Toronto’s mean streets of a century ago recalled in old police register — Documents found in former police headquarters on College Street Genealogist Bill Gladstone looked through a number of thick handwritten criminal registers that turned up some years ago in a forgotten alcove of the Stewart Building, the former police headquarters on College Street, and…
From The Globe & Mail I am one of this city’s great silent army of working poor, and so my name is Legion. I am just one of the masses, evidently, poor and huddled, yearning to breath free; one of the anonymous faces that wash up in the courtrooms of Old City Hall each morning,…
Writing On The Wall: Review of Indian in the Cabinet (2021) Remember Jody Wilson-Raybould? She’s the former Trudeauvian Minister of Justice and Attorney-General who — incredible as it sounds — insisted upon telling the truth, a course that must have seemed all but inconceivable to the PM and his appointed viziers. In her 2021 memoir,…
Silas Aaron Hardoon was born into a poor Jewish family in Baghdad in 1851, but when he died in Shanghai China 80 years later, he was regarded as the wealthiest man in Asia, leaving behind a fortune worth as much as $15 billion in today’s dollars. When Hardoon arrived in Shanghai as a youth of…
From the Toronto Star, Jan. 15, 1915 Esther Greenberg, a seven-year-old child, was shot by a stray bullet from a rifle practice in Kent Public School on Dufferin Street in Toronto and died the next day. Fifteen targets had been placed in as many public schools around Toronto to aid local army cadets in target…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, June 13, 1914 “It is a great mistake,” said a local pawnbroker, “to imagine that the pawnbroker deals only with the poverty-stricken classes. The pawnbroker in a big way of business could reveal, if he so chose, some very surprising secrets of the business he transacts with customers whom the…
From InsideToronto Blog, December 2015 Although my client’s late father had always been told he had been born in Montreal, we ultimately found his birth record in Toronto. Why the purposeful deception? Turns out my client’s grandmother was trying to cover up the fact that her husband had been exposed as a bigamist in a…
Review of Empire of Deception: From Chicago to Nova Scotia — The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation. By Dean Jobb (Harper Avenue) From the Canadian Jewish News, June 2015 Five years ago, while researching a book on the history of the Jewish community of London, Ontario, I…
TORONTO POLICEMEN ARE MODELS OF POLITENESS Their Clubs Are Merely Ornamental, But They Manage to Enforce the Laws – How a Police Court Hearing is Conducted – The Finest are the Guides, Counselors and Friends of Our Canadian Neighbors – Not Like Pittsburgh. by Henry Jones Ford Pittsburgh Gazette, July 12, 1903 Above: Newpaper photo from Colonel…
Torontonians who have vanished to the four corners of the globe From the Toronto Star Weekly, November 29, 1913 By Arthur Barron In nearly every large city and town across the face of the earth are groups of men and women who, by all the laws of preference, should be spending their lives hundreds or…
