JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

  Buffalo Times, December 18, 1921. To compensate for not being able to visit Buffalo anytime soon (thanks Omicron!), I'm settling for flipping through the pages of the city's newspapers during the holiday season a century ago.  OK, that's not the entire truth. Awhile back, I spent a few days down a rabbit hole leafing through the Sunday editions of the great selection of early 20th century Buffalo papers found on Newspapers.com. There was a plan to begin a regular series of posts on Sunday papers of the era, focusing on a century ago, but the time wasn't there. File this idea under "projects for 2022." Still, material like this awkward shot of Santa hovering over a sleeping girl didn't deserve to be left in the can this holiday season. Illustration by Dan Smith, Buffalo Times, December 18, 1921.  A children's kingdom of toys and fairy tales, with characters ranging from classic comic strip character Krazy Kat to dolls that are inappropriate to own a c...

This post offers supplementary material for a recent edition of Historicist posted on Torontoist , which you should read first before diving into the following text. Can you spot the Laura Secord shop in this picture? Click image for larger version. Streetcar track work at Queen, King, and Roncesvalles, April 23, 1923. Photo by Alfred Pearson. City of Toronto Archives, Series 71, Item 2058. For a chain whose locations spread quickly across Toronto, finding good, close-up shots of a Laura Secord store from the City of Toronto Archives' online selection was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There's a sign here, a shop hidden behind hydro poles there, and generally good landscape shots where a Secord store is only a tiny portion of the picture. A Laura Secord shop hiding behind a pole at the southeast corner of Yonge and Bloor. Maybe it was feeling shy when this shot was snapped on September 9, 1926. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 3, I...