Bicycles! Bicycles! Bicycles!

Over at blogTO, Derek Flack is raaaather good at putting together galleries of old Toronto photos. And I think his post of old bicycle pics is one my favourites so far. Most of them are from the early 1900s, back when the car-to-bike ratio was a little less, uh, Rob Ford friendly — some cyclists fly across the not-exactly-gridlocked Bloor Street Viaduct, another trudges up the muddy, automobile-less hills of St. Clair. I'll re-post a couple of my favourires here, but why even bother scrolling down when with a quick click you can check out his full post right here.

Riding along the Don River, between Don Mills & Leaside, 1912

University Avenue, looking at about where the American Embassy is now, 1912

Yonge Street & Summerhill, 1915

The Royal York Hotel, 1919

Adding A Legend To This Old Photo Of The Foot Of Bathurst

So. This is what the foot of Bathurst used to look like. That's Bathurst going right to left toward the lake. And that's Lake Shore Boulevard (which is also called Fleet Street for this stretch) going up through the middle of the photo. East to west.

01 This is the edge of Little Norway. At the beginning of the Second World War, Norway was officially neutral, but Hitler invaded and occupied them anyway. The Norwegian King managed to escape the country and set up a government in exile in England, joining the war on the Allied side. What was left of the Royal Norwegian Air Force came to Toronto to train. They flew out of the island airport and had their camp just across the gap on the mainland — right at the foot of Bathurst. You can really only see the edge of Little Norway in this photo, most of it is off to the left. Today, that's where Little Norway park is. And you can still catch the ferry to the island airport in the same spot the Norwegians did back during the War.

See what Little Norway looks like today here.

02 This is Maple Leaf Stadium. It opened in 1926 and was home to the Toronto Maple Leafs, the minor league baseball team who played here right up until the '60s. Some of those squads are considered to be some of the best minor league teams who've ever played the sport. Sparky Anderson — the legendary Hall of Fame manager of the Detroit Tigers and Cincinnati Reds — played for one of them. In fact, he got his start managing right here, when the team's owner suggested he might be better at that job than he was at playing shortstop. They tore the stadium down in the' 60s, when the team was sold and moved to Kentucky. Today there's a gas station on that corner and a housing complex behind it. You can see more old photos of the stadium here.

See what the intersection looks like today here.

03 This little building is still there today. It was designed by the same architects who designed Maple Leaf Stadium: Chapman & Oxley. They designed a bunch of the most iconic sights along the lake shore. They're the same guys who did the Sunnyside Pavillion, the Palais Royale and the Princes' Gates (which you can see in the top right-hand corner of this photo, number 8). Originally this was called the Crosse and Blackwell Building, because that was the name of the food company who they built it for. Now, we just call it 545 Lake Shore Boulevard West and Rogers runs some of it cable channels out of it.

04 This was built just a couple of years after Maple Leaf Stadium — as a warehouse for Loblaws. You can see the freight train pulling up to it at the bottom of the photo, blocking traffic at what doesn't really look like the safest crossing in the world. When Loblaws moved out in the '70s, it donated the building to the Daily Bread Food Bank. And when the Daily Bread Food Bank moved out in the year 2000, Loblaws tried to demolish it. But the city stepped in and saved it as an historic site. Now, apparently, they're trying to figure out how to turn into a Superstore and office space. You can read about all that in The Grid here.

05 I'm pretty sure all of the land in this entire photo used to be lake. It wasn't filled in with dirt until the 1920s, which kind of explains why all the buildings in this photo were built in the 1920s. The original shoreline was just to the right of this photo. That's the spot where Garrison Creek met the lake, and where John Graves Simcoe decided to build Fort York all the way back in 1793. The Fort, of course, is still there. But now they've snuck the Gardiner Expressway into the space between it and the right-hand edge of this photo. 

I'm also pretty sure I read somewhere that this is a pretty hard place to build really big stuff, since you're digging your foundations in land that used to be water. But that doesn't seem to have stopped anybody. The whole corner is pretty developed — there are even new condos going up right now in pretty much this exact spot. They haven't completely forgotten the history of the place, though: the condo tower right on the corner has a statue out front in commemoration of the War of 1812. Douglas Coupland designed. A Canadian tin solider stands victoriously over the body of an American tin solider lying on the ground at his feet.

See what the statue and that corner looks like today here.

06 The Tip Top Tailors Building. A Polish immigrant by the name of David Dunkelman started the company in a storefront on Yonge Street in 1909. By the time '20s rolled around, he could afford to build these new headquarters down by the lake. The building is still there, but now it's the Tip Top Lofts. Which look pretty awesome with that giant old red neon sign and streetcars passing by.

See what it looks like today here.

07 This is Coronation Park. It was the 1930s before they decided what to do with this land. During the Great Depression, it was a construction site — in the fight against unemployment, the government hired people to build that seawall just offshore. They didn't start work on the park until 1936, after the seawall was done. That's when the old King George died and the stuttering, new, Colin Firth-y King George took over. In honour of the crowning of the new king, a group of veterans of the First World War — awesomely calling themselves "The Men of Trees" and declaring that restoring green space was "the most constructive and peaceable enterprise in which nations could cooperate" — planted a big oak in the middle of the park. In honour of the military units who had fought Canada's wars, they planted 137 maple trees. And they weren't done. In the years after that, they added even more — a series of pathways curved through hundreds of trees. In 1939, King George himself came to visit with his wife, the Queen Mum. They drove along what we still call Remembrance Drive, as veterans and schoolchildren planted trees for every single one of the public schools and high schools in the city. Today, though, there's not much done to remember any of this. Some of the trees have died. Some of the plaques have gone missing. Most of the paths aren't there anymore.

Coronation Park is also where The Grateful Dead played a free show in 1970. The day The Festival Express took over Exhibition Stadium there were clashes between hippies and cops outside the official concert. Woodstock had convinced a lot of people that live music should be free. To keep the busted heads to a minimum, The Dead and some of the other Festival Express bands finally agreed to head over here to park after their official sets and play for the people who couldn't — or wouldn't — pay.

See what it looks like today here.

08 The Ex! This is very eastern edge of the Exhibition Grounds — you can see the Princes' Gates right at the edge of the photo. The Gates, as I mentioned above, were also designed by Chapman & Oxley. And, no surprise, they were also built in the 1920s. The Princes themselves were here to open it: Colin Firth's older brother, King Edward VIII, who abdicated; and their younger brother, who was also, very confusingly, named George. The Goddess of Winged Victory stands on top of the Gates, with a maple leaf in her hand and nine pillars beneath her representing the nine provinces in Confederation at the time. More recently, we've added a garden out front, with the official flowers of every Canadian province and territory.

See what the Gates look like today here. And what the garden looks like here.

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One of Rob Ford allies, Scarborough councillor Paul Ainslie, has been trying to get Coronation Park restored. You can learn more about that from the Toronto Sun here.

Torontoist has a neat post with an interactive panaroma of Coronation Park here. And there's more information about it here. Wikipedia's got more of the down low on 545 Lake Shore, the Tip Top Tailors Building and Chapman & Oxley.

The Toronto Dreams Project Sticky Plaque Division

Here's my new thing: sticky plaques. That's what I'm calling these stickers I'm printing, each with a QR code on it. (QR codes are those fancy looking codes that you scan with your smartphone to automatically open a webpage.) Those QR codes all link to webpages which tell the story of something historical that happened on the spot where the sticker gets stuck. Sometimes those webpages will be my own posts right here on the Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera Blog. And sometimes they'll link to other posts I like.

The idea is to highlight historical stories and locations that might not already have their own official non-sticky plaques. And to provide more information and multimediaishness to some of the places that already do.

You can see photos of some of the places I've stuck sticky plaques here.

Where Conservatives Have Been Getting Drunk For 130 Years

Sir John A. Macdonald

It all started in 1882. Canada had only been around for 15 years, but Sir John A. Macdonald had already been Prime Minister for ten of them. He'd only lost one election — the one right after the Pacific Scandal. He and his Conservatives had taken a MASSIVE bribe from a railway tycoon in return for promising to give him the contract to build the railroad across Canada. And then they'd spent the money on bribing people to vote for them. Macdonald resigned in disgrace and got crushed in the next election. But a few years and one recession later, he was back in power. And with Toronto proving to be one of the key battlegrounds in federal politics, his supporters decided to start a brand new club in the heart of the city — somewhere where right-wing businessmen and politicians could come together, get drunk and plan their campaigns: The Albany Club.

The super-exclusive gentlemen's club was named after Queen Victoria's eighth son — the epileptic hemophiliac Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany. He was pretty famous back then and had recently met Macdonald and other high profile Tories on a trip to Canada. The club immediately became a secretive swank-fest of cigars and smoking chairs and brandy and oak paneling and alcoholism — a place for rich white guys back in the days when rich white guys were pretty much the only people allowed to vote. And it was for Tories only. That was kind of the point, right there in the bylaws: "No person shall become a Member of the Club unless a Conservative.” Those are their italics, not mine.

At first, the Albany Club was in a building on Bay Street, but before the 1800s were over, it had moved to a spot on King just a couple of blocks east of Yonge. There's an old stretch of buildings there — Victoria Row — built all the way back in the 1840s by one of Toronto's earliest architects: John Howard, the same guy who gave High Park to the city. The Albany Club is still there, like it has been since 1898, quietly serving as one of the powerful headquarters of Canadian conservatism.

And I do mean quietly. "We nurture our exclusivity and with that our privacy," the club's website says. There's no big sign outside the building, just a discrete "AC" emblem. "Nobody but an archaeologist accustomed to ferreting out old important things in secret places ever could discover the Albany Club," the Star wrote in 1921. Even the building's historical plaque is mounted inside the entrance, where only members and guests can see it.

There was a time when all the political parties had clubs like this. A few blocks away on Wellington, the Liberals had the Ontario Club. The Canada First Party had the National Club on Bay. But now, even the clubs that have survived have dropped their political affiliation. The Albany Club is the very last old school political club in Canada.

Every single Conservative Prime Minister from Macdonald to Mulroney has been a member of the Albany Club. And every single Conservative Premier of Ontario, too. Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty and Peter McKay and Jason Kenney and Jim Prentice and Maxime Bernier have all given speeches there. So have Tim Hudak and Hazel McCallion and Preston Manning and Christie Blatchford and Rex Murphy and David Frum. John Tory was the President of the Club for a while. Tony Clement is on the Board of Directors. So is Peter Van Loan. And Janet Ecker. And Denzil Minnan-Wong. And a whole bunch of lobbyists. In fact, they all got in a bit of trouble last year when Harper's government invited the Albany Club to host a private reception on Parliament Hill. Conservative politicians and registered lobbyists all got to hang out — and since it was a private party, they didn't have to worry about all those pesky lobbying laws.

For its part, the club is happy to admit the role it plays in the running of our country. "We believe in conservative values," the website says. "We will assist the conservative movement by being the forum for public policy discussions and decisions."

This time, those are my italics.

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There is at least one conservative politician who has publicly distanced himself from the club. In fact, that Rob Ford publicly distanced himself from them as part of his whole man-of-the-people shtick. "It’s not Bay Street or the Albany Club that's behind me," Rob Ford claimed during the last municipal election as part of his man-of-the-people shtick. "It’s Main Street."  Which hints at just how deeply the Albany Club is an entrenched part of Conservative power politics in Canada. 

The Albany Club was part of Doors Open a few years ago. You can see photos from inside here. There's Sir John A. memorabilia all over the place. You can learn more about the club's history on their website here. Their original bylaws are here. Read their historical plaque here.

You can learn more about the Ontario Club here and the National Club here. 


The Albany Club also does stuff like teach children proper table etiquette. 


Harper's Conservatives were investigated and eventually cleared by the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner for that private function on Parliament Hill. Because, amazingly, "There is no section in the Conflict of Interest Act that deals specifically with relations between registered lobbyists and Members of Parliament." The Hill Times has the full story here.

An FLQ Poster At St. Clair & Kennedy

Every June, I spend one drunken week covering the North By Northeast music festival. At this year's edition, which happened just a couple of weeks ago, a lot of the bands from Montreal stood out — with the red squares of the Quebec student movement pinned to their chests or guitars. It was kind of an interesting reminder of just how closely tied Toronto and Montreal are. And it was, of course, the first thing I thought of when I came across this poster. It was posted at St. Clair and Kenndy Road by the FLQ during the October Crisis in 1970. (Which you can learn lots more about on Wikipedia here.)

Dream 01 "Metropolitan York" (John Graves Simcoe, 1793)

John Graves Simcoe dreamed that his small town had become a sprawling metropolis. He wandered through the city, amazed. The cobblestones of Yonge Street stretched off into the distance – straight as an arrow – as far as he could see. The shops bustled. Carriages rumbled by in an endless, noisy parade. On nearly every corner, a golden church spire reached up into the heavens so high the peak touched cloud. Between them, giant balloons drifted into the city, baskets brimming with fruit and fish and cloth and exotic beasts from the far-flung capitals of the world. And there were so many people. He wanted to meet each one, to shake their hands and learn their names, but they were already growing faint and dim, slipping away. He found himself awake, in a tent on the tree-lined shore of Lake Ontario, listening to the sound of his men as they built Fort York.

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Learn about John Graves Simcoe here. 

Explore more Toronto Dreams Project postcards here.

And You Don't Even Want To Wear Pants In This Heat

You know how in old-timey novels people are always fainting all the time? Well when you see what people used to wear to the beach, it's not exactly surprising. This is Sunnyside in about 1914 or so, back when people were very clearly out of their minds. In the early 1900s, it wasn't just considered improper to show a little bit of skin at the beach in Toronto. It was totally illegal. A law passed in 1904 said that only people "wearing a proper bathing dress, covering the body from the neck to the knees may bathe at any time in the public waters within the city limits." And while people did try to fudge it a bit, if they fudged it too far they would run afoul of the Toronto Police Morality Department. (Yup, that was a thing.)

It wasn't until the 1930s that things loosened up a bit. But only a bit. The law was changed to say a bathing suit was required to "prevent indecent exposure", but no one was quite sure what that meant. The Morality Department and even the Mayor took it to mean that men had to wear tops. Hundreds of "filthy" "ape-men" were arrested for taking off their shirts at the beach, sparking legal and political battles over what exactly people were and were not allowed not to wear. (Kevin Plummer's got the lowdown over at Torontoist here.)

By 1953, a teenaged Brigitte Bardot was wearing a bikini on the beach in Cannes and things were about to get a whoooooooooole lot less stuffy. Fifty years after that, Toronto would get our very first nude beach. Hanlan's Point was officially declared "clothing optional" in 2002.