Ambitious in scope and masterful in execution, Allan Levine’s panoramic portrait of our city from its beginnings to the present is sweeping and opinionated, judicious and clever, insightful and gossipy all at once. This is no dry academic survey but a lively, popular-style “biography” in the mode of Peter Ackroyd’s London (2000) and other recent…
Back in 1938, two Jewish boys posed for a photo on the steps of Toronto’s Ostrovtzer Synagogue on the north side of Cecil Street, just east of Spadina. Last week [July 2014], roughly 76 years after that first photo was snapped, Gurion Hyman and Gordon Perlmutter returned to the same spot and had…
The illustration appeared in the Toronto Star on January 15, 1907, as the city welcomed a new city council into City Hall. The mayor was named Coatsworth. Note that there are no women councillors; however, it seems there are a few women present (note their distinctive hats) in the gallery in the background. In early…
Angell and Janey Lester (nee Alexander) were living in this house at 4 Radnor Rd., Bristol, in 1911 when this photo was taken. Janey is standing outside the house holding her infant son, Lionel Lester, with her four-year-old daughter, Ida, standing in front. Janey’s younger sister, twelve-year-old Dora Alexander, stands beside them in the dark…
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…
From Growing Up Jewish: Canadians tell their own stories (1997) My earlier recollection goesback to the very early 1920s, sitting on the stoop of our dry-goods store on Spadina Avenue and Baldwin Street (southeast corner), watching the Sunday evening church parade go by. These were the strollers emerging from two nearby Christian churches, the Western Congregational Church, just…
The following passages have been excerpted from The Rise of the Toronto Jewish Community, by Shmuel Mayer Shapiro (1877-1958), the late editor and publisher of the Toronto Yiddish newspaper, the Hebrew Journal. After surfacing in a synagogue archives in 2009, his unpublished manuscript was illustrated with some 90 rare and historic photographs and illustrations and…
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…
Opening of One-fare Trip to the City Limits Hailed With Joy / Triumph for Adam Beck / First Cars with Notable Passengers Made Run over New Rails / Triumphal Procession Up Yonge Street / Joy Expressed at Town Hall From Toronto Evening Telegram, Friday November 3, 1922 Everybody living in North Toronto seemed to be…
From The Toronto Evening Telegram, July 11, 1928 The T. Eaton Co. have called for tenders for the demolition of buildings in the block bounded by Yonge, College, Bay and Buchanan streets. All of the buildings are structures which have been erected for years and their destruction means the removal of old landmarks, the former…
