JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

From November 2011 through July 2012 I wrote the "Past Pieces of Toronto" column for OpenFile, which explored elements of the city which no longer exist. The following was originally posted on December 16, 2011. The paid attendance figure said it all: 802. A venue with a capacity of 18,000 that had once crammed as many as 4,000 more people than that into it was going out with a whimper. The sparse number of fans who witnessed the last baseball game at Maple Leaf Stadium on September 4, 1967 didn’t even have the satisfaction of seeing the hometown Maple Leafs achieve a final victory. A 7-2 loss marked the end of upper-level minor league ball in Toronto and 40 years of play at the foot of Bathurst Street. Ironically, the winning team, the Syracuse Chiefs, later became the farm club for Toronto’s long-awaited major league ball club. Yet Maple Leaf Stadium wasn’t far removed from its glory days. Under Jack Kent Cooke’s ownership during the 1950s , the Maple Leaf...

As I once wrote in a Historicist column , it was hard to tell if longtime Toronto newspaper columnist McKenzie Porter believed everything he wrote or pulled the legs of innocent readers. His columns for the Telegram and the Toronto Sun are full of head-scratching passages that are hopefully meant to be satirical. Ranting about pooping is definitely humorous, defending apartheid in South Africa less so. The absurdity of Porter's columns fits comfortably with the contrarion streak that has always filled the Sun 's pages. While researching an upcoming article, I came across this beaut of a Porter column about the movie E.T. It’s one of the oddest attacks of the Steven Spielberg classic I’ve ever read. The film’s problem? It caters to idiots who project human qualities onto animals and other beings! Source: the Toronto Sun , August 6, 1982 Please, please tell me that last line about eugenics was a joke…

From November 2011 through July 2012 I wrote the "Past Pieces of Toronto" column for OpenFile, which explored elements of the city which no longer exist. The following was originally posted on December 2, 2011. The Starbucks at 675 Yonge Street isn’t your typical branch of the corporate coffee giant. The walls are lined with sturdy old wooden bookshelves while the floor is a checkerboard of black and white. Why this location is not like the others is hinted at on the façade. Look up to the second floor and you’ll notice a legendary name in Toronto bookselling: Albert Britnell. The quality of the literature on the shelves inside doesn’t always match the standards the Britnell family maintained for over a century of book retailing, but it’s a nod to the building’s past that comes in handy while waiting for a friend or first date. English native Albert Britnell entered the book trade by working in his brother John’s bookstore in London. Both brothers moved to C...

Quick, name things you feared as a child. For me, it was comic books, films, or TV shows involving transformation sequences or body horror. These scared the beejezus out of me, even if the transformation was merely implied and not shown, such as a deceased Chevy Chase going back to Earth as adorable mutt Benji in Oh Heavenly Dog (a movie which scared Roger Ebert , for other reasons).  At home, I couldn't handle the transition from Bill Bixby to Lou Ferrigno in The Incredible Hulk . Hearing the Hulk theme music was the cue to scoot elsewhere. Why this shook me up was a good question - maybe I thought it was horrifying that a poor schlep could turn into a raging beast, that he was going through something so unpleasant I didn't want it to happen to me.