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.

William Gibson & The Summer of Love

The Summer of 1967. The Summer of Love. The whole hippie thing is at its height and Yorkville has become one of the biggest hubs for sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll on the continent. Just ten years ago, the first Beatnik coffee shops opened in what was then a quiet, residential neighbourhood – full of rundown Victorian homes, a few art galleries and upscale boutiques. Now, the coffee houses are everywhere, more opening and closing all the time – patios out front; poetry, folk music, go-go dancers, and rock 'n' roll inside. The Penny Farthing even has a pool on its roof. Streets like Cumberland and Yorkville, Hazelton and Scollard overflow with hippies, greasers, and bikers. And it all just keeps getting bigger and busier.

Shaggy-haired kids from all over Canada are hitchhiking across the country, thumbs pointed squarely at those few blocks north of Bloor, between Bay and Avenue Road – those same few blocks that have already been home to a shitload of super-cool people over the last ten years: folk singers like Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot; poets like Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Milton Acorn and Gwendolyn Macewen; rock stars like Neil Young and The Band, the beginnings of Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Hell, even Rick James.

It's not just Canadian kids. Americans have been flocking to Yorkville, too. Some of them come for the scene — for the drugs and music and art and free love — and some for the chance to escape the Draft and the war in Vietnam.

William Gibson came for both reasons. He'd grown up in rural Virginia reading science fiction and the Beats — Ginsberg and Kerouac, but especially William S. Burroughs. One day, they would help influence him to become one of the most celebrated science fiction authors of all-time. But first, they helped influence him to drop out of high school. And with the Draft in full swing, he figured it might be a good idea to convince the authorities that he wasn't really cut out for a stint in the Armed Forces.

"I told them that my one ambition in life was to take every mind-altering substance that existed on the face of the planet," he remembered later. "I just went in and babbled about wanting to be like William Burroughs. And that seemed to do the trick... I went home and bought a bus ticket to Toronto. But I don't like to take too much credit for that having been a political act... It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippie girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under U.S. imperialism – much more to do with hippie girls and hashish."

Yorkville, 1967

Yorkville had a lot of both.

Apparently, Gibson plunged right in, smoking pot and hash, dropping acid and doing pretty much everything else he could get his hands on. He knew better than to do heroin – thanks to reading Burroughs – but other than that: "The opiates aside, I tried whatever was going. I sort of prided myself on it."

He wasn't alone. That very summer, just a couple of blocks away at the University of Toronto, Yorkville's hippies organized something of a multimedia conference on the benefits of dropping acid. "Perception '67" they called it. Allen Ginsberg came. (He even had breakfast with Marshall McLuhan.) So did one of the Merry Pranksters. Timothy Leary would have been there too, but the government wouldn't let him into the country. And as amazing as the popularity of LSD was, it was nothing compared to pot. Yorkville was awash in marijuana smoke.

Money, on the other hand, was a bit harder to find. There were thousands of kids in the village that summer, especially on the weekends when "weekenders" flooded in from suburbs like Forest Hill. But there were only so many jobs and places to crash. "For a couple of weeks I was essentially homeless," Gibson later told the BBC, "although it was such a delightful, floating, pleasant period that it now seems strange to me to think that I was in fact homeless."

Luckily for him, at least one young entrepreneur saw the popularity of drugs in Yorkville as a new kind of business opportunity. The world's first head shop had opened in San Francisco the year before, followed by one in New York City a few months later. Now, Toronto had a head shop of our own — with an incredibly nerdy name to go along with it: Gandalf's. The store sold pipes and bongs and rolling papers and all sorts of other drug-related paraphernalia. The CBC called it, "A dope fiend's idea of a dream come true." And it seems that at the same time Gibson was looking for a way to pay rent, Gandalf's was looking for a manager. He got the job. And that's how he bankrolled a summer spent living, as he puts it, "in various wonderful sorts of sin".

Of course, all this drug-use and sex and long hair attracted plenty of media attention. The newspapers and television crews had been fascinated by Yorkville since the early '60s — spending most of their time freaking out over the supposed corruption of youth, but also trying to figure out exactly what in the hell all these kids thought they were doing. And so, in September of 1967, the CBC sent a crew into the neighbourhood to interview some hippies.

By an awesome stroke of historical luck, they happened to find William Gibson.

William Gibson in Yorkville, 1967

The video of their news report is posted online in the CBC archives. (I'll link below.) Gibson — in the slow, lazy voice of someone who seems to be stoned off their ass — rambles on about hippie philosophy, free love and the counterculture while he wanders around the neighbourhood. The CBC's narrator, Knowlton Nash, holds him up as a prime example: "a real hippie".

But in truth, by then, Gibson was sick of the whole scene. And with the summer winding down, he was just looking to get enough cash together to be able to move on. So, he says when the CBC showed up offering $500 for an interview, he was happy to lie through his teeth. "[N]othing I'm saying there, at such painful length, is even remotely genuine," he wrote a few years ago. "I'm thoroughly fed up... and want nothing more than a ticket out."

He got it. For the next few years, he'd move around – even go to Woodstock – before returning to Toronto for a while. It was here that he met and married his wife, but they eventually settled in Vancouver. That's where he went to university, got into punk, and started writing the science fiction that would make him famous. They say that not only did he coin the term "cyberspace", but that it's because of him we talk about stuff like "surfing" and "neural implants" too. His 1984 novel, Neuromancer, is still a mainstay of first year syllabuseses. In 1999, the Guardian called him "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades".

By the time he left Yorkville, the scene had already peaked. As bikers and harder drugs became bigger problems and a few cases of hepatitis sparked a media frenzy, the authorities – who had long been calling the scene a "cancer" and "a festering sore in the middle of the city" – seized their opportunity to drive the kids out of the village. The counterculture spread across downtown Toronto, to Kensington Market and Queen West and just down Bloor Street to Rochdale College (until the government shut that down too). Meanwhile, Yorkville was turned into the super-rich-person shopping district it is today. When Gibson came back for a visit a couple of months ago, the Globe and Mail was there. “It’s as though they tore down St. Mark’s Place and built the Trump Tower,” he told them. “My Bohemia is gone.”

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If you're willing to suffer through the two ads per video our national public broadcaster makes you watch you in order to see anything in their archives, can check out the CBC's footage of William Gibson, complete with a couple of other interviews and footage of a women freaking out on a bad trip here — and there's another whole video about Gandalf's here. 

I first learned the nugget of this story thanks to "Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s" by Stuart Henderson. It's easily one of the best books about the '60s I've ever read. You can buy it here or get it from the library here.

There's a feature-length NFB documentary about Yorkville's young people, which, because the NFB fucking rules, you can watch online for free here. York University has a neat virtual exhibit of Yorkville photos from the '60s here. And there's an archive of Toronto Star photos of the neighbourhood here. There's a nice rundown of Yorkville clubs and coffee houses, here, written by Nicholas Jennings, who wrote THE book about Yorkville's music, Before The Gold Rush.

Read that Globe article about William Gibson here. Listen to the BBC interview here. There's another interview I drew from here. And a book about him on Google books here. There also a biographical documentary about him, No Maps For These Territories.

Finally, Gibson has written about Yorkville himself on his blog. You can check out it here. And I will now proceed to quote a bunch of excepts from it and from the stuff he says in No Maps For These Territories.

ON KEANU REEVES AND THE DEATH OF YORKVILLE:

"When I first met Keanu Reeves, and we found ourselves talking about Toronto, he told me that he had played, as a child, in the excavation for the Four Seasons Hotel, on Yorkville Avenue. I was long gone to Vancouver, by then, but had been shocked, on subsequent visits, by the truly remarkable ferocity with which the ambient zone I remembered had been malled over. In retrospect, this had everything to do with Yorkville "Village" having been, in the first place, a developers' simulacrum of the West Village, briefly invaded, in my day, by a social simulacrum of the East Village.

"As the tide of "weekend hippies" washed back out, many of the more organizationally-inclined habitues were sucked up into the astonishingly Ballardian (as in HIGHRISE, it seemed to me) tower of Rochdale College. 

"The genuine ambients swam down into the twisty, virtually ungentrifiable streets of Kensington Market instead, and away from the Cronenbergian, acid-totalitarian creepiness of Rochdale, and I've regarded Toronto, ever since, as a city somehow uniquely blind to its own psychogeography."

ON THE OTHER DRAFT DODGERS:

"When I got to Toronto I actually – to my chagrin somewhat – I found that I really really couldn't handle hanging out with the American draft dodgers. There was too much clinical depression, there was too much suicide, there was too much hard core substance abuse. They were a traumatized lot, those boys, and I just felt like I – you know, I felt frivolous."

ON THE END OF THE "STRAIGHT WORLD" AND THE ROLE OF DRUGS:

"Most of the people – I suppose really everyone that I counted as a close friend – seemed to harbour the unspoken assumption that everything that had gone before us was ending. It was really a very millennial time – far more millennial than this last year of the century. [What did you think was ending?] The straight world. I think that's what I would have told you at the time. But the straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today. Drugs were absolutely central to that experience, but they weren't essential. They weren't actually essential to it. I only know that in retrospect. At the time I'm sure I would have said that they were – you know, ingesting the right chemical was absolutely essential to the experience. But in retrospect, no, it's simply a matter of being there and being somewhat open to possibilities... Recreational drugs are essentially a wank. And a wank is okay, but you really should know that it's just a wank. And I think that's what we didn't know – to use the generational "we" – and what some of us still don't know."

The Giant Prehistoric Beavers of the Don Valley Brick Works

Hooooooo boy. Meet the giant beaver. It’s one of the largest rodents to have ever walked the earth: as much as seven feet long and more than 200 pounds. So, like, the size of a black bear. Its teeth were six inches long, but scientists aren’t sure if they were used to chop down trees like beavers do today; giant beavers probably ate aquatic plants, and there’s no evidence they built giant dams either. Their tails were probably quite different from their modern cousins, too: longer and thinner. And they had shaggier hair.

They also used to live in Toronto — about 130,000 years before our modern city was founded.

The first scientist to discover them here was Toronto’s most famous and celebrated geologist: Arthur Philemon Coleman. In the late 1800s, he became the first geologist to realize the importance of the big cliff on the northern end of the Don Valley Brick Works. At the bottom of the cliff was a bedrock of slate from about 450 million years ago — littered with fossils from the days when this part of the world was a tropical sea filled with trilobites. But what really makes the cliff special is what Coleman found above that slate: a remarkably complete geological record of the last 135,000 years.

Layer by layer, the exposed earth shows the last two Ice Ages coming and going, leaving rocks and dirt and boulders behind as enormous glaciers covered this land in ice and then melted away as the climate changed again. It’s the only place in this part of the world where you can see all of that history laid out in front of you. And in between those two Ice Age layers, there are a bunch of other layers: from a time when the planet was warmer. One of them, near the bottom, is a layer of sand and clay from about 130,000 years ago. That’s where A.P. Coleman found the giant tooth of a giant beaver.

Back in our giant beaver days, Toronto was actually a couple of degrees warmer than it is now. Instead of Lake Ontario, there was an even bigger and deeper lake here; they call it Lake Coleman in honour of the moustachioed geologist. Everything that now sits in downtown T.O. was very much underwater back then. The sands and clays at the foot of the cliff in the Brick Works — which is all the way north of Bloor — would have been in the shallow waters near shore, at the mouth of the prehistoric ancestor to the Don River.

A.P. Coleman

Coleman and his team were able to piece together a whole scene thanks to the other fossils they found along with the beaver tooth. The area where the river met the lake was a marshy wetland back then, surrounded by woods and grasslands. Prehistoric stag-moose, bigger even than moose are today, with huge sets of antlers, roamed through a wilderness that would have seemed both familiar and strange to us. There were plenty of trees and other plants that still grow in Toronto today: oaks and pines and maples, willows, cedars and elms. But there were also some species that you can only find further to the south these days — in the United States, where it’s warmer — as well as a few that are long-extinct. There were giant prehistoric bears here, too. Massive, ancient bison. Woodchucks and white-tailed deer. On occasion, a thunderstorm sparked a fire, flames tearing through forests and fields, enormous panicked beasts rushing for the safety of the water.

Scientists figure that giant beavers didn’t spend much of their time on land; even less, it seems, than beavers do today. They stuck to the swamp at the mouth of the river, swimming through the marsh, feeding on the aquatic reeds and long grasses that lined the shore. (And if they did behave like their modern relatives, maybe they were even cutting down trees and building beaver lodges big enough to house a family of rodents the size of a bear.) They’d been living like this, in the wetlands of North America, for two million years. And they had more than another hundred thousand years left to go.

But not in Toronto. As the next Ice Age began, Toronto got colder, eventually getting buried beneath a layer of ice two kilometers thick. The giant beavers would have been forced far to the south. And as the Ice Age ended, around 10,000 B.C. or so, the last members of the species died out. The giant beaver was extinct.

By then, a new species was living in North America: human beings. Back in the days when giant beavers had been swimming around the Don Valley, humans were still a young species, having only recently evolved on the savannas of Africa. But by the time the giant beavers went extinct, indigenous peoples had established cultures and communities all over the Americas — soon to become civilizations. The First Nations and their ancestors have been living in Toronto for thousands and thousands of years. But it was only a few hundred years ago that the first Europeans showed up. And when they did, many of them came looking for the smaller, modern relatives of those prehistoric beavers — so they could turn these new beavers into hats.

Finally, just a little more than 200 years ago, the British founded a new capital on this spot. To build it, they needed bricks. To make bricks, they needed clay. And one of the best sources for clay was discovered in the very same place where that prehistoric river once met that prehistoric lake. The Don Valley Brick Works was born, turning clay into red and yellow bricks of such a high quality that they won gold medals at the Chicago World’s Fair. A lot of Toronto’s old buildings are made of Brick Works bricks. Much of our city was quite literally built from the mud of the swamp where giant beavers once roamed.

Today, the Brick Works is no longer an industrial wasteland. Instead, we’ve tried to return it to its roots: a mixture of wetlands, forests and fields. Native species of plants and animals have been reintroduced and allowed to thrive — some of them are the very same species that would have been here in the days of the giant beaver. In fact, if you get lucky, you might even spot one of the newest residents: a modern, normal-sized beaver, swimming around the wetland where 130,000 years ago its giant beaver cousins did the very same thing.

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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

This post was edited from its original version to be more awesome.

Image: Castoroides in New Jersey by Charles R. Knight, 1904 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The ROM has a giant beaver, along with other prehistoric beasts who would have lived in these parts on display, which is raaaaather cool. And a few indigenous nations, like the Mi'kmaq and the Cree, have myths about giant beavers.

You can read more about the north cliff of the Brick Works here, at the oh-my-god-so-good Lost Rivers site.

There's a neat photo of the cliff from it's industrial days here and the wasteland that was the quarry here. 

Oh and Torontoist is currently running a series on our city back in its prehistoric days. They've started with a couple of posts about super-super-super old stuff. You can find them all here.

Here, also, since I made this list and didn't use it but don't want to delete it, a few of the plants A.P. Coleman and his team discovered evidence of from that period 130,000 years ago: sugar maples, ash, cedar, hickory, willows, elm, locust trees, oaks, white pine, sycamore, sedges, which are like rushes, mare's tail, algae, mosses.

And then there's this video about giant beavers from a Discovery Channel series called "Prehistoric New York":

The Scarborough Bluffs Looking Like They Belong In A John Ford Film

I can't seem to find any information about this photo online — like, say, when it was taken — but I like it so I'm posting it anyway. It almost looks like a shot of Monument Valley, where John Ford shot his iconic Westerns, but this is, of course, our very own Scarborough Bluffs. They were apparently originally formed thousands of years ago as part the shoreline of the ancient Lake Iroquois, the giant lake left behind when the last Ice Age ended and the enormofuckingus glacier that used to cover this land melted away. (The big hill that runs through Toronto just north of Davenport Road was also part of that shoreline.) The cliffs been gradually moving north as they erode away, and the sand that gets washed off them is what formed the Toronto Islands (which were nothing more than a sandy peninsula when our city was founded — before they got separated from the mainland by a storm and then enlarged artificially).

There are some cliffs that look a little like this on the northeast coast of England, at Scarborough, which is why Elizabeth Simcoe,  the wife of the guy who founded Toronto, named our cliffs Scarborough, too. The name obviously stuck. And ended up being used not just for the Bluffs, but for the entire east-end suburb that was eventually swallowed up by the Megacity.

What Bay And Wellington Looked Like in 1925

I think this has just become one of my favourite old shots of the city. Though I don't really have too much to say about it. It was taken in the spring of 1925 looking north up Bay Street from Wellington. Construction workers are repairing the streetcar lines. It's still one of the most beautiful views in our city, I think, especially at night — one of our few terminating vistas: looking up Bay Street toward Old City Hall. (Which, in this photo, was still just plain old City Hall. It opened it 1899, built by the guy who is Toronto's most famous old timey architect, E.J. Lennox, who also designed Casa Loma, The King Edward Hotel, and a bunch of other stuff.)

Toronto's First Cat

Toronto when it was just a few days old

The cat arrived on a July morning in 1793. Toronto was just a few days old. It had only been a week and a half since one hundred British soldiers sailed into our harbour and came ashore at the mouth of a creek they would call the Garrison. That's the spot where they pitched their tents and started taking axes to trees. Enormous old oaks and pines crashed to earth as the men began to clear away the ancient forest that had been growing here since prehistoric times. In its place they would build Fort York – and a few kilometers to the east, the first few blocks of a new town. This was going to be the new capital of the new province of Upper Canada, away from the border and easily defensible – ready for the inevitable war with the Americans.

It was in the early morning of their eleventh day clearing trees that a great big British ship sailed into the harbour. This was the HMS Mississauga. On board was the man who had sent them here: John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of the new province. He had sailed overnight from Niagara-on-the-Lake (the temporary capital) to oversee the construction of what he hoped would some day become a thriving metropolis, a testament to the glory of the British Empire. And he brought his family with him.

The next evening, he and his wife Elizabeth found a spot across the creek from the fort to pitch their own tent. It was an elaborate canvas house with two rooms, doors, wallpaper, windows and floors – even a stove to keep it warm. This was the very same tent that had once been used by one of the most super-important and famous European explorers ever. Captain James Cook had lived in it on his travels around the Pacific Ocean, right up until he "discovered" Hawaii, tried to take the indigenous king hostage, and was killed.

Now, in the forest of Toronto, the tent was home to the ruler of Upper Canada, his wife, and three of their children. They'd left the older ones behind in England, but brought their toddlers – Sophia and Francis – with them. Their youngest daughter, Katherine, was a brand new baby girl: she'd been born just a few months earlier in that very same tent.

She wasn't the only new addition to the family, either. At Niagara-on-the-Lake the Simcoes had gotten three pets: two dogs (who I'll talk about in another post) and a cat. And since they'd all come along for the trip to Toronto, (assuming none of the soldiers brought a cat along with him) this cat was the very first house cat to ever set paw on this land. Elizabeth Simcoe wrote a paragraph about him in her diary, just a few weeks after they arrived:

"I brought a favourite white Cat with grey spots with me from Niagara. He is a native of Kingston. His sense & attachment are such that those who believe in transmigration would think his soul once animated a reasoning being. He was undaunted on board the Ship, sits composedly as Centinel at my door amid the beat of Drums & the crash of falling Trees & visits the Tents with as little fear as a dog would do."

Toronto's first cat was a badass.

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That painting was done by Elizabeth Simcoe herself about ten days after they arrived. It's looking west from what's now the Port Lands. You can see the tiny little white specks of the first huts at Fort York and the tall masts of the ships that brought the Simcoes and the others here. 

Katherine, sadly, didn't live a very long life. The baby got sick in the spring and died. She was one of the first people buried in a cemetery that's still there, kind of, preserved as park called Victoria Square just southeast of King and Bathurst. You can read more about her and the other people buried there here.

You can read more about the canvas house from the Captain Cook Society here. 

As for wild cats, the internet is being weirdly unhelpful on this, but I suspect there would have been some prowling those woods in the days before our city was founded: bobcats and lynx and maybe even mountain lions.

Interestingly, the canvas house wasn't only the connection between James Cook and our Lieutenant Governor. Cook had served under Simcoe's dad on a ship called the Pembroke, which is how he learned how to be a great big important ship captain guy.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

The Beautiful Brook Hemingway Used To Stroll Along

Castle Frank Brook, 1907

That's Castle Frank Brook in 1907. Oh how pretty it once was. It used to run through the heart of our city — from Dufferin and Lawrence down along the south-western edge of Forest Hill, across the northern end of Yorkville, through Rosedale Valley Ravine and into the Don River. It was right near that spot, in the ancient pine forest overlooking the valley, that the dude who founded Toronto, Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, decided to build his family's summer home. He named it, with tongue firmly in cheek, after his young son Francis: Castle Frank. And so the brook ended up with that name too.

This photo was taken more than 100 years later and quite a bit further upstream, just south-east of St. Clair and Spadina. There, the brook runs through the Nordheimer Ravine, named after the family who used to own the land. Samuel Nordheimer made his fortune importing pianos and then married Edith Boulton of the super-crazy-important Boultons: one of the first families to move here when the city was founded, they were leaders of the Family Compact and the people who built the Grange. In the 1870s, the newlywed Nordheimers built a mansion on the hill overlooking the ravine and damned the brook at this spot to create a little pond and waterfall.

Not long after that the Town of Yorkville built their waterworks nearby, using the brook to supply the town with what quickly became not very clean drinking water. The yuckiness of it eventually helped convince the town that they should join the rest of the city. The waterworks were replaced with a brand new pumping station right around the same time this photo was taken, and then later expanded. It's still there now, designated as a heritage site and used to control the entire freaking water system for the whole entire freaking city.

Now, as for Ernest Hemingway. It was a little less than 20 years after this photo was taken that he moved into the neighbourhood. In the early 1920s, he and his wife Hadley lived on Bathurst, just a couple of blocks north of St. Clair, while he was writing for the Star. Their apartment building overlooked the brook about a ten or fifteen minute walk upstream of this pretty little waterfall. They say Hemingway used to like to take strolls along the banks of the creek.

Since then, sadly, most of Castle Frank Brook has been buried, tied into the city's sewer system just like the other streams that used to run through the middle of Toronto. In the 1960s, it was going to be even more obliterated than that: the Spadina Expressway was supposed to be built right on top of it. Thankfully, plans for the expressway were killed after opposition by community groups led by the likes of Jane Jacobs and Marshall McLuhan (who also used to live only a few minutes away from where this photo was taken). Today, most of the ravines around the area where Hemingway used to take his strolls are preserved as parkland. And Castle Frank Brook has been brought partially back life, trickling along the same path it has followed for more than ten thousand years.

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I wrote more about Hemingway and his ties to Toronto here. They also had their only child while they were living here. Jack Hemingway (eventual father to Muriel) was born at the Wellesley Hospital in 1923.

I first discovered this photo while I was reading the awesome book HTO: Toronto's Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost River to Low-flow Toilets. You can buy the book for yourself from Coach House here or borrow it from the library here. It's got chapters from Shawn Micallef and John Lorinc and everything.

And you can learn more about Castle Frank Brook and all of our buried creeks on the Lost Rivers website, which is an absolute-freaking-lutely amazing resource for all this kind of stuff. Really. Seriously. Neat stuff.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

This post is related to dream 07 The Lake Sturgeon Ernest Hemingway, 1923