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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 February 12, 2012. Photo of the Telegram Building by Ellis Wiley, taken prior to 1966, City of Toronto Archives Fonds 124, File 1, Item 91. British press baron Lord Northcliffe referred to it as “the finest newspaper office I have ever visited.” Most people called it “the old lady of Melinda Street.” For over 60 years, the rambling collection of buildings at the southeast corner of Bay and Melinda Streets was home to the Telegram , the voice of the city’s conservative Protestant working class. By the late 1890s, the Telegram had outgrown its offices at King and Bay. While warned about staying on Bay Street, whose homes and businesses were regarded as being in seedy decline, publisher John Ross Robertson was drawn to the Crown Hotel a block south at Melinda Street. A...

Alas poor Detroit. A city teetering on the brink of receiving an emergency financial manager appointed by the state of Michigan run its affairs .A city that has become a poster child for ruin porn. A city Forbes magazine declared to be " America’s Most Miserable City ." Yep, Motown is going through a rough patch. How, when, or if it bounces back remains to be seen.

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 February 5, 2012. Spadina moving walkway. Photo by Eva Amsen . With eyes closed, imagine yourself at an airport ready to embark on a jet-age journey to an exotic destination. As you and your backpack, briefcase, or luggage glide along the moving walkway, dreams of adventure or relaxation fill your head. The faint odour of rodents barely distracts you from your visions. Suddenly, there’s a lurch at the end of the walkway that jolts you back into the reality of standing at either end of the Spadina subway station. We may be exaggerating the experience one could have had using the moving walkways that carried TTC passengers between subway lines for 25 years. Whether you saw the moving walkway as a novelty item, a useful connector or, as a cranky early user told the Star,...

This post offers supplementary material for a recent "Ghost City" column in The Grid , which you should read first before diving into the following text. Among the neat things I found while looking through the city archive files on William Peyton Hubbard was a letter from 1907 stamped with Toronto's official civic seal. The document was an official notice from Mayor Emerson Coatsworth vouching for Hubbard while the latter toured Washington and other American cities. Given the racial attitudes of the time, I suspect there were numerous occasions this letter aided Hubbard. Mr. Hubbard is a highly esteemed citizen of Toronto. He is now and has been for many years a leading member of our City Council, during which time he has occupied a number of positions of prominence. He has been repeatedly elected to the Board of Control by the City at large, and has occupied the position of Vice-Chairman of the Board, a position second only in importance to that of Mayor...

Source: the Globe , December 20, 1893. To those celebrating Valentine's Day later this week, keep this in mind: a relationship can't be cemented unless there's high-quality shortening uniting you. According to Wikipedia , Cottolene was a beef tallow and cottonseed oil based shortening marketed from 1868 through the mid-20th century. Its advertising campaigns were directed at destroying North America's "lard habit." Please don't let this catch the eye of some Crisco executive, lest they get the brilliant idea to run a viral marketing campaign based around romance and their product. There are many, many roads that could go down, some of which aren't safe for work.

This post provides supplementary material for an article in The Grid regarding the time the army was called in to help Toronto cope with a major snowstorm in 1999 , which you should read before diving into the following text. Front page, Toronto Sun , January 15, 1999. Confession time: I’m drawing a blank as to what I did during the Snowmageddon of January 1999. I definitely experienced it—at the time I was living in Guelph, working at the campus paper. Given the regular dumpings Guelph received, the storm likely didn’t seem unusual. It was probably just another snowy day, albeit one with greater accumulation. My guess is that either I curled up with a pile of library books or headed over to the Ontarion office to work, surf the net, or play endless games of Civilization II . It was around this time that staff relations within the office settled into a permanent deep-freeze, sparked by deep disagreements about the cover of that week’s issue. The only story about the st...

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 15, 2012. A scene from an evening at Palace Pier: during a dance sponsored by the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in January 1951, participants were officially greeted by Toronto Controller John Innes. As his speech neared its end, he noted that it would be nice if everyone in the hall knew how to do an old-fashioned waltz. “Having said his piece,” reported the Star ’s Alex Barris, “Controller Innes was leaving the stage when the band started playing—a waltz.” Innes grabbed Lisa Derny, an Arthur Murray employee who had introduced him to the audience earlier in the evening, “waltzed her around a couple of times, planted a kiss on her cheek and strutted off.” That anyone ever received a kiss at Palace Pier was a minor miracle given the venue’s checkered history. When...

The things curiosity will lead you to do… About two years ago, my friend Sarah and I discovered a Detroit-based blog called Sweet Juniper . Among the great photoshoots of the author’s kids parading around Motown in homemade costumes (think Robocop as if it actually was filmed in Detroit ), there was a post with the intriguing title “ An Attempt to Explain Why I Smell Like George Brett’s Gym Bag .” Seems he has a friend who likes giving him unusual gifts—in this case, it was a bar of Grandpa’s Wonder Pine Tar Soap found in a garage. The packaging depicts a trustworthy old-timey white-bearded gentleman. Whether dispensing wisdom at a family gathering or helping the kids put on the show that will save the local library, Grandpa is undoubtedly a pillar of whatever community he produces his manly soap—in this case, suburban Cincinnati. He’s made his acne-and-psoriasis relief aid since 1878 , so it must have satisfied a few customers over the centuries.

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 30, 2011.  Opening ad for the Odeon Hyland. The Toronto Star , November 17, 1948 It was a dicey proposition: testing out a brand new movie theatre, and the Shakespearian adaptation that was its opening attraction, by filling the first showing with high school students. It was especially dicey after rowdy teens had recently disrupted a recent festival honouring the Bard at the Eaton Auditorium (now the Carlu). But Odeon Theatres officials felt that filling the new Hyland theatre with students from Northern Vocational High School (now Northern Secondary) for the afternoon presentation of Sir Laurence Olivier’s version of Hamlet on November 22, 1948 was worth any potential mishaps. According to the Star, the kids were alright: The kids at the showing were well-beh...

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...