Toronto's Icy Waterfront in the Winter of 1911

Well, it's been one a hell of a crazy winter in Toronto this year. And while the rising temperatures make it  almost sort of kind of start to maybe feel like spring will actually happen at some point, they say there's more snow on the way first. I suppose we might be able to take at least a little bit of solace in the fact that Torontonians have been dealing with ice and snow for as long as there has been a Toronto. Here, for instance, is a frigid photograph from the Toronto Archives taken on our waterfront during the winter of 1911.

Mimico Creek Looked Really Freaking Beautiful Back in 1889

This, according to me, has to be one of the most beautifully pastoral photos ever taken of Toronto. It shows us what it looked like in 1889 at the very south-east corner of Etobicoke, in the spot where Mimico Creek meets Bonar Creek just before they empty into the lake. (Well, where they used to meet anyway; most of Bonar Creek was buried in the 1950s.)

It's just a few block west of the mouth of the Humber, and these days it's easily recognizable thanks to the gleaming white arch of the Mimico Creek Bridge (which purposefully looks like a smaller version of the bridge over the Humber).

Amazingly, even though it looks like these Victorian Torontonians are in the middle of the countryside, not far to the east of them our city was undergoing a crazily enormous boom, quickly becoming a full-blown metropolis. Between 1861 and 1901 the population quadrupled from about 60,000 to about 240,000 people.

I came across this photo in the veryvery good book I'm reading at the moment: HTO: Toronto's Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost River to Low-flow Toilets. So you can probably expect a bunch of water-related posts over the next little while. You can also buy the book for yourself from Coach House here or borrow it from the library here.

Photo: Toronto Had Craaazy-Bad Smog in 1912

Oh boy. So that's what our skyline looked like around about 1912. Not exactly the kind of place you want to be spending time if you have asthma. Or, you know, lungs. A little more than 100 years before this photo was taken, the whole shoreline was covered by a forest that had been there for thousands of years, full of ancient oak trees and deer and wolves and eagles and bears. We started cutting down the trees as soon as the Town of York was founded. And we thought nothing of chucking our garbage and dead animals and piss and shit into the lake. Which we then drank from. Things only got worse as the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear. In the mid-1800s, we got railways along the waterfront and with them came massive coal-burning factories like the ones in this photo. They say that by the early days of the 20th century, all the walls in downtown Toronto were black — brick walls hidden beneath a thick layer of toxic soot.

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.