JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Found this cartoon while researching this weekend's edition of Historicist . I can sympathize with the frustrated diner -- a couple of months ago a friend and I experienced a lengthy delay at a Corktown brunch spot we had liked. Over an hour passed before we discovered our order had slipped through the cracks. Usually the 100-year wait while dining in Toronto is for the bill. I usually dash to the cash when it's time to go, regardless of the grumbly looks this occasionally inspires. Source: the News , December 31, 1887.

This post provides supplementary material for a Torontoist article about the evolution of Toronto's pinball machine regulations , which you should read before diving into the following text. I began my research for the article by going back to the 1930s, when guardians of morality began pressing to curb or eliminate pinball machines. On my first run through the Star archives, one of the earliest references to pinball I found was on the kids page of the May 5, 1934 edition. Problem: it wasn’t the pinball I was looking for:

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 January 29, 2012. At this point, the column went from biweekly to weekly. This entry also seems like a good one to repost now with news that the Paradise has been sold . Personal story: the first time I went to the Paradise was to see Robert Altman’s Nashville . The print was faded, but watchable; my seat was in rougher shape. The armrest was barely attached to the rest of the chair with either duct tape or chewing gum. While some people would have hightailed it to the nearest theatre with stadium seating, the improvised fix gave the Paradise a certain charm. Opened around 1937, and known for a time as the New Paradise, it was a neighbourhood cinema that served the community around Bloor Street West and Westmoreland Avenue. Notes in the City of Toronto Archives indicate

In honour of today being the 12 th day of the 12 th month of 2012, here’s a roundup of front-page headlines from a carefully selected batch (as in those I could get my hands earlier this morning) of Toronto newspapers the last time the calendar read 12/12/12: The Toronto Daily Star The only paper to acknowledge the significance of the date, which it called “a gala day for puzzle fiends and people of the class of who travel one hundred miles to see a century plant boom.” The Star also wins the best headline of the day: “THE KING AND YONGE CORNER HAS BECOME A GUSTY SPOT.” Recent gale-force winds added to the problems of crossing King and Yonge in the shadow of one of the city’s first skyscrapers, the Canadian Pacific Building . “Ladies making the crossing looked in some particulars like the pictures of fishermen’s daughters down on the stormy strand, when they have lost hope for their loved ones in the fishing boats out on the raging seas.” The wind tunnel effect

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.

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 orginally published on November 21, 2011. For four decades, solo or as a pair, the spinning neon records of Sam the Record Man were a Yonge Street landmark. Tacky to some, a reassuring sight to others, they lured music lovers into the store to linger. When the site was purchased by Ryerson University in 2007 part of the deal was that the discs would be remounted on the school’s new Student Learning Centre or a nearby building. Now that Ryerson President Sheldon Levy is having second thoughts about bringing the signs out of storage, there’s a strong possibility the only places to see them will be old photos, YouTube videos and SCTV ’s parody of Goin’ Down the Road . Entering Sam the Record Man was like visiting a museum of music history. The place had a ramshackle charm, with numerous expansi

Awhile back, I posted some browning profiles of prominent Canadian newspaper editors. Here's the last of the Toronto-related pieces, featuring long-time Telegram editor John "Black Jack" Robinson. As historian Jesse Edgar Middleton once noted, Robinson spared no mercy for municipal politicians "who showed signs of ‘wobbling’ or seemed unduly eager for self-aggrandisement." According to Telegram chronicler Ron Poulton, the best description of Robinson was provided by longtime Mail and Empire / Globe and Mail columnist J.V. McAree, "who envisioned him hurrying through the streets with a gait like an Indian on the trail, eyes down, pockets stuffed with newspapers, coat everlastingly flapping. He sometimes passed his own daughters without seeing them. Friends who haled him were grabbed in passing and coaxed to keep up. McAree thought that Robinson was colour-blind to all shades between black and white. 'Either a thing was something to thank God for

Source: The Enterprise , September 8, 1965 . Just one of the odd little stories that catch my eye during a marathon research session, which in this case was conducted in the comfy confines of the top floor of North York Central Library. In terms of newspaper research, I prefer working at NYCL because it tends to be a little quieter than Toronto Reference (the exceptions being teenagers who decide it's the perfect spot to release their raging hormones and one frequent researcher unfortunately endowed with distracting verbal/physical tics) and certain older papers are not kept under lock and key. It also has a large selection of community papers from the north half of the city stretching from Don Mills to Weston, which have been valuable when researching suburban stories I didn't look far enough in the future to see what the feedback on this sign was. I can't imagine a slogan like "progess with economy" excited too many residents. The "city with heart&quo

Source: a disintegrating copy of The Daily Mirror (overseas edition), April 7, 1953.

The cover caught my eye as it sat in a bin at Goodwill Buy the Pound in Scarborough: a large, blonde-haired bully about to give the beats to a bespectacled pencil-neck geek whose dog is afraid of what might unfold. There was something familiar about the bully, though it took a second to kick in. Sweet jeezus, it's Rob Ford! Flipping through the book, the resemblance grew with each page. I figured it was worth making a fifty-cent investment, since who knew when it might come in handy for a mayoral fiasco. That opportunity is now. Wednesday night, there was a confrontation next to Ford's home between the mayor and Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale . Details are still emerging, but Ford's actions toward the media in the wake of the incident (such as refusing to talk to any City Hall reporters unless Dale is removed from the beat) reinforce his image as a bully to those who don't support him. Which brings us back to Let's Talk About Being Bullied . Let's

Source: Captain Britain #28, April 20, 1977. Sort this one out: a game page written and drawn by a Canadian for an American publisher who placed it in a comic book designed for the British market. You follow? The game itself is pretty simple. If you're feeling bored, print out the full-sized version , grab the nearest die, and play a round or three. Owen McCarron was an advertising director and cartoonist with the Halifax Chronicle-Herald whose feature Fun and Games was syndicated across Canada. A comic book fan, McCarron produced various giveaways that, according to John Bell's guide to Canadian comic book history Invaders From The North (Toronto: Dundurn, 2006), were "mostly full-colour comics that were distinguished by bold, engaging artwork and reasonably solid storylines." For  Marvel, McCarron produced Fun and Games pages like the one above and a series that ran 13 issues in 1979-80 with covers advising readers that "all you need is a pencil.

  The journalism school that Toronto's morning conservative paper barely conceals its disdain for evolved into the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (though I agree that one doesn't have to sit in a classroom to learn the essentials of reporting). Seventy-nine budding scribes made up the opening class on September 30, 1912. Within five years, the school handed out its first Pulitzer Prize, which makes me wonder if the Mail and Empire later pooh-poohed the concept of journalism awards. Source: the Mail and Empire , April 19, 1912.

One series of paperbacks I've picked up at fundraising book sales over the years is Penguin's food handbooks.  Small, rarely more than 50 cents a copy, and ranging in subjects from haute cuisine to proper freezing techniques, they're food guides designed for reading instead of gawking. Aimed at a British audience, there are occasional nods to North America, such as a brief look at our fermented grape industry in Allan Sichel's 1965 guide The Penguin Book of Wines .

Anyone following the saga of Caterpillar's decisions to first ask its workers in London, Ontario to take a 50 percent pay cut , then close the plant may find dark humour in the ads we're spotlighting today. Back in the late 1970s, Caterpillar portrayed itself as a good corporate citizen interested in spurring debate on environmental and public infrastructure issues. A long series of ads in National Geographic explored topics ranging from road maintenance to water pollution. The tag line on all of them — "There are no simple solutions. Only intelligent choices" — probably sounds like a sick joke to those who lost their jobs in London. There are a dozen more ads in this series on my Flickr feed . Source: National Geographic , June 1977

At first I laughed at the absurdity of this ad’s claims: turning into a misanthropic wretch because of an ill-fitting shirt. Then I remembered I’ve been guilty of yelling in anger or cursing my physical shape whenever a shirt that fit well on its first wearing shrank after being washed. This is especially true if the shirt cost more than my usual apparel budget. There have been times where I’ve been ultra-paranoid about purchasing clothes out of fear they would shrink by 50% or, if it was a type of garment I knew was prone to a water-induced diet, remain in an enlarged state suitable for a clown costume. In other words, the man in the ad deserves his moment of cheerfulness. Source: the Toronto Daily Mail , January 23, 1892