Haunted Toronto by John Robert Colombo.

Robert Christie, you see, had a mistress. And while he was living in the Christie Mansion with his family, he decided she should live there too. He kept her hidden in a secret chamber behind the wood paneling in the library. They call it Room 29. It was fully furnished, with a bed and a bathroom and a butler to bring her all of her meals so she would never have to leave. She would just hang out in there, waiting for him to visit so they could have sex and carry on whatever twisted semblance of a romantic life you can have when one of you is being held in the secret room of a Victorian mansion by your lunatic cookie baron lover, slowly going mad as he loses interest and you’re left alone more and more often, hour after hour after hour, until you finally can’t take it any more and you hang yourself from the rafters with a bedsheet.

They say Robert had her body secretly removed under the cover of darkness and buried somewhere on the grounds of Queen’s Park. Some claim the guilt drove him to distraction: the business suffered, he was forced to sell the mansion to the university, and soon he followed his father to the grave. Nabisco bought out the company, gave it the famous slogan “Mr. Christie, you make good cookies” and made it home to Oreos, Fudgee-Os and Chips Ahoy!

That, as you might imagine, is why they say the ghost of his mistress still haunts the Christie Mansion. The building became home to the local chapter of the Sisters of St. Joseph’s for a while and now it’s the Jesuits’ Regis College. They say that if you enter Room 29 all by yourself at night, the door will swing shut behind you. You will find it locked; nothing you can do will open it. And if there’s no one on the other side of the door to hear your screams, you’ll be trapped all night, just like Robert Christie’s mistress all those years ago.

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blogTo tipped me off to this story in an article they wrote last week, which you can find here. The photo comes from another site, which talks about a haunted U of T walking tour. It's here. And Regis College has a bunch of photos of the gorgeous interior of the mansion on their website here. Christie, Brown & Company were bought by Nabisco not long after Robert died. It was they who gave the brand the famous "Mr. Christie, you make good cookies" slogan and made it home to products like Oreos, Fudgee-Os and the unnecessarily punctuated Chips Ahoy!