JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

I guess I should have waited a little longer to post the last installment of my stroll along Broadway Avenue . Almost two weeks ago, I noticed that the lot of Brennan Pontiac Buick GMC was emptier than usual. Upon closer inspection, office equipment was piled up in the showroom. Sell-off sale announcements were posted on all of the windows. In short: sixty years of car dealerships at the corner of Bayview and Broadway have drawn to a close.

Part one of this journey . 1 - Northern Secondary School 2 - Brennan Pontiac/Buick 3 - Esso station Northern Secondary School marks Broadway's crossing of Mount Pleasant Road. There was considerable debate on what name to bestow upon what was then planned as a joint commercial/vocational school. Possible monikers were tossed around on the front page of the February 8, 1930 edition of the Toronto Star , along with fussy reasons for their unsuitability: "North Toronto": Would conflict with North Toronto Collegiate a few blocks away. "Eglinton": Would conflict with the public school of that name. "Mount Pleasant": Would sound too much like the cemetery of that name. "Roehampton": Name of one of the streets on which the school will stand, is deemed rather an awkward sort of name. Opinion now seems to favor the name "Northern Vocational School" as expressing both the location and the scope of the school. One further...

Disclaimer : After a long hiatus, an old feature of this site returns. Blame it on several factors—diving into other projects, time factors, lethargy, stubborn belief in finishing one massive instalment before moving on to the next one, lumbago, etc.—choose the excuse you wish to believe. Most of the photos used in this post were shot in December 2006, in case you notice any outdated elements. The final entry in this series may include photo updates. It may not resemble Manhattan's similarly monikered main artery, but Toronto's Broadway carries its share of history and stories, from rebellion launch site at its west end to a gateway to the Don Valley park system in the east. Broadway was one of the few side streets that ran through three municipalities in pre-amalgamation Metropolitan Toronto (Toronto, North York, East York). Among its homes and buildings lies several pieces of my family's history. This three-part look will begin with most of its run through the old c...