The Ford Brothers' Worst Nightmare

From the year 1900, one of Toronto's early streetcars. This, I presume, is what the Ford Brothers are thinking of when the dimiss 21st century light-rail technology as "fancy" "trolleys". And if that weren't enough to keep them up nights, you'll notice the sign on the tree to the left: an offer to check passengers' bicycles for free.

What Queen and Gladstone Looked Like in 1893

Wow. Well, here you go hipsters, this is what it looked liked right outside the Gladstone Hotel in 1893. The Gladstone (which isn't in this photo, just out of sight to the right) would have only been four years old when this was taken. But the awkward "Dufferin jog" was already in place -- created by the railroad running by over the bridge in this photo. The bridge only had an underpass built on Queen, not Dufferin, meaning traffic traveling up and down Dufferin had to take a detour up Gladstone Avenue instead. It would take more than 100 years for a second underpass to be built; it just opened back in 2010.

Maybe even more interesting than that, though, is that in 1893 Toronto was in the middle of switching for horse-drawn streetcars to an electric system. According to the Wikipedia, the very first electric streetcar had started running just the year before; the final horse-drawn streetcar would be retired the year after. This photo captures that brief transition. The guy in the foreground is laying down Queen Street's first streetcar tracks, with the soon-to-be-obsolete horse-drawn transportation behind him.

I came across this photo in a TTC gallery put together by the Toronto Star, which you can check out here. I'll probably post another couple of photos from it over the next few weeks.

Bloor & Spadina Was Pretty Beautiful Back in 1933 (Featuring Old-Timey Streetcars)

This is Bloor Street, just west of Spadina, in the summer of 1933. By then, it already been about 50 years since the Annex was annexed into the city of Toronto. But the growth hadn't stopped there, of course. By the time the 1920s rolled around, the city had begun to swallow up villages and neighbourhoods even further north, spreading up the escarpment into places like Moore Park and Forest Hill, and west too, through Parkdale. That's when we decided that our transportation system should be amalgamated as well: the TTC was officially born and a brand new fleet of streetcars hit the roads of Toronto.

You can see them here in the middle of the photo. They're called Peter Witt streetcars, named after the guy from Cleveland who designed them in the early 1900s. We had a few hundred of them, which apparently makes us one of their best-known homes, but they also appeared in cities all over North America and Europe: New York, Chicago, Detroit, Mexico City, Madrid, Naples, Milan... The TTC used them for about forty years, finally taking the last ones out of commission in the '60s, but in Milan, they are still about two hundred Peter Witt streetcars gliding through the streets, painted bright orange. A few of them have even made their way from Milan to the United States, where they grace the hills of San Francisco.

I found this photo on the Toronto Archives Flickr page (which rules). They've got an entire set dedicated to the Peter Witts. I'll post a few of my other favourites below and you can check out the full set here, read more about the streetcars on Transit Toronto here or in Agatha Barc's blogTO post here. You can also watch a little video of one of the streetcars in action here from the Halton County Radial Railway Museum, where they've got one you can ride.

The Peter Witts ran on different tracks from the ones we had before

 

An Especially Neat-Looking TTC Transit Map from 1955

Click to enlarge

One of the most beautiful books written about the history of our city is Derek Hayes' Historical Atlas of Toronto. It's filled with gorgeous maps of the city, stretching all the way back to the time of the earliest European settlers. One of my favourite discoveries is this map of our fledgling downtown transit system from 1955, ringed with images of some of our most iconic attractions.

At least, our most iconic attractions at the time. Some of them (coughthebusterminalcough) might have trouble making that list today. Most obviously, the CN Tower and the SkyDome have gone up since. The ROM and the AGO look a bit different these days. The CBC has moved from Cabbagetown to Front Street. And the Armouries on University Avenue, which are included here, aren't there anymore. In 1955, they stood just north of Queen, behind Osgoode Hall, having been built in the late-1800s. Soldiers were trained there to fight in the First and Second World Wars, as well as the Boer War before that. But it was demolished in the '60s to make way for the new courthouse.

You can click to enlarge the map. And you'll find the Historical Atlas of Toronto for sale here among other places.

The Toronto Streetcar Sessions

The Grim Preachers (photo: me)

I've spend a bunch of time over the last few weeks writing about the Toronto Streetcar Sessions. They happened a few months ago, so I'm going to go ahead and cheat and say that this counts as Toronto history.

The Streetcar Sessions were a series of concerts organized by a friend of mine, Milan Schramek, which took place on chartered streetcars traveling around downtown. Six bands played on three Sunday afternoons late last year and each set was recorded, with videos and free MP3s of each session later released online.

It is awesome, inspiring stuff. I've written about the Toronto music scene for years, and this was easily one of the most interesting events I've covered. The free EPs by Ivy Mairi and Parks & Rec in particular are probably among my favourite live Canadian albums ever; anyone with a bit of a TTC fetish will get a kick out listening to them if only for the way the streetcar ambiance — clanging bells, the screech of the wheels, automated stop announcements — mix with the songs.

I've written six posts about the sessions over at The Little Red Umbrella (the new arts & culture site of which I am the Editor-in-Chief), where I talk about it all in more detail and muse on the implications and possibilities for the TTC and our relationship to the city and other downtown leftist pinko elite crap like that. I, of course, think it's well-worth a read. Not to mention the free downloads and video streams.

So, yeah, you should head on over here and check it out.

Video: Canada's First Subway Opens In 1954

The world's first subway—in London—had been running for about a hundred years before Toronto finally got ours. People had started suggesting one in the early days of the 1900s, but it took decades of lobbying, a rapidly growing population and fears that the downtown was going to be overwhelmed by cars before a referendum on the issue overwhelmingly passed in 1946. Three years later, construction started. It was, of course, a massive project: workmen spent the next six years ripping up Yonge Street pretty much all the way from Front to Eglinton. In 1954, it opened: an underground railroad that could take you from Union Station to Eglinton in just 20 minutes. To mark the occasion, the CBC produced this video, a seven-minute documentary about the new line. The sound is kind of crappy, but it's well worth  having to squint your ears a little.

The construction project also made for a lot of good photos. I'll post one of Front Street below (click to make it bigger), but there's another great one of Yonge Street near Queen here. You can also find some more, including a neat aerial shot of the trench, if you scroll down on  this article. There's a photo of the official opening ceremonies at Davisville Station here. And there's a YouTube video of one of those very first, very red subway trains rolling into Rosedale Station here.

Front Street outside Union Station, 1950

Photo: Broadview Streetcar in 1896

Broadview Streetcar, 1896

That's the Broadview streetcar, at Broadview and Danforth, in 1896. I found the photo through Google, but as it turns out, Torontoist posted it with an article about Victorian transit riders and drivers bitching about each other. My favourite complaint: "Ladies who wish to attract the attention of the conductor are not expected to punch him in the ribs with their umbrellas." The piece is from their kickass "Historicist" series, which gets published every Saturday. And you can read it here.

Video: TTC Commercials From The '80s

YouTube is full of these TTC commercials from the '80s, and each one is better, cheesier and more fluorescent than the last. The one I've embedded is from 1985, and there are two more jingle-based ones from a couple of years later here and here. There's one with a bunch of big name celebrities like "Soap Opera Broadcaster" Vic Cummings and "Consumer Advocate" Lynne Gordon here. And in 1988, they did a whole series highlighting all the fun things you can't do on the TTC, like watch a movie or a hockey game or eat dinner. Then, in 1990, someone was clearly fired; they suddenly went in a completely different, much more poetic direction.

Bloor Station Back In The Day

Here's Bloor Station, some time back in the days before people were very good at dating their photos. Those elegant black-on-white signs were the standard for the TTC in the '50s and '60s and, I believe, were in the Commission's original unique typeface.

If you're a font freak, you can find lots more about the fascinating history of TTC typography in a so-impressively-detailed-I've-only-just-skimmed-it paper by Joe Clark, which I found thanks to Spacing, and is housed online over here.