Image from Eaton’s – Golden Jubilee (1869-1919) (T. Eaton Co Ltd., 1919).

Toronto writer Anne Dublin’s new book for young readers, 44 Hours or Strike!, is a fictionalized account of the strike that follows two young sisters as they navigate the picket line outside the factory where they work. Sixteen-year-old Rose and 14-year-old Sophie spend long hours bent over sewing machines under the watchful eye of the foreman to support themselves and their sick mother. But their union, the Local 72 International Ladies Garment Workers Union, votes to strike in February 1931, to demand shorter work weeks (down to 44 hours, hence the book’s title), better factory conditions, and fair wages. As the strike drags on, the girls have to deal with police brutality, waning public attention to their cause, and prejudice.

Dublin says she was inspired to write the book when she thought of her family’s history, the 2013 factory collapse in Bangladesh, and a factory fire in New York in 1911 she researched for a book review.

“My father was a tailor, and we came to Canada in 1948, my parents were Holocaust survivors, and one of the reasons we were allowed to come to Canada was because my father was a tailor,” Dublin says.

“So, you know, I grew up with tailors and dressmakers and seamstresses everywhere … it’s my connection to my father that was very significant, and to other people in my family who sewed, especially those who worked in the factories.”

“So that’s one strand. The other one happened a couple years ago when I heard about the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh. And you know, over 1,000 workers were killed and there were many many who were injured, and I started to think, ‘Well, not much has changed in some places in the world for garment workers’ … And then the third strand was I write book reviews, and I recently wrote a review about the Triangle Shirtwaist company fire in New York in 1911, and so I started reading other books about that terrible fire. And all these different threads came together.”

What followed were about six months of research in the Toronto Archives, the Archives of Ontario, and the Ontario Jewish Archives as Dublin gathered information about the strike and about life in 1930s Toronto.

“I read old newspapers, and any journals and magazines I could find of that period,” she says.

“So one thing I found really interesting was how the strike was covered in the English newspapers like the Toronto Daily Star as opposed to how it was covered by the Yiddish newspaper … the Yiddish newspaper was really on the side of the workers, supporting the strike, and the Toronto Star, and I think the Tely, or the Telegram it was called, supported the owners, the employers.”

Archival photos are used throughout the book to give readers a sense of how Toronto would have looked when Rose and Sophie were on strike.

Dublin tackles many issues in this book, including child labour, abuse in the prison system, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the difficulty of accessing healthcare pre-medicare. She says she wants kids to learn that they can make a difference, even if the problems seem too big to tackle.

“The thing is, this strike was ultimately unsuccessful. … It was 10 weeks long, they ended up sort of getting contracts, but they weren’t really honoured, and they went back a lot to how the conditions that they had been in before,” she says.

“But, a couple of years later in New York, there was a huge strike of the ILGWU [International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union], and I’m sure that they had learned lessons from the strike in Toronto in 1931, and they were much more successful in New York. So, I mean, how would the people involved with the strike know in 1931 that their actions would make a difference two years later? They didn’t know that, but they knew they had to try. So that’s what I want young people to know. That they can make a difference, and we need to try to make a difference in the world. To repair the world.”

Dublin says this message is one of the reasons she writes.

“One of the main reasons that I write books is, there is a concept in Jewish philosophy and it’s called tikkun olam, and it means basically repairing the world. And that’s really why I write, because I’d like people to know that although our world is broken, there is a lot that each person can do to make it better.”

The post New Children’s Book Explores 1931 Dressmakers’ Strike appeared first on Torontoist.

Photo by Vik Pahwa from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

While the City of Toronto has pledged one third of the $2.6 billion needed to repair TCHC homes over the 10-year capital repair plan, without the other $1.73 billion, the money will run out next year and repairs will stop.

For Greg Spearn, TCHC’s CEO, it’s a longterm structural issue whose consequences are becoming very real.

“Since the company was formed, there was never a proper reserve set aside to continually repair our buildings,” he told Torontoist in 2015.

“We got way behind and there was never any money to do it. So everything is kind of catching up to us an a bit of a tsunami of repairs and that’s largely because more than half of our buildings are more than 50 years old and they’re all starting to age out at the same time because they haven’t been taken care of.”

Around 500 TCHC homes have already been boarded up because they were deemed uninhabitable. The people who lived in those units are put back on the waiting list for community housing—a list that now has around 90,000 families.

TCHC owns around 60,000 units total, but 7,500 more will be shuttered by 2023 if they aren’t repaired. That will leave the over 18,000 people who live in those units without a home.

Spearn says the line between critical condition and uninhabitable is just a matter of time. Currently, 4,000 units are considered critical.

“So a critical unit is going to have a leaky roof, windows that are pretty breezy, because they aren’t sealed properly and it’s hard to keep the units heated in the winter, they’re going to have an appearance that is unpleasant. Because the roof is leaky and so on there’s going to be failures in terms of pieces of drywall falling and stuff like that,” he says.

“And the line between that and being uninhabitable is that the longer that goes on, what begins to happen is the drywall begins to rot and then mould develops and that becomes a health issue and then we have to move people out.”

Spearn says some residents avoid telling TCHC if their unit is in bad shape, because they have nowhere else to go if they’re moved out.

“They know that if they leave there, it’s going to be worse because they won’t have a roof over their head, even though the one they have is leaking,” he says.

Even if TCHC does secure the funding from the province and the new federal government, Spearn says it will not be enough to fully repair and maintain the units.

“We’ve been actually, I’d say, modest in the projection of the repair need at $2.6 billion, because that amount of money will only get our portfolio back to what we call a fair condition, which means the homes are not in good shape, they’re just in fair shape. It’s something that bothers us every day,” Spearn says. Even if $2.6 billion was spent on capital repairs over the next 10 years, there would still be $1 billion in outstanding needs.

But returning the homes to at least fair condition could save a lot of money in the long run, according to a report by the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis in March 2015 that was commissioned by TCHC. The centre predicted billions in new tax revenues for the federal and provincial governments, thousands of new jobs, billions in private investment and an $18 billion increase to the GDP over 30 years, with 68 per cent in the first 10 years. The report also predicts lower healthcare costs, savings of $3.8 billion, a reduction in utility costs as homes are made more energy efficient, and a drop in crime as neighbourhoods are improved.

Spearn argues that since taxpayers are the ones who own the homes—with an estimated real estate value of around $9 billion—Torontonians should want to fix the asset they have, rather than pay to build new affordable housing.

“When I take my real estate hat off … what about the human side? This is housing for people that need it for sure, but they’re also people that do a lot of the basic jobs that need to get done in Toronto and they all need a place to live,” Spearn says.

“So if we can’t sustain keeping them repaired and in good shape, then there’s a growing gap in who can afford to live in Toronto.”

TCHC has tried to raise the money needed to keep repairs going by asking its main mortgage lender, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, for lower rates, but the request was denied earlier in 2015.

The 10-year capital repair plan started in 2013 and Spearn said they’ve been working to triage and tackle the homes in worst condition.

“We’ve been able to do … close to 20,00 major repairs already, but we’re just scratching the surface,” he says.

“There’s a ton left to do and right now we don’t have a plan B for how to finance finishing the job after the money that the city has supported runs out. So for me, where I sit, what I live and breathe every day it should be one of the highest priority election issues in the current federal election.”

Councillor Ana Bailão (Ward 18, Davenport), argues that affordable housing improves the quality of life for all Torontonians.

“When we talk about housing, it’s not only the shelter or the TCHC. We need to look at the whole spectrum,” Bailão says.

“Vacancy rates are low, rents start going up, people can afford less, people spend more money on their rents—what do they do? They start applying for assistance in their housing, our list keep growing. It’s all interconnected, so you need to look at the housing spectrum and Torontonians need to understand that this is an issue that’s affecting all of us.”

A Task Force appointed by John Tory to look at ways of improving TCHC will likely release its report on Tuesday morning.

The post Toronto Community Housing’s Daunting Repair Backlog appeared first on Torontoist.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

Plaques about the Blackburns in the Inglenook Community School yard. (Erin Sylvester)

Thornton and Lucie Blackburn’s homestead would have stayed undiscovered underneath Inglenook Community High School if Karolyn Smardz Frost did not decide to have volunteers dig.

In 1985, Smardz Frost decided to use the schoolyard—of the oldest continually used school building the TDSB owned—as a site to run a public archaeology dig. She knew that it was likely built on top of demolished tenement housing and any artefacts or debris would have been sealed under the asphalt of the playground, ready to be rediscovered. Smardz Frost went to the Toronto Archives to research the site and learned that the land had been owned by a Thornton Blackburn, described in the 1852 City Directory as “cabman, coloured.” She consulted with Dr. Daniel Hill, the academic, first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and co-founder of the Ontario Black History Society, to ask if the society would support the excavation by children and volunteers of what she suspected might be an Underground Railroad site.

This house, at 10 Sackville Street, would have been very close to the home Thornton and Lucie lived in. This house was condemned and photographed in 1917. (Toronto Archives Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 32, Item 522)

Smardz Frost has dedicated years of her life ever since to the history of the Blackburns. “I fell in love with them,” she says. Her book about their lives, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, took 20 years and a PhD to write. In 2007, Smardz Frost won the Governor General’s Award for Non Fiction for the book.

The Blackburns were escaped slaves from Kentucky who arrived in Upper Canada in 1833 via Michigan. Smardz Frost “happened to pull a book on Detroit history from the shelf” at the library, she says, and noticed that the first race riot in the city was called the “Blackburn Riot.” By chance, she’d found an important clue about the lives of Thornton and Lucie.

The Inglenook Community School as it appears today. (Erin Sylvester)

The riot was orchestrated to help the couple escape after they were jailed. They then fled toward Upper Canada and freedom. But when they arrived, they were detained again on the charge of attempted murder of the Detroit sheriff. Upper Canada’s lieutenant governor, Sir John Colborne, was an abolitionist and didn’t believe it was right to send the Blackburns back to a country where they would be possibly executed for their alleged role in the beating of a sheriff—especially given that they’d been behind bars at the time. He took the problem to Attorney General Robert Jameson. His decision not to extradite the couple—because the punishment they could receive in the U.S. was more than what Upper Canada would impose—set the Canadian precedent for extraditions.

The couple moved to Toronto in 1834.

This drawing of Toronto in 1834 shows the city and Thornton and Lucie would have known it when they first arrived. (Toronto Archives Fonds 1231, Item 904)

“It was the Blackburn case that formally established Canada as the main terminus of the Underground Railroad,” Smardz Frost wrote in I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land.

And the Blackburns made sure the terminus was a welcoming one. In addition to their home at South Park Street, now Eastern Avenue—the one excavated from under the playground and the current site of the plaques about the couple’s story—they owned five other residences that they rented as discount rates to recently escaped slaves.

This picture of King Street East, from 1834, shows the neighbourhood that the Blackburns lived in. (Toronto Archives Fonds 1231, Item 89)

Thornton Blackburn is also credited with establishing Toronto’s first cab company. Called “The City,” his company had one horse-drawn cab, driven by Thornton, which held four passengers.

Although the couple had no idea, Smardz Frost learned that Thornton’s brother was already in Toronto when the Blackburns arrived. He was sold away from his mother when he was 11, and Thornton when he was 3, so the brothers hadn’t seen each other in a long while.

But the family reunions weren’t over. Thornton made the dangerous trek back to Kentucky in 1837 to rescue his mother from slavery. She is buried with her sons in the Toronto Necropolis cemetery.

The Blackburns now have two plaques commemorating their contribution to Canadian history. One, from Parks Canada, notes the significance of the excavation—the only one on an Underground Railroad site in Canada—and the recognition of the Blackburns as “Persons of National Historical Significance,” by the Department of Canadian Heritage in 1999.

The other plaque, from the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, at the Sackville Street site notes that their “determination to build free lives provides a window into the experiences of many refugees in the Underground Railroad era.” Smardz Frost helped write the plaque commemorating the Blackburns, and wrote one in Kentucky, from which the couple originally hailed.

Karolyn Smardz Frost will be in Toronto speaking at the North York Public Library on February 17 on “Slavery, Antislavery and Resistance in 19th Century Toronto.” February is Black History Month.

The post Now and Then: Thornton and Lucie Blackburn appeared first on Torontoist.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

St. Lawrence Hall today. Photo by Vik Pahwa from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

St. Lawrence Hall has long been a Toronto destination for big events. Built in the mid-19th century, the hall features several old charms: etched stonework, tall, domed ceilings, ornate finishes. For many, it’s the perfect venue for a fairytale wedding, or for those massive corporate holiday parties with an open bar. Located in the heart of Toronto’s urban centre, it was built specifically for social gatherings—to entertain, to converse, to enjoy.

But in 1851, St. Lawrence Hall played host not to a celebration but to a political gathering: The North American Convention of Coloured Freemen. And one of its organizers, though largely unknown to most Torontonians, is responsible for shaping the landscape of the city’s journalism for people of colour.

The convention was organized by Henry Bibb, of Sandwich, Canada West, (now Windsor, Ontario) and Theodore Holly, of Vermont, to discuss the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in the U.S. It was also a meeting to explore other issues facing their communities as people escaped slavery and fled to the northern states or Canada.

St. Lawrence Hall boasts several historical plaques, including one that commemorates the convention. Construction was completed in 1850, so the hall was practically new when it hosted the convention. Since then, it has been restored to its original glory and designated a National Historic Site.

Henry Bibb was born a slave in Kentucky in 1815, but became a famous abolitionist after he escaped to Detroit in the 1840s. While in Detroit, Bibb married Mary Miles, one of the first Black female teachers in North America who was born a free woman in Rhode Island.

Henry Bibb (via Wikimedia Commons).

The couple escaped to Canada West after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress. Under the new act, escaped slaves in the northern states could be captured and returned to slaveholders, and authorities in these northern free states had to cooperate.

Henry Bibb, who wrote a book, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, about his terrible childhood and escape from slavery, was not willing to take the chance that he could be sent back south to his former owner. He’d already been separated from his first wife, Malinda, and their daughter, Frances, when they were sold away from him after an unsuccessful escape. In his book, Bibb notes that he attempted on many occasions to escape a life of slavery: “I learned the art of running away to perfection,” he wrote. “I made a regular business of it, and never gave it up, until I had broken the bands of slavery, and landed myself safely in Canada, where I was regarded as a man, and not as a thing.”

An illustration of an attempted escape by Henry Bibb, his first wife, Malinda, and their daughter Frances from his book Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. (via Wikimedia Commons)

After they settled in Sandwich, Henry and Mary Bibb started a newspaper, The Voice of the Fugitive, the first Black-owned newspaper in Canada. The Voice reported on many issues of interest to the Black Canadian community, including fugitives escaping to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

The Voice of the Fugitive newspaper was founded in 1851 by Henry and Mary Bibb.

In 1851, the Voice covered the convention at St. Lawrence Hall. In the first issue published after the convention, the paper reported that “time and space are too limited this week…it is sufficient to say that the result was glorious.” There was still space to give a breakdown of what had been discussed at each session and to give a list of the delegates who attended, which included visitors from the U.S., other towns in Canada West, and even one from England. Thornton Blackburn, who was living in Toronto at the time, also attended.

Toronto as it appeared in the mid-1850s. (via Wikimedia Commons).

The first session started with the appointment of Henry Bibb as chair. In his opening address to the convention, reported in the following issue of the Voice, Bibb said the Fugitive Slave Act turned the northern states into “a common hunting ground for kidnappers and man-thieves.”

In one of the early sessions, the convention declared that the Act was “an insult to God and an outrage upon humanity,” and delegates resolved to welcome American refugees and work to obtain arable land for the settlers. Both Bibbs were involved in the Refugee Home Society, which worked to buy land for refugees.

On the final day, the convention resolved that Canada or the British West Indies were the best places for American refugees.

Bibb was lucky enough that three of his younger brothers, who had been sold away when they were young, were able to escape to freedom in Canada with him. Bibb died at the age of 39 in 1854.

CORRECTION: 3:55 PM A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that a photo of St. Lawrence Market South was St. Lawrence Hall. Torontoist regrets the error.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

Some of the Olympics team in 1928, including Alex Duff, who coached some of the competitors. City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 14105.

March in Toronto has come in like a lion, as the saying goes, and sunny summer days at the pool might seem far off. But this week, we’re taking a trip back to the 1920s and ’30s, and jumping in the pool with the Toronto Dolphinets and their ambitious coach, who helped develop synchronized swimming.

Get your swim caps ready.

In the 1920s, swim coach Alex Duff started training women in swimming and diving, founding the Dolphinets Swim Club in 1926. As the plaque dedicated to Duff at the outdoor Christie Pits pool named for him notes, he trained Canadian swim champions and Olympic and British Empire Games competitors. Such began his foray into the world of swimming.

Duff was renowned for coaching strong female athletes. One of his most famous students was Marilyn Bell, who became a household name after becoming the first person to swim across Lake Ontario. Bell started as a short-distance sprint swimmer with the Dolphinets and became a long-distance swimmer when she started training under coach Gus Ryder (who has a pool and health club named after him) at the Lakeshore Swim Club.

Marilyn Bell with her coach Gus Ryder, likely after her English Channel swim in 1955. Toronto Archive. Fonds 1244, Item 2120

According to Margaret Ann Hall’s book The Girl and The Game: A History of Women’s Sport in Canada, at the first British Empire Games in Hamilton, in 1930, two teenage swimmers from the Dolphinet Club, 16-year-old Irene Pirie and 13-year-old Marjorie Linton, placed in all of their races.

Duff also travelled to London, England, in 1934 as the coach for the diving and swimming team at the British Empire Games, and to Berlin in 1936 as the assistant coach at the Olympic Games. He wasn’t able to attend the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, although some of his students were there. As the Toronto Daily Star reported, he was “wandering around town to-day [sic] bemoaning the fact that he neither got the chance to go to the Olympic games at the expense of the Olympic fund and that he cannot afford to pay his own way…he claims that four of the Canadian swimmers and divers who made the team are his pupils.” Canada won nine medals at the Berlin Olympics, the games Duff did attend, but none for swimming.

But Duff’s most notable accomplishment was his creation of ornamental swimming, which later developed into synchronized swimming.

In the ’20s and ’30s, ornamental swimming was, as the name suggests, mostly for show, famously featured in Hollywood films known as “aqua musicals.”

The first competition for synchronized swimming in Canada was held in 1924 in Montreal, but it didn’t become an Olympic sport until the 1984 games in Los Angeles. Since then, Canada has won eight medals in synchro events.

Women line up for the three mile swim race at the CNE in 1929. City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 17880

Aside from swim, Duff was also a skiing and photography enthusiast. He was a member of the Toronto Ski Club and the Toronto Camera Club.

The Toronto Dolphinets Club put up the plaque in his honour on the memorial pool building named for him after he died suddenly in 1952.

The plaque commemorating Duff sits at Christie Pits, which used to be a popular swimming hole. The pits were formed thanks to gravel mining and a natural ravine that used to lead down to Garrison Creek, a now-buried river.

The Garrison Creek sewer under construction in the 1890s. Fonds 200, Series 376, File 1, Item 15.

Duff leaves behind a rich legacy. It spans beyond the robust competitive women’s swim teams in Canada and the recognition of synchronized swimming as a professional competitive sport. Every beautiful, sunny day spent at the Christie Pits pool, in fact, is touched by Duff’s hard work and accomplishments.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

Ireland Park by the lakeshore, has statues commemorating the journey of Irish immigrants during the Great Famine in 1847. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

It’s not a park you’re likely to happen across by accident, but if you have some time this St. Patrick’s Day, wander over to Ireland Park by the Lakeshore and learn about Irish history. But, the story at Ireland Park isn’t a cheerful one.

In the mid-1840s, during the Potato Famine (an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger), around one million people left Ireland. Around one million others died in the country. Even those that did leave for other countries, including Canada, didn’t always survive the journey.

The five bronze figures at Ireland Park look towards the Toronto skyline. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

Ireland Park, nestled in a strip of grass next to the abandoned Canada Malting Company silo buildings at Éireann Quay,commemorates both the people who made it to Canada and those who didn’t. Five bronze figures face the Toronto skyline, with one man raising his arms towards the buildings. One woman has collapsed to the ground and appears appears to be suffering. According to the Ireland Park Foundation she is “in the last moments of life.”

One of the bronze statues at Ireland Park raises his arms in joy after reaching Canada and escaping the famine in Ireland. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

The sculptures were commissioned by Dublin-born Robert Kearns, now chair of the Ireland Park Foundation, after he saw the famine memorial in Dublin.

In 1997, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the famine, Norma Smurfit commissioned sculptor Rowan Gillespie to create a memorial, which she then gifted to the City of Dublin. The figures are at the Customs House Quay at along the Liffey River and they face east, towards the Irish Sea. The sculpture is called Famine or The Departure and shows figures clutching belongings and, in one case, carrying a small child as they shuffle east.

The Famine memorial in Dublin, Ireland, shows people emigrating during the Potato Famine. Photo by Erin Sylvester

Kearns asked Gillespie to create a similar memorial for Toronto, and his brother, architect Jonathan Kearns, designed the park. Ireland Park was officially opened in a ceremony with Irish President Mary McAleese, Premier Dalton McGuinty, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, Mayor David Miller, and Kearns. The park commemorates the arrival of around 38,000 Irish immigrants between Mary and October 1847, with the bronze sculptures titled Migrants or The Arrival.

The five bronze figures at Ireland park stand in the shadow of the old Canada Malting Company silos. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

The pregnant woman is meant to symbolize hope and new life in a new country, while the young boy is meant to seems apprehensive, and unsure if he should move forward. The figure closest to the grain silos was inspired by Pius Mulvey from Joseph O’Connor’s book Star of the Sea, set in 1847 during the famine. In the book, the Star of the Sea is a ship carrying migrants, including Mulvey, from Ireland to New York.

Behind the figures looking at the skyline is a large block of black limestone from Ireland. The shape resembles a ship, but the limestone has been sliced into several pieces. In the small gaps, names of those who died making the voyage are engraved into the stone.

Names engraved in the limestone blocks at Ireland Park. These are people who died on the journey or once they reached Toronto. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

According to the Ireland Park Foundation, they only knew 32 names of the 1,186 who died on the ship or shortly after arriving in Toronto. Many immigrants died of typhus during an 1847 epidemic, and the boats that carried them were often called “coffin ships” for this reason. Sick people would be quarantined in fever sheds, including at Grosse Île, Quebec, where thousands of Irish immigrants were kept after arriving. Over 800 Irish immigrants died in Toronto fever sheds, built by the Toronto Board of Health at King and John Streets.

Flowers left at the limestone memorial for those who died on the journey to Canada during the Great Famine. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

According to the foundation website, “Thanks to the great work of Prof. Mark McGowan, his son Patrick and research assistants Michael Chard and Neil Sands, we are proud to have recovered a total to date of 675. Their names will be forever engraved in the limestone sculpture at Ireland Park and have been returned to the citizens of Ireland in a commemorative book.”

The park also has some screens around a glass tower—symbolizing a hopeful beacon—although they were not switched on as of mid-March.

A stone marking the opening of Ireland Park in 2007 stands in front of a glass tower, symbolizing hope. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

Ireland park took over a decade to create and the foundation gathered $3.5 million to build the memorial and park. The money came from both private and public sources, including the provincial and federal governments and the Government of Ireland. The foundation is working to commemorate Dr. George Robert Grasset, who died in 1847 treating Irish typhus patients, with a memorial at a park named for him at Adelaid and Widmer. The park was dedicated to Grasset and two of his colleagues, Susan Bailey and Edward McElderry, in 2014 when it was just a small green space. Money for development and a memorial will come from the City and the Irish government.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

Toronto Harbour as it looked in 1820. Givins would already have lived in Toronto for decades and seen many changes in the town.
City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 895

Well surely Colonel James Givins, who died 170 years ago this month, is turning in his grave at the news that Alexander Hamilton and his revolutionary cohort are cool again. Givins fought in the American Revolution, or American War of Independence—but on the British side. He settled in Canada, likely no longer welcome in the new United States, and served as an Indian agent, and fought for the redcoats again in the War of 1812 at the Battle of York. He died at 87 in 1846 and has a street (and school) named after him.

Where Givins is from exactly is a bit hazy. He was possibly born in Ireland, because John Graves Simcoe, lieutenant-general of Upper Canada, once said Givins was “bred up” by Henry Hamilton, who was Irish. Givins was with Hamilton when he was posted as lieutenant-governor of Detroit in 1775. While in Detroit, Givins learned to speak the Ojibwe language (Anishinaabemowin), which would be an asset later in life when he worked with Ojibwe communities in southern Ontario. He helped take Fort Sackville at Vincennes, Indiana in 1778, but became a prisoner of war when the American forces re-took the fort in 1779, when they renamed it Fort Patrick Henry.

Henry Hamilton surrendering Fort Sackville to American forces in 1779. He and Givins were both prisoners of war following the fall of Fort Sackville. Painting by Frederick C. Yohn.

After his release in 1781, he disappears from the record for a decade before reappearing in November 1791 as the newly appointed lieutenant for the Queen’s Rangers. The group, commonly called “Simcoe’s Rangers” during the American Revolution, needed a new leader because John Graves Simcoe had just been appointed the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. Under Simcoe and Givins, the Rangers helped build Fort York and Yonge and Dundas Streets.

In 1797, Givins married Angelica Andrews and became the Indian Agent for Upper Canada. He and Andrews would go on to have nine children. In his work as Indian agent, Givins was in charge of overseeing the annual present-giving ceremony, which he was instructed to hold separately for the Mississaugas and the Six Nations so that the two groups would not have much opportunity to to come to “any Junction or good understanding between these two Tribes,” in the words of colonial administrator Peter Russell. Russell was worried because 1797 was a tense time in the relationship between the British settlers and the indigenous population. Wabakinine, a Mississauga chief who was friendly with the British, had been murdered by a Queen’s Ranger the year before and the Six Nations, under the leadership of Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) had been involved in a long dispute over the right to sell land.

A sketch of the parliament buildings in York as they would have appeared in Givins’s day. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 2076.

Givins got his own parcel of land, 1,200 acres in total, as a thanks for his service for the loyalist side in the American Revolution, and he built his house, Pine Grove, in 1802 on 100 acres where Givins Street now runs. Givins/Shaw Junior Public School was named for the street and for nearby Shaw Street—named for Givins’s neighbour Aeneas Shaw. John Ross Robertson’s describes Pine Grove (which he visited in 1888) in his 1894 book Landmarks of Toronto, as “the oldest house in the city.” “A crescent shaped pathway leads to the front door,” Robertson writes, “with on either side a giant locust tree, each planted by Colonel James Givins.” Robertson goes on to describe the inhabitants and appearance of the old homestead, including, remarkably, bloodstains on the floor from the Battle of York.

The Queen’s Rangers were disbanded in 1803, but Givins was back in the military within the decade as an aide-de-camp for Major-General Isaac Brock, the so-called “Hero of Upper Canada,” during the War of 1812. The Battle of York, a defeat for the British, was fought on April 27, 1813 and ended with York (now Toronto) being sacked—and men bleeding on Pine Grove’s floor.

A 1914 painting of the arrival of the American fleet before the Battle of York. From the Toronto Reference Library, Owen Staples.

That morning, American troops landed at York and Givins led a small troop of Mississaugas in the defence of the town and fort. Lieutenant-Governor Sir Roger Sheaffe noted Givins and co. for “spirited opposition.” It wouldn’t be enough, however, and the American forces, led by General Zebulon Pike, moved towards Fort York. British forces accidentally exploded the Western battery magazine, killing 20 men and causing confusion that allowed further American advance. After it was clear that the day was lost, Sheaffe retreated to Kingston and, without informing the militia or legislature, ordered the explosion of Fort York’s magazine. The explosion killed 38 Americans, including Pike, and injured over 200.

Givins and his band had intercepted the Americans on their march from the lake to Fort York, but they were outnumbered (and presumably outgunned, outmanned, and outplanned) and retreated east to Pine Grove. At home, Angelica Givins stitched up the wounded men and removed musket balls from their injuries—hence the blood-stained floors. York was sacked that night and the parliament buildings were burned. British forces retaliated the following year and burned down the White House.

D Barracks at Fort York from the 1830s as they appeared around 1899. Toronto Archives.

Givins went on to serve as Chief Superintendent of the Indian Department in Upper Canada from 1830-1837 and was nicknamed “the Wolf.” He was involved in supporting a project by the Mississaugas the Reverend Peter Jones to build a village of Christian converts—the Credit Mission—along the Credit River, which would later serve as the model for Canada’s reserve system. The village had largely declined by 1847 and many of the inhabitants returned to the Grand River reserve.

CORRECTION: 2:20 PMA previous version of this story incorrectly stated that James Givins died 127 years ago. Torontoist regrets the error.

Photo by Daniel Rock from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The Brunswick House is not the type of place you go for an evening hangout with your dad. On most nights, it reeks of Axe Body Spray and nostalgia, bros fist bumping one another over trays of beer.

But last night, the Brunny (as it is so affectionately dubbed by city regulars) held its last last call. And my father, who was once a Brunny bro during his time at the University of Toronto in the 80s, was the only person with whom I could adequately visit this iconic Toronto landmark.

The Brunswick House first opened as a hotel in the 1870s. Despite its history and proximity to my favourite brunch location, I had never been. It always seemed a bit mysterious with its high, dark windows, and the only glimpse I’d ever really had was when patrons would open the side door as they went to stand in the little fenced-in smoking pen.

So, on the Brunny’s final day, my dad and I made one last journey there together—him in his old U of T jacket, with a backpack full of potato salad and beer, on his way to a friend’s house for dinner, and me, armed with low expectations.

On the walk over, he shared some of the lore from his days at the Brunny.

“Small dude from small town USA, this was kind of a funky, cool place,” he says. “And you got blitzed. Because you had to order giant trays of beer. And it was cheap. It was so cheap.”

He also remembers the trays of sandwiches they would provide to patrons to soak up the booze. That is, if you hadn’t picked up a schnitzel “the size of a cow” from some place across the street. The sandwiches—egg salad, as he recalls—were only edible after a few drinks.

According to him, the Brunny’s “floors were sticky, the tables were sticky,” and nights, after polishing off a few trays of beer, often ended up blurry.

Despite the textured memories, Dad says he won’t miss the place much. He hasn’t been back in over 20 years, and in that time it has changed ownership and become more clublike than the beer hall he used to visit. Besides, he has better memories in other bars—some of which are also dearly departed—where he had better conversations and better beers. After graduating from U of T, he also graduated to better drinking establishments.

Around 6 p.m., we arrived at the Brunny to the sound of a band playing outside and patrons dancing with the umbrellas. Just as we walked up, the crowd dispersed and musicians in little hats drifted away.

We tried to open the door, but it was already locked.

“You missed it,” a man on the street corner said. (Talk about an early last call.)

We instead hung out with our new friend, a man on the street corner. He was, supposedly, a regular at the Brunny. He says that they’re going to let the old-timers have one last drink later in the week. “Don’t know why though,” he added. He told us some jokes, and mused about the future of the old drinking hole. He’s heard the rumours that it will become a pharmacy. “That’s bullshit,” he has decided. “It’s too small.”

In the end, he doesn’t seem that sad about the place closing either.

I never got a chance to see inside, and my dad didn’t get to say goodbye, but we still shared a laugh—although not a tray of beers—with a local.

“That’s the Brunny,” Dad said as we walked away.

The post Saying Goodbye to the Brunny (With My Dad) appeared first on Torontoist.

Photo by Empty Quarter from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

We’ve dealt with the Ted Rogers statue outside the stadium (despite threats to throw it into the lake). We’ve swallowed the cost of overpriced beers at the ball game.

It’s time that fans got a break. We want the SkyDome back.

In an act of pure revolt, Torontonians are flocking to sign a petition to Rogers, demanding it change the name of the Rogers Centre back to SkyDome. At the time of publication, the petition had more than 13,000 signatures.

Started by Change.org user Randy Rajmoolie, who is a TTC bus driver by day, the petition says Rogers disappointed fans, who chose the name SkyDome in a public contest in 1987, by changing the stadium name to the Rogers Centre in 2005.

“Why did they have to change it? What was wrong with a name that we loved and that symbolized important moments in our city’s history?” Rajmoolie writes.

Rajmoolie started the petition in June. But it was only in early April, following a BlogTO April Fool’s Day joke, when a Change.org employee contacted Rajmoolie to promote the petition in advance of the Blue Jays home opener. The promoted petition gained traction online and likely has more supporters than “Rogers Centre” ever did.

The SkyDome opened on June 3, 1989, to spectacular fanfare. It hosts more than 3.5 million guests every year.

Many SkyDome lovers have a lot of feelings about the petition, and have taken to social media to voice their discontent for Rogers’s act of corporatization.

@kacharyshka forget the OMB let's bring down the man https://t.co/1uVdIJrhnq #ourskydome #thesix

— Blake Harper (@BlakeWHarper) April 8, 2016

Hey @JustinTrudeau can you retweet? #OurSkyDome https://t.co/S3kfHBx5nr

— Andrew Salmons (@andrewstraffic) April 7, 2016

I still call the @RogersCentre SkyDome and I think you should to! #OurSkyDome #BlueJays @BlueJays

— Ryan (@therealryanLT) April 8, 2016

Rogers has not yet commented on the petition.

The post Why Torontonians Want The Rogers Centre (Rightfully) Renamed to SkyDome appeared first on Torontoist.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

Dr. John G.C. Adams and young patient Dora Goldman, who has a dental fistula. Source: Dominion Dental Journal, c.1910.

The children were desperate: they touted “furred” tongues, “foul gasses emitted from the mouths,” their bodies “veritable hotbeds for every species of bacteria.” Some couldn’t even attend school, painful abcesses on their faces misdiagnosed, thought to be infectious.

In late 19th century Toronto, where was a poor kid with bad teeth to turn? Dental hygiene wasn’t on the radar for many people, especially when they couldn’t afford to see a dentist. As a result, children often suffered from tooth pain and other, nastier symptoms of bad teeth.

Before John Gennings Curtis Adams opened North America’s first free dentistry clinic in Toronto in 1872, they had nowhere to go. Many children’s teeth would have rotted out if it wasn’t for one man with a passion for dentistry—and for charity.

April is Oral Health Month, and it would likely make Dr. John G.C. Adams very pleased to know that people take their teeth seriously these days.

Adams started off as a farmer in a small town west of Toronto, but moved his family to Toronto in 1870 to study dentistry under his older half-brother, W. Case Adams. But Adams wasn’t just struck with a sudden desire for oral health—he was driven by a missionary desire to help the poor (moral health, perhaps). Today, on the plaque devoted to him, he’s heralded as “Canada’s first resident dental missionary.”

After two years of dental training, Adams opened his free dental hospital for poor children and their mothers (two years before he received his licence to practice). He paid for the treatments at the free clinic, using the profits from his dental practice. Adams and his wife, Sarah, would also visit orphanages and poor houses where he provided dental care.

A Toronto dental clinic in 1913. Source: Toronto City Archives.

When the Hospital for Sick Children opened in 1875, Adams became its first “dentist of record” in 1883. He was the only dentist at Sick Kids until 1890.

He checked teeth at the clinic but his missionary zeal also led him to advocate for dental exams into Toronto schools. In his book School Children’s Teeth: Their Universally Unhealthy and Neglected Condition (subtitled “The Only Practical Remedy: Dental Public School Inspection and Hospitals for the Poor), published in 1896, he lists his three goals for the publication. He hoped the book would encourage “the Christian people” to do something to preserve children’s teeth, help children save their teeth “with as little suffering and expense as possible,” and “improve the health of the children of the schools. The object of the dentist should be to prevent suffering rather than to relieve it.”

This dental check up at Brown School in 1936 is part of the legacy of John G.C. Adams, who advocated for better oral health for children. Source: Toronto City Archives.

Adams argued that children were suffering needlessly, that they should have dental exams twice a year to screen for any issue, and the dentist should prepare a report for parents with treatment options. In a 1901 statement to premier George William Ross, Adams said “there are not less than one million permanent teeth going to destruction in the mouths of the school children of Ontario.”

The building on the corner of Bay and Elm streets, where Dr. John G.C. Adams had his dental practice and free clinic. Photo by Laura Carlin.

He, along with one of his sons who also became a dentist, inspected the oral health of schoolchildren across Ontario and even in the U.S. In School Children’s Teeth, Adams described the travels by saying, “God has enlarged the mission field so that now it takes in the whole continent, for He is sending me out everywhere to protest against the present heathenish and inhuman custom of extracting the permanent teeth out of the jaws of young children.”

And if this doesn’t convince you that dentistry is vital and fascinating work, Adams goes on to assure readers the subject is “thrilling with interest.” Adams argues that after all of the inspections he’d done, he felt that adults, like him, had better teeth than 95 per cent of children. Children he saw in schools had cavities that hadn’t been filled and were now decaying the teeth too much, because parents, even those who could afford to, didn’t realize the importance of oral health.

By 1910, the Public School Act of Ontario allowed school dental inspections, after years of lobbying by the Ontario Dental Association. In 1913, the City opened the first free, municipally funded dental clinic in Canada.

Despite his successful legacy, Adams faced tough times in the final years of the 19th century. His wife, Sarah, died in 1896 and Adams dedicated his Christ’s Mission Hall and Dental Institute, which was at the corner of Bay and Elm Streets, near where the University of Toronto Faculty of Dentistry is today, to her and to his mother. In 1899, his teacher and older brother W. Case Adams died and he lost his dental hospital because of unpaid taxes ($200 total).

He continued to work in a private practice until 1912, and died in 1922.

John G.C. Adams (non-dental) plaque at the corner of Bay and Elm Streets, where his free clinic once treated patients. Photo by Laura Carlin.

With files from David Wencer

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

The Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial. Photo by Shaun Merritt from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

One man reaches up towards the large wooden log—big enough to crush him—and braces himself against the trestle. Another man stands high on top, directing the log with just a rope, pulling it up to build the next tie on a railroad. This scene would have been common across the country as workers built the Canadian Pacific railway from coast to coast in the 1800s. Now, these men, cast in bronze, stand near the Rogers Centre in Toronto, as a permanent reminder of the thousands of workers—many of them Chinese labourers, overworked and underpaid—who died building that railroad.

It’s Rail Safety Week and April 28 is the annual Workers Day of Mourning, and so it’s a particularly relevant time to look at the lives and deaths of the Chinese railroad labourers, who worked in dangerous conditions and died in large numbers. Estimates of how many Chinese workers died building the railroad vary widely. The grim saying, immortalized in an iconic Heritage Minute (below) is that one Chinese worker died for every mile of track laid. The Canadian Encyclopedia, published by Historica Canada, which also makes Heritage Minutes, uses the estimate “at least 600” dead in its articles. The memorial puts the number at over 4,000.

Records of the deaths of Chinese workers were poorly kept by railroad foremen, and the 600 figure seems to come from Andrew Onderdonk, who supervised construction on British Columbia sections of the railway and gave testimony at the Royal Commission on the Canadian Pacific Railway. Based on contemporary descriptions of Chinese workers dying and the poor record-keeping, the other estimates of deaths are much higher.

Workers clear ice from the railroad tracks in the Don Valley around 1910. Photo from the Toronto Archives Fonds 1244, Item 5029.

Workers died in landslides, cave-ins, from disease, drowning, and explosions. Blasting tunnels through the mountains of B.C. made it the most dangerous, time-consuming, and deadly section of the railroad. Around 15,000 Chinese workers were brought in between 1880 and 1885 to work on the railroad in B.C., mostly from southern provinces including Guangdong, and paid around half of what other workers made ($1 a day to the $2–$2.50 other labourers got). They faced racism from many in B.C., partly because workers were concerned that Chinese immigrants were willing to work for less, and discrimination from their supervisors on the railroad, who paid them little, forced them to buy supplies from the company store, gave them the most dangerous jobs, and gave them little access to healthcare.

Even those who survived building the railroad often couldn’t afford to return to China or bring their families to Canada. They were left without jobs in hostile territory. The railroad workers memorial notes that it also memorializes these men, saying, “With no means of going back to China when their labour was no longer needed, thousands drifted in near destitution along the completed track. All of them remained nameless in the history of Canada.”

A Chinese family picnics in Toronto in 1927. Photo from City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 10752.

The last spike on the railroad joining the coasts was famously driven in at Craigellachie, B.C. on November 7, 1885. That same year, Canada imposed a “head tax” on Chinese immigrants, initially set at $50 a person. The tax was later raised to $500 before Chinese immigration was banned in 1923. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had previously supported some Chinese immigration, saying, “It is simply a question of alternatives: either you must have this labour or you can’t have the railway.” By 1885, he had changed his tune and argued in Parliament that Chinese immigrants were not adding anything to Canada, saying,

When the Chinaman comes here he intends to return to his own country; he does not bring his family with him; he is a stranger, a sojourner in a strange land, for his own purposes for a while; he has no common interest with us, and while he gives us his labor and is paid for it, and is valuable the same as a threshing machine…that money does not fructify in Canada.

On June 22, 2006 Prime Minster Stephen Harper gave a full apology for the Chinese head tax and for the ban on Chinese immigration from 1923–1947, calling them “malicious measures aimed solely at the Chinese.”

The Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial in downtown Toronto. Photo by Shaun Merritt in the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The Workers Memorial was funded by the Foundation to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada, led by James Pon. In 2004, Pon told the Toronto Star his father had to pay a $500 head tax to bring him to Canada in 1922, and it took 17 years to pay off the debt. The Workers Memorial, including the trestle arch and sandstone blocks carved to represent the Canadian Rockies, was built in 1989 and designed by prominent Toronto artist Eldon Garnet. The bronze figures were cast by Francis LeBouthillier.

The foundation, along with the Multicultural History Society on Ontario, has an online exhibition called The Ties That Bind about the history of Chinese-Canadian labourers and building the railroad. The foundation also offers the annual James Pon Memorial Scholarship to honour the man who led the push for greater acknowledgment of the contributions and sacrifices made by Chinese railroad workers.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

A public health nurse visits a school in 1914. From the Toronto Archives Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 11, Item 110.

The devastating Spanish influenza outbreak was surely still fresh in people’s minds when Edith Kathleen Russell decided that nurses needed to be better trained. The 1918 flu pandemic killed millions worldwide, beginning just a few months before the end of World War I and lasting well after it ended. The flu was still making people sick in Canada until the mid-1920s. If their importance on the battlefields of WWI wasn’t enough, nurses proved their value during the Spanish flu pandemic.

Russell was a new nurse in 1918, freshly graduated from Toronto General Hospital School of Nursing. Only two years later, she was the first director of the University of Toronto’s Department of Public Health Nursing, launching her lifelong quest to improve training for public health nurses in Canada.

In a 1921 article published in The Public Health Journal, Russell expressed concern about what she saw as a brain drain of Canadian nurses, who would study in the U.S. and remain there to work. She argued that those who wanted to be public health nurses—which she defined as a nurse with a good bedside manner who considered themselves a health care professional and a teacher—need special training. She wrote:

Pending any better arrangement, it has been agreed, at least in this country, that a hospital training is the best preliminary teaching for this public health nurse, but it is just as fervently agreed that a hospital training alone does not fit a nurse for this special field of work.

Russell said that through the advocacy of nurses who wanted to be trained and work domestically, not in the U.S.—where there were schools for public health nurses—some schools were established in Canada, including the one at U of T where she was director. At the time, the character of Sarah Gamp in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit represented the worst characteristics of nurses: that they could be drunk, untrained, and sloppy. Russell wanted to overturn that stereotype and work to make nursing more professional than domestic work. She addressed this at the end of her article, writing:

We have had under-education in the nursing profession and it produced Sairey-Gamps; let us try over-education, that bogey of the highly imaginative, and see if the results will really be as dire as some pessimists suggest.

A nurse bandages a young girl’s finger in 1923. From the Toronto Archives Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 32, Item 686.

To ensure her nurses were as educated as she wanted, Russell led the first university-based nursing program in Canada. In 1928, her department became part of the School of Hygiene and in 1933, an independent school, now the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing. In 1949, Russell was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal by the Red Cross Society, the highest international honour for nurses, in recognition of her work in education. She also worked with the Canadian Red Cross society as an honourary nursing advisor from 1942 to 1952.

Because of her expertise in nursing education, Russell reviewed the state of nursing schools in New Brunswick in 1956 for a report published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health. In it, she argued that nurses need better specific training for mental health care and notes that many nurses don’t work inside homes anymore and only hospitals can afford to pay them. She also said, “with quiet irony,” according to the Journal of Public Health, that during WWII the government paid to fund nursing schools, but she asks readers to”consider how long and how earnestly the regular schools of nursing had sought public support and been unable to obtain it.”

According to her 1964 obituary in the Globe and Mail, Russell also studied Saskatchewan’s Centralized Teaching Program for nurses and Red Cross home care. She held two honourary doctorates, one from the University of King’s College and one from U of T, and honourary memberships to the Canadian Nurses Association and the Victorian Order of Nurses.

In honour of International Nurses Day and National Nursing Week, drop by Russell’s plaque at Faculty of Nursing the University of Toronto and thank her for well-educated and professional nursing in Canada.

Russell’s plaque at the Faculty of Nursing. Photo from Dave Ross/University of Toronto.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments. Brought to you by Heritage Toronto’s Plaques and Markers Program.

Edmund Scheuer and Ida Siegel, two of the founding members of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, pictured at the Canadian Jewish Farm School in Georgetown, Ontario, circa 1927. Photo courtesy of the Ontario Jewish Archives Fonds 15 File 37 Item 24.

In 1917, a group of philanthropists felt their community was being solicited by too many charities during the holidays. It was complicated to have so many people coming to the door, canvassing for donations. So, a group of community leaders decided to improve the situation by incorporating all the existing groups into the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies Toronto, which was given a charitable charter in March 1917.

The core founding group included Edmund Scheuer, a jeweller and the federation’s first president; Abraham Cohen, the first honorary secretary; and Ida Siegel, who wasn’t given a seat after she argued there should be a woman representative. The federation later expanded to become a vitally important institution during the Depression, and still exists today as the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto.

Before the federation existed, a number of Jewish charities would hold fundraising drives around the High Holy Days, and people would be visited by door-to-door donation collectors. There was a 1912 attempt to organize some of these into one group, the Associated Hebrew Charities, but it didn’t last. According to the Ontario Jewish Archives, the association, which didn’t include every charity, couldn’t keep up with the demands from a boom in immigration and a 1916 recession.

Ida Siegel, a philanthropist and education advocate who helped start the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, pictured in 1943. Photo courtesy of the Ontario Jewish Archives Fonds 80 Series 1 Item 33.

Siegel alone helped start seven charitable and social organizations before the federation, including the Herzl Girls’ Club, Hebrew Ladies Sewing Circle, Daughters of Zion, and Hadassah-WIZO. She and her brother also started the first free Jewish medical dispensary, which became Mount Sinai Hospital in 1923. The federation supported the dispensary and hospital until 1940.

The goal of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies was to organize the fundraising efforts for all the associated charities into one big annual drive. Each year, the federation would kick off a big fundraising drive and profits would be distributed to affiliated organizations.

This house on Anette Street, pictured here circa 1909, became a Jewish orphanage in the 1920s, supported by the federation. Photo courtesy of the Ontario Jewish Archives Item 4759.

But, according to historian Jack Lipinsky, this new way of organizing charities didn’t go over well with everyone. In Imposing Their Will: An Organizational History of Jewish Toronto, he writes that in the 1920s, some organizations left the federation because they disliked the “insistence on scientific charity and professionalized accountability in spending.” Women’s groups, who, according to Lipinsky, had “traditionally provided the soldiers of Jewish charity work,” also started leaving in the 20s because they disagreed with some Progressive reforms. But people had become used to giving only to the federation each year, so some groups that left found it difficult to fundraise enough to continue as they had.

In April 1917, the Globe and Mail reported that the federation expected to make $40,000 that year. In 1934, deep into the Great Depression, the federation launched its drive with a goal of $80,000 to help, as the Globe described it, “the present condition of unemployment and consequent need.” But, in 1931, the federation had its sights set even higher, with a fundraising goal of $175,000. Presumably, the group had to lower its goals as the Depression dragged on and potential donors lost jobs or depleted savings. A number of articles in the 30s gave frequent updates on the progress of fundraising efforts and the endorsement of politicians, including the mayor and the premier.

Women shop in Kensington Market, where many Jewish people lived, in 1932, during the Great Depression. City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 26172.

In 1938, the federation was absorbed into the new United Jewish Welfare Fund, which included any other Jewish organizations not covered by the federation. In 1948, after the creation of the State of Israel, the fund combined with the United Palestine Appeal to form the United Jewish Appeal, which still exists today.

The Federation of Jewish Philanthropies plaque stands outside 220 Simcoe St. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

The federation moved from its Simcoe Street location, where the plaque dedicated to its history stands today, to 179 Beverly in 1928. The new location was named Scheuer House in honour of Edmund Scheuer. At the dedication ceremony, Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman praised Scheuer for his decades of community service. “Mr. Scheuer is a living refutation to those who go up and down the land casting sneers and scorns at hundreds whose ambitions have enabled Canada to reach out to a greater destiny,” Isserman is quoted as saying in the Globe. “Mr. Scheuer symbolizes the great contribution which the immigrant has made to Canada.” Scheuer had been a Globe reader for decades, and had a number of letters to the editor published that were critical of their coverage of the Jewish community or issues that affected the community.

Scheuer was killed at 95, in July 1943, by a streetcar. He’d been sick and confined to his home for a month and was crossing the street when he was struck. In a tribute in the Globe titled “A Fine Citizen,” he was remembered for his childhood in Paris and for his philanthropic work. Another Globe article highlights achievements from his impressive resumé, which included opening the first Jewish religious school in Ontario, his work with the federation, being named a justice of the peace, and working with Holy Blossom Temple. An article in the Star, “A Tribute to Edmund Scheuer,” by an anonymous columnists called “the Observer,” recounts his friendship with Scheuer, their discussions on religion, and how it’s possible and productive for Christian people and Jewish people to get along.

Edmund Scheuer, at 90 in 1937, reading. Photo courtesy of the Ontario Jewish Archives Fonds 47 Item 37.

The Globe ended its tribute with a reflection on Scheuer’s life and work:

“It was a pity that he did not live to see the fulfilment of his most fervent desires, the unconditional surrender of Hitler and his villainous associates, who had brought such disgrace upon Germany, and the birth of a new and better world in which righteousness and justice would prevail. For the triumph of these he worked selflessly all his life and he leaves in Toronto the memory of an able, enlightened and lovable man.”

May is Ontario Jewish Heritage Month.

The Federation of Jewish Philanthropies plaque. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

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CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the United Jewish Welfare Fund combined with the United Palestinian Appeal, not the United Palestine Appeal, to form the United Jewish Appeal. Torontoist regrets the error.

The post How a Group of Philanthropists Changed the Face of Jewish Charitable Work appeared first on Torontoist.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

A couple in the Philosopher’s Walk in spring 2009. Photo by Randy McDonald from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

There are a few natural go-to locations for Torontonians to explore in the summer. Toronto’s most famous buried river, Garrison Creek, used to run roughly along Shaw and emptied into the lake near Fort York, and is now perfect for a stroll southern stroll in the city. The Don and Humber valleys, meanwhile, are lush and green and well-loved by passersby.

But not every creek or valley needs to be enjoyed while the sun is shining—like the Taddle Creek ravine, passed through year-round. Taddle Creek is another buried river, but the path it cut through the land is partly preserved in the University of Toronto’s Philosopher’s Walk, which runs between the ROM and the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor down to Hoskin Avenue.

These days, the ravine is full of students, not fish, streaming to school. As they walk along the leafy path, they pass wide stone steps up the grassy side of the ravine. A plaque will tell them it’s the Philosopher’s Walk Amphitheatre, but despite its grandiose name, it’s very small. It’s rarely used for outdoor performances, although U of T’s Canopy Theatre Group used to do an annual Shakespeare show outside of it.

The amphitheatre was built at the same time as the Alexandra Gates on the Bloor side were fixed up, around 2010. The Bennett Gates, at the south end, were installed at that location in 2006 in honour of Avie Bennett, who owned the publishing firm McClelland & Stewart and donated 75 per cent of his shares to U of T.

The Bennett Gates at the Hoskin Street entrance to the Philosopher’s Walk in spring 2008. Photo by Shaun Merritt from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The Alexandra Gates were built in the early 1900s and stood at Bloor Street and Queen’s Park to commemorate a visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. The gates moved to their current location on Bloor between the ROM and the Royal Conservatory in early 1960s. Around this time, landscape architect William Hough redesigned the path to integrate with the natural ravine. According to his 2013 obituary in the Globe and Mail, Hough “spent his career in pursuit of this ideal—the integration of cities with natural systems.” Hough also helped to design Don Mills, the master plan for what is now the Brick Works, and he founded U of T’s Landscape Architecture program.

During an excavation at Lowther and Huron in 1928, part of what is possibly Taddle Creek flowed across the ground. Photo from the Toronto Archives Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 1, Item 798.

The stone amphitheatre was built only about six years ago but, as the U of T plaque there points out, the natural ravine has been used as a gathering place for hundreds of years for the Anishinaabe people. The amphitheatre was designed with the idea to serve as both a meeting place and for “learning experiences outside the classroom.”

People relaxing at the Philosopher’s Walk amphitheatre in June 2016. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

The Philosopher’s Walk is a quiet reprieve from busy downtown Toronto, a leafy and green winding path that mirrors the route Taddle Creek would have followed to the lake. The amphitheatre provides a spot for reflection and appreciation of the natural ravine that people have been using for generations to gather, work, and think.

June 5 to 11 is Canadian Environment Week. June is National Aboriginal History Month.

The plaque at the Philosopher’s Walk amphitheatre. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

A reconstructed Iroquoian longhouse and palisade at Iroquoian Village near Burlington. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Around 950 years ago, the summer sun would have risen over a settlement in what is now Forest Hill. The approximately two-hectare site would likely have been surrounded by a wooden palisade, encircling several longhouses. It’s unknown how many people would have lived there, but they were probably a southern branch of the Huron, or Wendat, people. According to Tales of North Toronto, a 1948 history book by Lyman B. Jackes, there was also a fresh water spring flowing by the village. He also claims that the hills in the area are more recent and were created by covering old sites where food was stored.

Today, children play in a schoolyard where longhouses once stood. There’s no indication of what used to be: a tall, brick building houses young students, a Canadian flag flaps in the wind out front, and children and teachers go about their days.

What we know about the site from the few artifacts and from what Jackes writes is probably as much as we will ever know about this settlement and the people that lived there. The Jackes or Eglinton archaeological site, so named because it was on the land of Lyman Jackes’s family near Eglinton Avenue West, where the village once was, has been erased, buried under the Allenby Public School.

Allenby Public School in 1931. Photo from the Toronto Archives Fonds 1266 Item 23394.

The artifacts that were found at the site have been dated from anywhere between 1450 and 1475. In Tales of North Toronto, Jackes writes that some human remains found at the site seemed to have been burned, possibly when a longhouse caught fire and collapsed.

The first excavation of the area took place in 1887, by David Boyle, who later became the provincial archaeologist. In a 1974 article in the journal Ontario Archaeology by William C. Noble about the artifacts excavated at the Jackes site, housed at McMaster University, notes that they come from a later dig by Everett James Case between 1930 and 1950. “He was primarily interested in keeping only certain types of exotic specimens, notably worked bone, pipes, and pottery rims,” Noble writes. Preserving only certain artifacts can, of course, influence the interpretation of a site; and the Jackes site artifacts are limited by what the men casually digging there decided to keep.

The artifacts in the collection at McMaster aren’t the only pieces of history uncovered at the site. Lyman Jackes writes that many hobby gardeners in the area dug up arrowheads or even the head of an axe. In fact, he says that it was Baldwin Jackes who dug up so many artifacts in the area that persuaded them to call Boyle to investigate. He says they realized there was likely a cleared, palisaded settlement because a large section of trees were clearly much younger than the surrounding forest. Jackes also suggests that the consistent age of these younger trees means the settlement was destroyed by one event, rather than a slow decline. He offers a battle as a possible explanation.

Unfortunately, development in the area has buried the site and likely disturbed any remaining artifacts or traces of the settlement. According to the plaque on the school, which was placed there in 1986, it was “the best documented Iroquoian village in the City of Toronto.”

The reconstructed interior of a longhouse at Iroquoian Village at the Crawford Lakes Conservation Area near Burlington. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

June is National Aboriginal History Month.

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Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

Rev. Henry Scadding in 1897. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

If you’re going to the air-conditioned Eaton Centre to escape the heat this summer, you might pass an old house near its side entrance.

This house used to belong to Rev. Henry Scadding, a teacher, writer, amateur historian, and, of course, an Anglican priest.

Scadding grew up in the inner circle of the lieutenant-governor John Graves Simcoe, and went on to become of the first historians of Toronto.

Henry Scadding’s father, James, was a close advisor to John Graves Simcoe and followed him to Upper Canada when Simcoe was appointed lieutenant-governor. Scadding lived in a log cabin, which burned down, and then a second log cabin, which now sits on the CNE grounds. When Simcoe left Canada to return to England, the elder Scadding followed, but returned to North America, now with a young family in tow, after Simcoe’s death. Henry would have been around five years old at the time of the move. Although he was raised in York, his family maintained their close ties with England.

When he was eight, Scadding studied at the Home District Grammar School under John Strachan, the first Anglican bishop of Toronto and a founder of Trinity College, now part of the University of Toronto. After primary education, Scadding became the first pupil enrolled at Upper Canada College. He went to university in England, attending Cambridge and Oxford, where he obtained a bachelors and two divinity degrees, partly with the help of Elizabeth Simcoe, the widow of John Graves Simcoe.

Scadding moved to Lower Canada in 1837, tutored the sons of Sir John Colborne, who founded Upper Canada College, and was ordained a deacon. He was made a classics teacher at UCC the following year and moved back to York. On top of his teaching work, he was also made a priest and worked at the Cathedral Church of St. James until 1847, when he moved to Holy Trinity, which was dedicated the same year and was intended to be a church for the poor. The house, where his plaque is found, was built next to the church in the 1860s.

St. James Cathedral circa 1885 to 1895, while Rev. Henry Scadding worked there as a canon. Photo from the Toronto Archives, Fonds 1478, Item 3.

Scadding suffered from ill health and ended up leaving UCC in 1862 and Holy Trinity in 1879, although he then served as a canon at St. James. He continued to live at the house next to Holy Trinity until his death in 1901.

Rev. Henry Scadding’s home next to Holy Trinity Church. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

He may have been unwell, but in addition to his teaching and religious work, Scadding was a historian and writer. His best known book is Toronto of Old (1873), which discusses the history of European contact and settlement in Toronto, starting with the French in the 17th century. Scadding says in the preface that with this work he is trying to create a sense of local lore for the city:

And a first step has, as we conceive, been taken towards generating for Toronto, for many of its streets and byways, for many of its nooks and corners, and its neighbourhood generally, a certain modicum of that charm which, springing from association and popular legend, so delightfully invests, to the prepared and sensitive mind, every square rood of the old lands beyond the sea.

He also wrote Memoirs of Four Decades of York, Upper Canada (1884), History of the Old French Fort at Toronto (1887), and Shakespeare: the Seer, the Interpreter (1897), among others, including religious pamphlets (like “Christian Pantheism,” a published address from 1865). He was the editor of the Canadian Journal of Science, Literature, and History, published by the Canadian Institute, and the Proceedings of the Canadian Institute from 1869 to 1886. The Canadian Journal published a wide variety of articles, including, in one volume from 1870, “The Improvement of the Arrangement of Ferns,” and “Canada in the Bodleian.” Scadding is also credited as the honorary librarian of the Canadian Institute.

His articles and his books demonstrate his interest and knowledge of many topics, but the history of Toronto seems to have been his special project.

A plaque Rev. Henry Scadding on his old house, next to Holy Trinity Church and the Eaton Centre. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

July 1 to 7 is Canada History Week, and a good chance to learn about local history and historians.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

The Trillium ferry circa 1916 when it used to take passengers to and from the Island. Photo from the Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 261.

This summer, countless city goers will be Snapchatting or Instagramming videos or photos of themselves taking the ferry to the Toronto Island. The wake of the boat at it crosses the water and the view of the skyline on the way out and the way back in are popular, even if overdone, shots.

Although the city has changed substantially over the past hundred years, visiting the Island and enjoying the breeze on the boat hasn’t. In fact, you might even be taking the same boat as your Edwardian predecessors.

The City of Toronto has five ferries that bring people between the Island and the mainland—the Sam McBride, the Thomas Rennie, the Wm. Inglis, The Ongiara (which can carry vehicles), and the Trillium. The Trillium is the heaviest of the fleet, weighing in at over 611 tons, and the oldest. It was built by the Polson Iron Works and launched in 1910, joining other flower ships: the Bluebell, Primose, and Mayflower.

The Trillium is a steam-powered side-wheeler ferry (the only steam-powered ferry in the City of Toronto fleet), and was originally operated by the Toronto Ferry Company. In 1926, the City of Toronto took over ferry services and ownership of the Trillium was transferred. Gradually, steam-powered boats were phased out, and the Trillium was retired in 1956. It rested near the filtration plant at the Toronto Island for years.

Trillium, as it steams across the lake in 1935. Photo from the Toronto Archives, Fonds 16, Series 71, Item 10962.

According to a 1963 article in the Toronto Star, a brief note in the column “In Town and Out,” the City purchased Bluebell and Trillium to convert them into sewage disposal craft. Bluebell apparently sank on a trial run, before extra floatation devices were attached. In 1973, conversations began about fixing up the old boat and having it steam across the water once again. Reaction seemed favourable: people were impressed with how old the boat was and felt it could be like a floating museum. In 1973, Alan Howard, then the curator of the Marine Museum of Upper Canada, spoke to the Star about the old ferry and its historical value, as well as some of its quirks, like an engine defect that made a knocking noise. “It almost had a conga beat,” he said. “I half-expected that all the passengers would form a line and snake-dance across the deck.”

In 1974, rebuilding and fixing of the Trillium began and lasted for two years and cost more than $1 million. The ship started taking passengers over the lake, with its original steam engine, and hosted Caribana parties and moonlight jazz cruises. On its second maiden voyage, on May 19, 1976, a spray from a fireboat intended as a salute ended up pouring water all over the boat and the guests all dressed up for the trip. On passenger told the Star, “I have never seen a fireboat in operation before and I never want to see one from that distance again.” The newspaper reported that she was drying her hair at the time.

Trillium has two plaques about its history—one, from Heritage Torotono, in the ferry terminal, and one from 1985 from the Toronto Historical Board, which is on the ferry itself.

Trillium’s historical plaque at the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal. Photo by Erin Sylvester.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

Toronto Workshop Productions Theatre on Alexander Street as seen on April 27, 1971. Photo from the Toronto Archives, Fonds 1526, File 6, Item 26
Credit: City of Toronto Archives. Copyright was transferred to the City of Toronto by the copyright owner.

Summer is a great season for theatre in the city. There are outdoor arts festivals and shows inside, if you prefer to escape the heat and bugs. While Toronto has a vibrant theatre scene today, its history is impressive as well.

One of the major figures in Toronto’s theatre history is George Luscombe, who created Toronto Workshop Productions in 1959, when it was originally called Workshop Theatre. The group has been heralded as one of the great early alternative performance troupes, and one of Canada’s first professional alternative theatre companies. According to former-troupe member and drama instructor at the University of Toronto, Steven Bush, “WP was in operation some 10 years before important companies like Factory, Passe Muraille, Tarragon, and Toronto Free appeared,” he wrote in a 2015 journal article. “Theatre-makers in other parts of Canada would acknowledge George’s influence.” Bush says he was also likely the first director in Toronto to “practice ‘colour-blind casting,'” the practice of casting actors for roles without considering their ethnicity.

Luscombe first got involved in the arts when he assembled a song-and-dance troupe with the Canadian Commonwealth Federation Youth Club to perform for striking workers on the picket line. In the 1950s, Luscombe moved to London, England, and worked with the Theatre Workshop under Joan Littlewood, where the company put on classic and modern plays and lived in a commune. Inspired by his time across the pond, Luscombe returned to Toronto and founded his own workshop.

George Luscombe and general manager June Faulkner after the Workshop Productions theatre was saved by the city after public support. Photo from the Toronto Star August 24, 1977.

According to Bush, “George was committed to original creation, to new looks at old plays, to strong political content and to building a full time paid ensemble of actors who would train as well as perform together.” Like Littlewood, he developed his work through rehearsals with the troupe.

Luscombe was also inspired by alternative texts to create his plays. He adapted documents and documentary style into live theatre, such as the transcripts of the trial of the Chicago Seven, which he turned into Chicago ’70. Bush, who worked closely with Luscombe on the project, says they were surprised by how exciting they found the news coming from the Chicago courtroom:

The play we were rehearsing kept failing to ignite us, but the news and the verbatim excerpts from the trial did. The testimony of poet Allen Ginsberg, Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, militant activist Linda Morse, Mayor Richard Daley, and others really got us going. The irreverent behaviour and imaginative wit of the defendants and their lawyers struck a chord. In the trial judge, we found a perfect villain: harsh, partisan, smirking, very smart and possessed himself of a wry sarcastic wit.

In addition to improvising based on the court transcripts, the ensemble used an Alice in Wonderland-inspired structure, and referenced writers Fernando Arrabal and Marge Piercy to highlight the surreal nature of the proceedings. The play was a hit and ended up playing in New York and touring Europe.

George Luscombe and general manager June Faulkner in the Star on April 22, 1978.

In his book Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada, University of Guelph drama professor Alan Filewood says Luscombe “saw plays as raw material for performances, and playwrights who were possessive of their scripts did not last long with him. Nor did he see plays as ever finished; each production was simply a stage of development.” Luscombe’s attitudes were just right for the age of free love, political protest, and the rise of the counter-culture. He pushed the envelope and made some people uncomfortable. In 1979, his theatre was gutted by fire on the opening night of You Can’t Get Here From There, a play about refugees from Chile being turned away from Canada. Filewood says it was “widely perceived to have been politically motivated arson.”

Luscombe was named a member of the Order of Canada in 1981 for “contributions to the development of theatre in Canada.” He cut ties with the company in 1989 when the board of directors voted to fire him, and soon after to dissolve Workshop Productions. However, the theatre was preserved to always be used for arts and is currently home to Buddies in Bad Times. In his book, Filewood notes that because of Luscombe’s devotion to performance, he doesn’t have a legacy of scripts that can be reworked and reimagined by new generations of performers. His work was chiefly about the moment of being in a theatre and seeing performers on stage, which can’t be replicated.

Luscombe died in February 1999. His plaque is at Buddies in Bad Times theatre, located at 12 Alexander Street.

Check out some summer theatre this year. The annual SummerWorks Performance Festival starts August 4 (today!) and runs to August 16. Shakespeare in High Park runs until September 4.

The post Now and Then: George Luscombe and Toronto Workshop Productions appeared first on Torontoist.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

The Star‘s Entertainment section on June 26, 1978, the day after the final concert at the Riverboat coffee house, shows the line to get in for Murray McLauchlin’s last show there.

As Canada prepares to say goodbye to the beloved Tragically Hip with their nationally televised Kingston show on August 20, it’s an interesting time to reflect on Canada’s homegrown talent and famous jam spots.

The Riverboat Coffee House was a hopping hangout for hippies in cool counter-culture Yorkville during the 60s. Yorkville was the place to be and the Riverboat was the basement to check out if you wanted to hear up and coming musicians, sometimes even playing new compositions they’d put together in the venue’s rehearsal space.

Bernie Fiedler opened the Riverboat in 1964. The small underground space could seat around 120 people. According to the Toronto Daily Star, in December 1964, Fiedler and his partner Pat Hancock had done well with the Mousehole coffee house and spent $10,000 renovating the Riverboat.

The Riverboat became popular for hosting musicians and groups, such as Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Murray McLauchlan, and Gordon Lightfoot. A Star review of a Lightfoot performance at the Riverboat in March 1965 says, at 26, he was “on the threshold of a very promising career as a performer.”

At his 1965 show at the Riverboat, Lightfoot discussed his switch from jazz to country-inspired folk, which came about partly because he was offered a job on the CBC program Country Hoedown. At first, he told the crowd, singing country made him “so sick.” But he came to realize he didn’t fit in in the jazz world. “Man, I couldn’t talk that language,” he said. “Those guys are awful smooth.”

By 1968, he was famous and the Star heralded the Riverboat as the venue where he became established.

Yorkville in the 1970s. Toronto Archives, Finds 124, File 8.

Some locals complained that Yorkville was too noisy, with all the coffee houses playing music late into the night. A group of city politicians went to tour the neighbourhood one evening to investigate the noise, and ended up at the Riverboat during a set by singer Anita Sheer. The aldermen were hushed by the audience there as they whispered during the performance. They generally agreed that it wasn’t the the coffee houses causing the late night noisy revelry.

According to music writer and historian Nicholas Jennings, who wrote Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of Canadian Sound, a history of the Yorkville music scene, Joni Mitchell first performed what is probably her most famous song, “Both Sides Now,” at the Riverboat.

In 1970, Neil Young returned to the coffee house for a visit, after hitting it big in the U.S. “It’s good to be back,” Young is quoted saying in the Star under the headline “Pop rock superstar Neil Young visits old haunts.” Jennings has noted that Neil Young referenced the coffee house in his song “Ambulance Blues” with the line: “Back in the old folky days/The air was magic when we played/The Riverboat was rockin’/in the rain.”

Gordon Lightfoot performing at an Apex Records lunch circa 1970. Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 3405.

By the late 70s, the Riverboat was struggling and with the lower drinking age (18, down from 21), and it couldn’t compete with bigger venues with liquor licences (such as El Mocambo). Fiedler, the owner, also said that these other venues could afford to pay performers a lot more than he could offer and that musicians who got their start in the basement, such as Lightfoot, were now filling Massey Hall. The Riverboat’s final concert was on June 25 1978, and featured Murray McLauchlan, with two performances by Dan Hill earlier in the week. The Star quoted McLauchlan saying about his final show, “It was a debt to a scene whose passing I regret—the free-form club scene…The Riverboat was the Cadillac of coffee houses. Once you got a gig there, you had arrived.”

A Heritage Toronto plaque commemorating the coffee house stands out front of 118 Yorkville Avenue, now a condo building.

The post Yorkville’s Riverboat Coffee House, Which Helped Launch Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell appeared first on Torontoist.

Now and Then explores the stories behind Toronto’s historical plaques and monuments.

Jesse Ketchum was a prominent entrepreneur and philanthropist in early York. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

It’s time to go back to school, and for some students that will mean returning to the halls of Jesse Ketchum Junior and Senior Public School.

The school was founded in the 1850s, although the current building dates to 1920. As the name suggests, the school was made possible by Jesse Ketchum, a tanner who became known as the “children’s friend” for his philanthropy. He donated the land to the Village of Yorkville to build a “Free and Common School” and a park, now also named after him, in 1856.

Born in 1782, Ketchum wasn’t originally from Toronto, but he moved here at 17 to escape an abusive foster home. His mother died when he was six; he’d been living with his foster parents since. One of the problems he had with them was that they didn’t want him to go to school. His brother Seneca had moved to Toronto, then called York, in 1796 and had a farm north of the city.

Ketchum likely learned the tanning trade from his foster parents. Around 1812, he bought a tanning business from an American who was leaving the country to avoid fighting on the British side of the War of 1812. Luckily, leather was in demand during the war. Ketchum fought too—with the 3rd Regiment of the York Militia.

Ketchum became wealthy enough over the years to buy land (and to afford to give it away). He owned a chunk of land between King and Queen and Yonge and Bay, which includes the current Cloud Gardens and Temperance Street. A strict Methodist, Ketchum named the street himself. In 1813 or 1814, he built a house near his tannery, which John Ross Robertson, in Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, described as “a large American style home considered a mansion in the early days of York.” The house included a small turret where, reportedly, Ketchum could watch the ships in the harbour.

Jesse Ketchum Park on October 16, 1913. Photo from the Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 52, Item 214.

He was also, some say, the first to introduce sidewalks to the city when he laid down some bark on muddy Yonge Street to help people get in and out of his tanning business. Apart from this great gift, keeping the shoes of Torontonians clean, he also donated money to churches, including Toronto’s first Methodist chapel in 1818 and what became Knox Church in 1820, and schools (and he built a temperance hall).

He even got the nickname “Father Ketchum” for his special attention to education (although he did have nine children of his own from two wives). According to the 1982 Toronto Historical Board plaque at the school that bears his name, he first gave land for a school in 1832 at McMurrich Avenue and Davenport Road, and then again in 1956 at Bay and Davenport, where Jesse Ketchum Public School is located.

A principal at Jesse Ketchum School in Toronto in 1909.
Credit: Filey, M. / Library and Archives Canada / PA-073444.

After the failed rebellion of Upper Canada in 1837, Ketchum, who was a reformer but disagreed with William Lyon Mackenzie’s violent plan, moved his tannery to Buffalo. That was where his son William lived.

Ketchum’s land in Toronto was very valuable, but he left it to the children from his first marriage in 1845. In Buffalo, 12 schools and a street were named after him. He also donated money to support cholera patients during an 1849 epidemic and to the families of soldiers during the Civil War.

To the delight of visiting children, his house in Buffalo included a miniature replica of the train running from the city to Niagara Falls.

Ketchum died in 1867 after catching a chill on his way to visit one of the schools he supported.

The plaque near Jesse Ketchum school in Toronto. Source: Alan L. Brown, torontoplaques.com

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The post Meet the Man Who Introduced Sidewalks to Toronto appeared first on Torontoist.