Tag: 19th-century

Exhibition Of 1889 Only One He Missed

Ex-Alderman Edward Galley Has Been Going to Them Since the Year 1852 HOW C.N.E. HAS GROWN SINCE THE EARLY DAYS First Held in a Few Tents in Boulton’s Fields — Big Display of Patchwork Quilts from Toronto Star Weekly, September 9, 1922 By William Lewis Edmonds Toronto can boast of having at least one citizen…

The oldest family tree in the world

From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 24, 2004 You may not find Dr. Neil Rosenstein’s new book listed on national best-seller lists, but the noted genealogist — with his tongue halfway in his cheek — compares it to the popular thriller “The Da Vinci Code.” Both books, the noted American genealogist and surgeon said, deal in…

Michael Blume, Toronto’s first Jewish pharmacist (1866)

From The Jewish Standard, April 1, 1966 The author, in an earlier article, wrote of the career of Mr. Charles Kahn, Toronto’s first Jewish dentist. The following article deals with the first Jewish pharmacist in Toronto and discloses hitherto unknown material in the history of Jewish life in Old Toronto. At just about the time…

‘Old’ City Hall has lovely interior

    This beautiful and huge stained glass window was made for Toronto’s then-new City Hall at Queen and Bay streets when it was constructed in the late 1890s. The window seems to depict in pictorial form some of the ideals of the city: “The union of commerce & industry.” Virtues cited along the top of the windows…

Repentant: A new role for the divine Sarah Bernhardt (1922)

From the Canadian Jewish Review, September 8, 1922 It will be remembered that Sarah Bernhardt was born in Paris in 1844 of Dutch Jewish parents and was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the request of her father. She has recently given an interview to Miss Elsie Roow, of the New York Herald, in…

An 1839 travelogue through the Jewish world

In the year 1839, had you been a traveller along the road from Rzeszov to Cracow, you would have been obliged to show a passport in Podgorze, the suburb of Cracow on the Austrian side of the Vistula (“Weichsel”) River. After submitting to a cursory inspection from Austrian officials, your vehicle would have crossed the…

York Street of 40 Years Ago (1928)

Recollections of Old Timer Forty Years Ago John Heenan ‘Tended Bar’ at the N.E. Corner of Front Street Many Changes Noticed Now — But the Sign Board of ‘Heenan’s Place’ Is Still to Be Seen From the Toronto Evening Telegram, November 2, 1928 John Heenan, veteran employee of the Walker House, whose trim grey uniform,…

Devil in the White City: Murder & Chicago World’s Fair, 1893

In this riveting page-turner that reads like a murder mystery thriller, Erik Larson resurrects the legend of a forgotten American psychopathic mass murderer, the cold-blooded H. H. Holmes, and overlays it atop the equally dusty story of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, one of the most impressive achievements of gilded-age America. Satisfying the modern…

“David Levinsky:” Cahan’s classic novel of Jewish immigration

Literary critics often express hallowed praise for writers who have contributed brilliant works to English literature but whose first language was not English. Two supreme examples come to mind. Polish-born Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) did not learn English until he was in his twenties, yet he became one of the language’s great novelists and story tellers…