elizabeth street scene, 1934
Photograph by Alfred Pearson. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 16, Series 71, Item 10091. According to the City of Toronto Archives, these pictures show a "traffic tie up on Elizabeth Street south of Dundas with truck having lost a rear wheel parked on tracks on Elizabeth Street delaying a Peter Witt streetcar on the Dundas route" on January 10, 1934. Photograph by Alfred Pearson. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 16, Series 71, Item 10092. This incident may not have made it into the day’s papers, but Elizabeth Street figured in two stories in the following day’s edition of the Star . A front page headline noted that “GAMBLING DENS THRIVE IN CITY HALL’S SHADOW OPEN TO ALL COMERS.” An undercover reporter, “who had never placed a bet or risked a nickel in any public gambling house,” visited three bookie joints within three blocks of (Old) City Hall. Among those stops was “a rendezvous on Elizabeth Street” that was “known to the sophisticated. The reported wasn’t asked any...