JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

This installment of my "Retro T.O." column for The Grid was originally published on June 19, 2012. Globe and Mail , July 26, 1997. Click on image for larger version. Lovers of wild pants and saxophones rejoice! As of this week, the Spadina bus of 1980s musical fame has returned while platform reconstruction takes the streetcar right-of-way out of service for several months. And the return of bus service might reawaken arguments that stalled the construction of the Spadina streetcar line for years.

This installment of my "Ghost City" column for The Grid was originally published on January 15, 2013. Toronto Life , December 1985. That Cumberland Terrace exists as a time capsule of shopping-mall design fits well with one of the site’s earliest uses: A cemetery preserving the memory of loved ones. Currently honoured with a plaque on the 2 Bloor West tower, Potter’s Field was Toronto’s first non-denominational burial ground when it opened in July 1826.

This post has moved to Tales of Toronto .

This post has moved to Tales of Toronto .

This post has moved to Tales of Toronto .

This installment of my "Retro T.O." column for The Grid was originally published on July 24, 2012. And, as we predicted, people are still devising burial plans for the Gardiner. Jarvis Street, east side, looking northeast from Lake Shore Boulevard East, showing Gardiner Expressway under construction, 1963. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 5603. “I’ve looked at this darn thing from one end to the other and I can’t think of anything I would like to change.” Frederick Gardiner’s verdict on the expressway that would bear his name was not one future municipal officials shared. Within a decade-and-a-half of the Gardiner’s completion in 1965, grumblings arose from City Hall that the elevated section through the core should be knocked down. Like clockwork, every few years a plan to bury or replace the freeway emerges. Each plan is initially greeted with relief that the waterfront will soon be rid of what many people have perceived as an eyesore and bar...

This installment of my "Retro T.O." column for The Grid was originally published on May 8, 2012. Shortly after becoming mayor of Toronto, Mel Lastman was asked if he worried about his wife Marilyn’s verbal snafus. “All the time,” he said. “But I find it cute and if people don’t like it, too bad.” The same could be said of Mel’s odd outbursts, yet few found it cute when Lastman uttered a death threat against CBC reporter (and current city councillor) Adam Vaughan in May 1999. Thanks to a police leak, it was an open secret among City Hall reporters that Marilyn Lastman was caught shoplifting a $155 pair of designer pants at the Promenade Mall Eaton’s on April 19, 1999. According to the police report no charges were laid “due to her age as well as no outstanding offences on her record.” Sources close to Marilyn believed the pressures of Mel’s job had resulted in depression and prescription drug use. The incident was kept quiet until the satirical magazine Frank published a ...

This installment of my "Retro T.O." column for The Grid was originally published on July 10, 2012. Toronto Star , May 8, 1986 “The most expensive beer commercial in Canadian history unfolds this weekend on the grounds of Toronto’s Exhibition Place,” observed the Globe and Mail’ s Stephen Brunt on the eve of the first Molson Indy a quarter of a century ago. At stake for the brewer were $50 million worth of insurance and the wrath of Parkdale residents petrified that their neighbourhood would be left in shambles. As back as the late 1960s, several attempts were made to bring a major auto race to central Toronto. Efforts in the late 1970s to hold races at Exhibition Place met fierce opposition from a Parkdale-centric citizens group known as the Anti-Grand Prix Coalition (AGPC) and city councillors like John Sewell (“it’s a stupid idea”). The AGPC reformed in the spring of 1985 when a proposal from Molson to run a CART Indy-car race gained momentum. As AGPC chair Susan S...

Item : I recently appeared on Radio Regent 's Dums Dums show, along with Adrienne Coffey from the Archives of Ontario, to discuss how to use archives. Listen to the podcast here . Item : Along with fellow Historicist writer David Wencer and Heritage Toronto's Plaques and Markers Program Coordinator Michelle Ridout, I'll be leading a walk during Doors Open weekend (May 23-24). The subject: "Sport Stadiums and Lakeside Leisure: Playing Along the Waterfront" Three walks will be conducted each day, at 10:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 2:00 p.m. I'm leading the 11:00 a.m. walks each day; Michelle will lead the other two Saturday walks, while David will guide the other two Sunday walks. Want to come? Sign up on the Doors Open site for the slot that best suits your plans for that weekend! The meeting spot is Little Norway Park, located at the southwest corner of Bathurst and Queens Quay.

The News , April 27, 1912. Also worthy of note, which I didn't edit out of this clipping: a silly story of the day (the man with the 39-letter last name); a typical example of how ads often looked like news items ("In Camp and Barracks"); and an announcement regarding appointments for what was eventually known as the Langstaff Jail Farm , where minor offenders (and some ill/poor seniors) were shipped to tend land until 1958.

Abraham Lincoln, 1863 April 15, 1865: the front page of the Globe featured its usual assortment of classifieds and diplomatic dispatches from Great Britain and elsewhere. It also contained the latest news from Hamilton, publication notices for two books, and an article offering advice from a former Torontonian on moving to California. Nothing particularly earth-shattering. Not so the headline halfway down the first column of page 2: Globe , April 15, 1865. The Globe then outlined what it knew about the events at Ford's Theatre the previous evening, and gave this description of Lincoln's condition: The President was in a state of synops, totally insensible and breathing slowly. The blood oozed from the wound at the back of his head. The surgeons used every possible effort of medical skill, but all hope was gone. The parting of his family with the dying President is too sad for description. In a separate incident, an attempt was made on the life of Secretary of St...

Globe and Mail , April 7, 1977. This installment of my "Retro T.O." column for The Grid was originally published on April 3, 2012.  Fur coats, parkas, and snowmobile suits—not the garb traditionally associated with an afternoon at the ol’ ball game. Yet for baseball fans at the Blue Jays’ franchise debut on April 7, 1977, heavy winter gear was necessary to endure snow and bone-chilling wind. Though many of the 44,649 attendees left Exhibition Stadium after the first inning to escape the inclement weather and to start bragging that they were there, those who stayed (“assuming they survive the pneumonia that is bound to set in,” noted the Globe and Mail ’s Allen Abel) were warmed by the team’s performance on the field. The team received over 200,000 requests for opening-day tickets. Some devoted fans of the old minor-league Maple Leafs franchise that left town after the 1967 season felt they deserved a place at the front of the line. According to George Holm, dir...

Star Weekly , September 15, 1968. By 1968, Wonder Woman was long overdue for a major revamp. Over the decades since her introduction in  1941, the edginess that marked her early years (especially the kinkiness slipped in by creator William Moulton Marston ) had been watered down. Her rogues gallery was nothing to write home about, from boring baddies like Angle Man to the bizarre, not-at-all-racist Egg Fu . An attempt to revive the character's 1940s look had faltered. Her dowdy alter-ego, military secretary Diana Prince, just wouldn't do in a Vietnam world. Cue makeover. Writer Denny O'Neil and artist Mike Sekowsky shook up Wonder Woman's world with a series of changes that transformed her from a star-spangled heroine into an Emma Peel-inspired protagonist: Dumped the costume in favour of mod clothing, which evolved into various white-coloured outfits by the early 1970s Killed off useless love interest Steve Trevor, replacing him with a blind Asian mentor n...

The Telegram , November 15, 1954. Click on image for larger version.  November 15, 1954: the day Torontonians began enjoying two long-running comic strips, courtesy of the Telegram. Peanuts  ( whose local debut I wrote about for Torontoist ) had been gaining popularity across North America since its debut four years earlier, while Marmaduke began causing mischief that year. Both strips migrated to the Toronto Star when the Tely folded in 1971. Peanuts is regarded as a comic strip classic; Marmaduke is admired for its longevity (creator Brad Anderson is still alive at age 90). The Great Dane's monotony has led papers to try and drop the strip--an act they don't always succeed in carrying out. When the Star attempted to dump it in 1999 , readers revolted. When people like, as the Star put it, the same two jokes told over and over again ("Marmaduke is a dog with some human qualities, and Marmaduke is gargantuan"), it's comfort food they will fight tenac...

August 14, 1947 was a busy day on the global history front. British rule in India ended, as the subcontinent anxiously prepared to split into the new nations of India and Pakistan. In Germany, 22 former attendants at the Buchenwald concentration camp were sentenced to hang ("22 NAZIS TO DIE FOR ATROCITIES" screamed the Star 's main headline). In Tel Aviv, violence between Arabs and Jews escalated, leading to fears, according to the Globe and Mail, of "the worst racial conflict in the Holy Land since 1939." At home, Torontonians endured a week-long heat wave which was blamed for causing two deaths that day: a 60-year-old man who suffered heat prostration and was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Mike's Hospital, and another man who died at his home on Lauder Avenue. Temperatures hovered between 90 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit around the province, and were accompanied by high humidity. The heat caused factories to close early. In Ottawa, government offices clos...

The Telegram , December 3, 1952. Click on image for larger version. If you do the math, "Millionaire Sam" was only four years younger than the Tely itself. I wonder if he found the night watchman job he desired for his final years (unless it's a joke). Unless they opened convenience stores or expanded their hawking into a storefront newsstand, it's unlikely any of the younger men entering the newsboy field in 1952 enjoyed careers as long as Mr. Samuels.

It's Museum Week on Twitter this week, which prompted me to sift through my "Future Story Ideas" and "Misc" folders to see if anything relevant lurked about, waiting for its moment in the sun. I found this: an article published in the Globe in 1932 declaring that, based on a report conducted for the Carnegie Corporation, Canadian museums were boring. Read deeper and you'll find greater complexities. Some institutions were getting off the ground; others suffered from a lack of endowments. Old models such as rooms tucked away in the middle of a university, lingered on. Only a few museums were "well worthy of the towns in which they are situated," such as the Royal Ontario Museum, which was undergoing an expansion along Queen's Park when this article was published. Read the full article below to discover the extent of "paralytic modesty" in Canada's museums of the early 1930s. The Globe , November 24, 1932

During the recent run of Acting Up / Obsidian 's production of The Wild Party , I was invited to give a pre-show chat prior to three performances. I split the talk into two sections: the black community in Toronto during the 1920s, and a brief look at vaudeville in the city during that decade. Wedding of J.M. Williams and Rachel Stephenson, July 28, 1926. City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 8380. Click on image for larger version. Among the weddings detailed on the social and women’s pages of Toronto’s major newspapers on July 29, 1926, regular readers might have noticed something unusual about one of them. As the Toronto Star ’s headline put it, “Toronto Jamaica Folk Attend Smart Wedding.” The Star , along with the Globe and the Telegram , covered the union of merchant Joshua Michael Williams and Rachel Adina Stephenson. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the coverage is that, apart from references to the couple’s West Indian origins, ...

This installment of my "Ghost City" column for The Grid was originally published on January 8, 2013. Toronto Star , March 22, 1981. When East York rejected physician Charles Trow’s offer to sell his 25-acre wooded property south of Leaside to the municipality for use as parkland circa 1950, little did political officials realize the headaches that would ensue over the next half-century. Instead, the property—which offered a beautiful view of the Don Valley—was sold by Trow’s widow in 1953 to developers Hampton Park Company Ltd. Legal problems arose almost immediately as Hampton Park proprietors Harry Freedman and Harry Frimerman beat a foreclosure attempt when they were slow to pay the mortgage. The site was approved for apartment development in East York’s first official plan in 1957, but the document was scrapped when the township planner was fired for consulting with tower builders on the side.

From 2012 to 2014 I contributed to The Grid . This article was originally published online on July 15, 2013. Given the ongoing debates over public transit in Scarborough, this piece will remain timely for a long time to come. You may also wish to read a piece I wrote for Torontoist several months later on the general history of public transit in Scarborough . Toronto Star , March 19, 1985. Click on image for larger version. Torontonians love arguing about the same proposed transit lines ad nauseum. Tuesday’s City Council debate—regarding which form the Scarborough RT‘s replacement will take—feels like a replay of past battles where a streetcar/LRT line was displaced in favour of a pricier, sexier option. Toronto Star , January 29, 1975. Among the priority studies recommended in January 1975—by a joint provincial/Metro Toronto task force on the region’s transportation needs for the next quarter-century—was a high-speed transit line linking the recently approved Kennedy s...