JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Cartoon by Sid Barron, the Toronto Star , November 23, 1962. Click on image for larger version. Adjust the dates to match this year's election (October 27, for the record), and you could easily recycle this cartoon. Some voters may feel as if the world ended long ago during the current drawn-out, fiction-writers-couldn't-make-this-stuff-up narrative.

This post offers supplementary material for an article I wrote for Torontoist , which you should read before diving into this piece. If your appetite has been whetted, here are a pair of Hans Fread recipes I encountered during my research. First up, his take on chicken liver pate. Source: Globe and Mail , November 16, 1957. Note steer behind Hans's head. Second, from Fread's George Brown College course on "Cooking for the Budget Minded," a recipe printed in the September 12, 1969 edition of the Toronto Star . Budget braised beef 1 piece beef fat, size of small potato 4-5 pounds beef, crossribs, or bottom round juice of 1/2 lemon 1 garlic clove, minced 3/4 tsp celery salt 1 tbsp crystallized ginger, diced 1 tsp salt 1/2 tsp pepper 1/2 unpeeled lemon, thinly sliced 8 small potatoes, peeled 4-5 carrots, quartered 8 medium onions Dice and melt the fat in a dutch over or pot. Brown the meat slowly on all sides, until it has a good-looking brown co...

This post offers supplementary material for an article I wrote for Torontoist , which you should read before diving into this piece. If only more mayors kept scrapbooks as extensively as Allan Lamport did. To say the dozens of brittle, flaking volumes sitting in the City of Toronto Archives were a valuable resource in preparing this profile is an understatement. Throughout his political career, Lamport clipped every article mentioning his name and pasted them into the type of scrapbook you can easily pick up at Staples or Wal-Mart. During his mayoralty, volumes are organized by newspaper, which is especially helpful in the case of the yet-to-be-digitized Telegram . Warning: due to the condition of the scrapbooks, you’ll need to brush the flakes off yourself after viewing them.

As Toronto's police magistrate between 1877 and 1921, George Taylor Denison III  passed judgement on thousands of people in his court. The press dutifully covered the proceedings daily, leaving historians with a record alternatively amusing, enraging, and heartbreaking. Over the years, I've saved several police court reports, usually topped with a catchy headline like this one. Who doesn't want to know the sordid details surrounding "John the Hugger" that caused him to be hauled in front of Denison? Let's dive into the details of John, the Stone family, the "saucy mendicant,"  and the other cases included in the News 's court roundup on November 22, 1909...

Source: Toronto Star , September 29, 1967. While this story is presented in a charming manner, complete with victim who apparently shook off being grabbed and dunked in a tub of water, it's hard to deny that the hippie-washers were out to commit acts meriting assault charges if attempted now. This wasn't an "attempt to do something constructive," this was a bunch of yahoos looking to stir shit up. Note the look on the victim's face. His expression screams "Seriously? Are you kidding me? Riiight..." Not everyone at U of T felt the same way about cleaning up Yorkville. A story in the Globe and Mail the following day noted that in a 78-56 vote, the Graduate Students Union endorsed financial aid for draft dodgers and for people arrested at a Yorkville sit-in the previous month.

Click on image for larger version. The 1970s. You have a pantry full of Campbell's Vegetable Soup. You can't decide what kind of sandwich will taste best while playing spelling games with the alphabet pasta. Who do you turn to! Toronto Maple Leafs hockey star Dave Keon , of course!

Click on image for larger version In the midst of recent housecleaning, this pamphlet fell out of a decaying cookbook I was about to toss out. Much screams 1970s: the layout, the nod to Canadian nationalism, and the heavy use of tinned food. Perhaps somebody worked very hard in Aylmer's test kitchen to devise these nautical-inspired dishes...or perhaps they were handed a list of products and told "do something with these!" Note the absence of "edible" in that sentence. Brave enough to enjoy a taste of "Nautical 'n Nice?" Continue on...

Source: Eye , May 3, 2001. While researching a recent Torontoist post regarding the demise of Eye/Eye Weekly/The Grid , I dug through a box of material meant to be scrapbooked over a decade ago. Besides finding a couple of fully intact issues focusing on the 2001 Toronto Fringe Festival, I unearthed this clipping of a long-shuttered Windsor pizzeria whose slowly-decaying sign provided years of mirth for my sister and I. Over time, Star Pizza's sign lost more letters. By the mid-2000s you could buy a "lie" for 99 cents, which is a bargain when you're looking to hoodwink somebody.

This post offers supplementary material for an article I wrote for Torontoist , which you should read before diving into this piece. Source: Toronto Star , November 1, 1978. On my computer reside plenty of files I'm stumbled upon in the midst of research which I figure may be useful someday, no matter how absurd they are. Prime example: Art Eggleton dressed as a pickle. Based on the highlighting on the PDF copy of the original page, I discovered this gem while working on a Hallowe'en post. The original caption read as follows: No sourpuss : Dressed as a pickle, but all smiles, Toronto Alderman Art Eggleton hands out a balloon to Diana Russo, 2, of Grace Street, at campaign headquarters last night. Supporter Robert Long offers Hallowe'en treat. 

Historicist won a National Magazine Award ! A revised version of an  old post on my days at CFRU .

During some recent research, I stumbled upon a book review longtime Globe and Mail writer William French penned over 40 years ago for George Glazebrook's The Story of Toronto . French's introduction sums up the stereotypical view of Toronto history, and the battle I and my fellow historians face daily to present the city's past in fresh, engaging ways. Anyone writing a history of Toronto faces an awkward problem: the story, on the whole, is dull. It lacks drama and dash, and our heroes are in a minor mode. Without exceptional effort on the part of the author, his book will also be dull. Apart from the clash of arms in 1813 and the rattle of muskets in 1837—both encounters were marked by an almost comical incompetence—Toronto’s story is one of slow, plodding growth over the years. The major element in that story is a rather dull and narrow bourgeoisie, preoccupied with matters of property, finance, and morals. Until recently, anyway: the city is now undergoing a fund...

Conservation lab at the Archives of Ontario . Photo taken during a Doors Open tour in 2010. Plug in the laptop. Attach the cooling pad to ensure the computer resists self-immolation. Wait for research materials to arrive, or start in on an order placed ahead of time. If waiting, sign on to the internet, work on other projects, or grab a pencil (no pens allowed!) and scribble random thoughts on scrap paper or in a notebook. When the boxes and file folders arrive, dive headfirst into the past. Yep, just another day researching in an archive. *** I love working in archives. Flipping through holdings brings forward the same feelings of discovery I had as a student while working with my father’s archival-sized collection of newspaper clippings. In both cases, beyond gathering the information required for the project at hand, I enjoy stumbling upon odd, unrelated tidbits. These side findings are good for a laugh, for shock value, and for inspiring future articles. Any...

Photo taken on Gordon Street, Toronto, December 3, 2009. 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. This is the final installment to be reprinted, one appropriate for today as it was originally posted on April 1, 2012.  That date is key, for the following is an April Fools joke, one I learned several lessons from. Prepare yourself for another lengthy preamble.

This post has moved to Tales of Toronto . 

Sifting through files on one of my 7,853 USB keys, I found a folder of material I'd copied from City Lights , a short-lived (1934-35) Toronto magazine from the mid-1930s. Its content fell somewhere between the New Yorker and a Depression-era Toronto Life . City Lights is also one of those subjects that is perennially on my Historicist back burner - someday a profile will see the light of day, once I can find any information about its brief existence.

Last night I went to Second City for the first time in ages. Little did I know the comedy wouldn't stop when I got home. The interwebs were abuzz with news of  2010 Toronto mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson jumping into this year's race. Said candidate decided to launch their campaign with a lengthy poem which provoked waves of derision, because that's what you automatically do when you have a platform which allows only 140 characters at a time (though in this case, it is a train wreck of verse). In my fatigued state, the following thought sprang into my head: The only offhand example I thought of was a piece of doggerel I encountered while researching the incorporation of Toronto in 1834 . Technically, William Lyon Mackenzie wasn't running for mayor when the following piece was written - the position didn't exist yet - but he'd be named our city's first chief exec soon enough. Context: Mackenzie, along with some other Reformers, opposed Upper Can...

Source: the Toronto Star , April 13, 1964. To mark Oscar night, we're heading back 50 years to check the reaction from Toronto's TV critics regarding the 36th annual Academy Awards ceremony on April 13, 1964. Among the milestones that night were the first black performer to win Best Actor (Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field ) and the first film to place three nominees in the Best Supporting Actress category (Diane Cilento, Edith Evans, and Joyce Redman in Tom Jones, all of whom lost to Margaret Rutherford from The V.I.P.s ).

Source: the Telegram , April 7, 1911. Two adjacent sketches make up today's post. Did the artist try to suggest bags under each crook's eyes to illustrate their depravity in holding up one of the city's most prominent jewelers? Or did John Lester naturally look that weary? Also, were they trying to pass along their stolen diamonds to unsuspecting tourists in Niagara Falls? A possible sales pitch under that scenario: WILLIAMS (since he shows promise as the smooth talker of the pair): Hello there young lovers. Are you here to celebrate your honeymoon? GROOM : We are. Just arrived on the train. Been looking forward to this for three years. Do you know if anyone's going over the falls in a barrel today? WILLIAMS : Wouldn't know. Not as common as you'd think. By the way, I notice your rings are not diamonds. BRIDE : He couldn't afford them on his clerk's salary. But our love is priceless. WILLIAMS : That may be true, but it would be nice to hav...

Source: the Toronto World , April 9, 1911. Click on image for larger version. First thing about this ad which caught my eye: the funky typeface used by the Grand Opera House, which it used for all its showcase ads during this period. Second thing about this ad which caught my eye: "Lucy Daly and her Pony Ballet." Did Ms. Daly bring ponies on stage to performance classical ballet? Did she do an interpretative dance routine to salute ponies? While I'm unable to confirm either theory, it appears Daly was a singer/dancer who had toured with headiners Hap Ward and Harry Vokes for several years. The New York Dramatic Mirror noted that during a production of A Pair of Pinks in Montreal in 1905, Daly "was as bright and vivacious as ever and danced beautifully." I also wonder if she was related to another frequent performer in Ward and Vokes productions, Vokes's wife Margaret Daly-Vokes. Third thing about this ad which caught my eye: "The Famous Fu...

This post offers supplementary material for an article I wrote for Torontoist , which you should read before diving into this piece. In an opinion piece published on November 30, 1833 complaining about the rejection of his expense claims in covering the provincial assembly, Gurnett described his editorial policy for the Courier of Upper Canada . He avoids mentioning that the “the true interests of this province” he believed in tended to coincide with Tory/Family Compact policies: In the management of our journal, we have never courted, or deferred to, what is usually called public opinion; neither have we courted the approbation of persons in authority, or in fact of any individuals whatever. Our sole object has been to promote to the utmost extent of our ability and our means, the true interests of this province; and in the pursuit of that object; we have advocated those principles which we believed to be most conducive thereto; those principles we declared clearly and ...