JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Source: Daily Mirror (overseas edition), April 4, 1953. One of the oddest Easter images found kicking around the ol' Warehouse. If the egg was smaller, it would be tempting to label this post "Giant Mutant Baby Altered by Nuclear Test Attacks Innocent Easter Egg." As it is, it's as goofy as a shot in the same browning bound edition of the British tabloid featuring Orson Welles wolfing down a bowl of spaghetti . Perhaps the Mirror should have sponsored an eating contest between this chocolate-loving child and the movie auteur.

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 March 11, 2012. Temple Building, probably between 1967 and 1970.  Photo by Ellis Wiley. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 124, File 2, Item 53. One of the sections marked "Temple Building" above the entrances survives as a ruin at The Guild. “Want to go see a monument destroyed?” the Globe and Mail asked readers in its July 6, 1970 editorial. “Go down to the corner of Bay and Richmond streets and watch them make gravel out of the Temple Building . It won’t go easily or prettily because it wasn’t built with destruction in mind. It was intended to last like the Pyramids, one of the wonders of a young country, a great stone tribute to an Iroquois who became supreme chief ranger of the Independent Order of Foresters (IOF) in 1881.” Oronhyatekha liked whatever he

When I hit my teens, I started imitating my father’s interest in building a healthy music library. It started with an occasional cassette, then the gift of The Beatles 1962-1966 (aka “The Red Album”). During a stop at Sam the Record Man on a grade eight trip to Toronto—a stop I insisted the group I was with make, even if it cut into others’ precious time at Yonge Street head shops—I bought my first large haul of pre-recorded music, some of which is now laughable but was influenced by peers at the time—Poison’s Open Up and Say...Ahh!  anyone? In early 1990, my father clipped an article from the Detroit News listing record stores worth investigating on future cross-border trips. Both of us, along with my sister, would rapidly expand our collections thanks to at least two stores listed in the piece. Twenty-three years on, most things associated with this article are gone. Nearly all the stores profiled. The massive tape collection I built up. My father. Yet, along with a

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 March 24, 2012, with some additions made on March 7, 2013. When Isadore “Issy” Sharp decided to build his first Four Seasons hotel at Jarvis and Carlton Streets, everyone thought he had lost his mind. Once a street lined with the homes of wealthy Torontonians, by the end of the 1950s it had a reputation as a hangout for derelicts, drug dealers and prostitutes. “How could you think of building a motel or hotel on Jarvis?” he was told. “People will think it’s a flophouse!” Sharp ignored those comments. Once opened, nobody mistook the hotel at 415 Jarvis Street for a flophouse. As the Globe and Mail noted years later, the Four Seasons Motel Hotel was “an elegant, relaxed place for a drink or a night’s stay.” Sharp, who worked at his father’s construction firm, had gathere

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 May 13, 2012. Map showing subway interlining. The Telegram , February 25, 1966. When you mention lower Bay station, images conjured include an abandoned subway platform used for film shoots, a TTC test lab, a Nuit Blanche installation venue or an occasional construction detour . But when the Bloor-Danforth line opened in February 1966, lower Bay was part of an experiment to allow riders to reach any destination without transferring lines. The wye , a triangular-shaped rail intersection that allowed interlining, proved highly contentious among TTC officials during its six months of regular service use. The wye was among subway designer Norman Wilson’s recommendations when the Bloor-Danforth subway line was proposed in 1958. “The importance of this [wye] connection bet