Toronto Heritage recognizes HVRA Storyposts

This Toronto Legacy Plaque on Bloor Street honours Anna Russell, the “funniest woman on the opera stage”, says Grace Westcott, chair of the Toronto Legacy Project. The group has been nominated for a 2015 Heritage Toronto Award, one of several Annex-related nominees this year. Brian Burchell, Gleaner News

By Annemarie Brissenden

How do we define a city’s heritage? Is it the network of buildings connected by meandering streets and avenues? Is it a shared history of accepted truths?

If this year’s nominees for the Toronto Heritage Awards are anything to go by, our heritage is as woven out of the conflicting narratives, shared memories, and individual triumphs of our collective past as it is from our built history.

“We are getting people to think of heritage as a much broader concept than buildings,” explains Dr. Nicole Schulman, the producer of the Harbord Village History Storyposts, a project of the Harbord Village Residents’ Association that has been nominated in the media category.

Located throughout Harbord Village, there are 24 Storyposts: bright yellow outdoor plaques with QR codes that, when scanned by a smartphone, guide listeners to an audio collage created from interviews with long-time residents, organized by theme. Some are light-hearted, recounting memories of the games children played, while others cover more serious subjects like racism and anti-Semitism.

Very much inspired by murmur, a documentary oral history project that records stories about specific locations, the Storyposts took about two and a half years to produce, and grew out of a companion project to capture the oral stories of the neighbourhood’s oldest residents before those stories were lost.

For Schulman, who notes that at times the individual voices contradict each other, the “oral testimonies convey the reality that there is not a single truth” and remind us that “we do have history, and it helps shape who we are today”.

One of the biggest challenges was figuring out where to locate the plaques: the one about chestnut trees, for example, is placed so a listener is looking at a chestnut tree, while the one about the games children played is placed in front of a park.

Choosing “which site does the most justice to the individual” is not always easy, allows Grace Westcott, chair of the Toronto Legacy Project, which oversees the Toronto Legacy Plaques in partnership with Heritage Toronto. “Sometimes you choose visibility over historical significance.”

Nominated in the community heritage category, the project has erected 37 distinctive blue plaques that mark where a person of note once lived or accomplished something significant.

There is a large cluster of plaques in the Annex honouring notables such as Lester B. Pearson (Admiral Road), Norman Bethune (Robert Street), and champion rower Ned Hanlon (Beverley Street). And, it’s hard not to miss Anna Russell’s plaque amid the hustle and bustle of Bloor Street just west of Spadina Avenue.

Westcott’s favourite plaque, however, is the one honouring Jane Jacobs on Albany Avenue.

Part of the Annex cluster, it’s located where Jacobs lived when she was fighting the Spadina expressway, between two trees that she planted, in an area that still exists as a result of her work.

“It’s redolent of Jane Jacobs and everything she stood for.”

Modelled on the blue plaques of London, England, which date to 1866, the program was founded in 2009 by Toronto’s then poet laureate Dennis Lee — of Alligator Pie fame — who wanted to bring greater prominence to the city’s great achievers. (Have you heard, for example, of Donald Coxeter, the most important mathematician since Euclid? There’s a plaque for him.)

For Westcott, the Heritage Toronto nomination is a recognition that “we’ve accomplished something… something that’s noticed and has value”.

“Encouraging recognition of the city’s heritage in all its forms” helps to remind us to preserve that heritage, says Kevin Plummer, the Heritage Toronto board member who chairs the Awards Working Group.

One of the buildings up for recognition in the architecture category is the one Uno Prii designed at 100 Spadina Rd.

Unlike the fate suffered at Prii’s 44 Walmer Rd., where the original distinctive balconies were removed and never replaced, the exterior appearance of 100 Spadina Rd. was restored.

“Uno Prii’s buildings were a cohesive whole, and the balconies were part of his original vision,” relates Plummer. “It certainly strikes a contrast to [44 Walmer Rd.] in terms of how the owner of 100 Spadina Rd. is trying to maintain the heritage of the building.”

There are two other local landmarks nominated in the architecture category, the sanctuary at Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church, which underwent significant upgrades to its accessibility, stage size, and acoustics, and the Munk School of Global Affairs, whose interior masonry, original windows, and interior staircase were restored.

For further information about the Harbord Village History Storyposts, or to hear them in their entirety, please visit http://www.HarbordVillageHistory.ca. For further information about the Toronto Heritage Awards, or to buy tickets, please visit www.heritagetoronto.org.

Madison Avenue is one step closer to becoming a Heritage Conservation District (HCD). On Sept. 8, the Toronto and East York Community Council endorsed a motion to designate Madison Avenue from Bloor to Dupont streets an HCD under the Ontario Heritage Act. The designation allows a municipality to protect and enhance the special character of a property or group of properties. The City of Toronto currently has 20 HCDs, three of which are in the Gleaner’s coverage area: Harbord Village Residents’ Association (HVRA) I and II, and the East Annex. Two more studies are also underway for HVRA III and the West Annex.

HCDs “are an incredibly important tool under the heritage act”, said Joe Cressy (Trinity-Spadina, Ward 20) in a previously published May Gleaner article, “to not just design a property, but to preserve an entire area’s unique character.”

The Madison Avenue HDC must be approved by City Council before the designation is made official. That approval is expected to occur in November.

—Brian Burchell and Annemarie Brissenden

The Liberal and New Democratic Party (NDP) candidates for Spadina-Fort York (the southern half of what was formerly Trinity-Spadina) have come out strongly against any plan to expand the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. Sitting member of Parliament (MP) Adam Vaughan, and former MP Olivia Chow, who are running in Spadina-Fort York, have both said the plan to bring jets to Billy Bishop would be grounded should either of their parties form a federal government after the election Oct. 19.

“The Liberal Party will not reopen the Tripartite Agreement. No Jets. No Expansion. Period,” wrote Vaughan in a letter to Community Air, a local advocacy group that opposes the expansion of the island airport.

Chow was equally opposed to reopening the agreement in her letter, which like Vaughan’s was written in September, to the Clean Air Partnership.

“Porter Airlines and the Toronto Port Authority have to honour the existing Tripartite Agreement from 1983,” she wrote. “An NDP government will not amend the Tripartite Agreement to permit a runway extension for jets, or for any other purpose.”

The agreement, which governs the operation of the airport, is between PortsToronto (previously the Toronto Port Authority), the federal government, and the City of Toronto. However, many believe that the federal government controls PortsToronto, as it appoints its chief executive officer and board members.

The City of Toronto continues to study Porter Airlines’ request to bring jets to the airport.

—Brian Burchell

Although gun crime is high in the entertainment district, neighbourhood crime and crime incidents related to gang activity is down, reported Staff Superintendent Francis Bergen of the Toronto Police Service at a 14 Division Community Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) meeting on Sept. 14.

Bergen said that gun crime has been “off the charts in the past three months with 19 shooting incidents resulting in five homicides”, but cautioned that the shootings, while alarming, were for the most part localized to the entertainment district of clubs and bars that has migrated west of Spadina Avenue.

Most of the incidents occur, explained Detective Sergeant Brian Kelly, when the 720 licensed establishments in the division shut down and patrons are lingering outside in summer conditions.

In its first meeting since June, the CPLC viewed reports spanning the three months period from June to September that showed residential break-and-enters down 55 per cent and commercial break-and-enters down 25 per cent, each over the same period one year ago. Robberies, such as cell phone theft, purse snatchings, and hold-ups, are at the same rate as last year, and represent a total number of 45 reports over the three-month period. Theft-of-autos is up 10 per cent from last year, but includes a spike in motorcycle thefts from parking garages in the south end of the division.

The division polices the area from the lakeshore to the south to the CPR tracks near Dupont Street to the north, and from Spadina Avenue in the east to Dufferin Street to the west.

—Brian Burchell

A jumble of stories about an area lost to time

By Annemarie Brissenden

Before there was Ed Mirvish and his free turkey giveaways, there was Merle Foster and her annual Christmas trees; parties the sculptor would throw in St. John’s Ward for children who would have little other pleasure during the holiday season.

Foster’s story is just one of many delightful snippets to be discovered in The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto’s First Immigrant Neighbourhood. Edited by John Lorinc, Michael McClelland, Ellen Scheinberg, and Tatum Taylor, it’s a ragtag collection of essays, photographs, and narrative memorabilia about the area bounded by University Avenue, and College, Queen, and Yonge streets. Now known for Nathan Phillips Square, City Hall, high rises of office towers and condominiums, for many years the rectangular swath of city blocks was part slum, part artist colony, and part way-station for the thousands of people who lived and worked there. Toronto’s first Chinatown sprang up there, the first synagogue was built there, and the first novel of Toronto — Morley Callaghan’s Strange Fugitive — was set there. It was where Black men and women escaping slavery prospered alongside refugees of Europe’s pogroms. For many, it was simply home.

The book does not attempt to be an exhaustive history of the Ward, but is — rather like the area it memorializes — a patchwork quilt of stories that aims to echo its jumble. Chronology is eschewed in favour of randomness, and each random patch has its own tone. One entry traces William Lyon Mackenzie King’s summer investigating the sweatshops of the Ward for The Mail and Empire, while another examines city directories for clues on one street’s evolution. There are reminiscences of the V-J Day celebrations in Chinatown, a story about a Sai Woo condiment dish — “a genuine Ward artifact” — and tales of bootleggers, sex-workers, and strikes at Eaton’s.

This purposeful randomness is not without some frustrations, however. Readers grapple with abrupt changes in tone, and can be startled from a dry historical tract into a rollicking tale about “my grandmother the bootlegger” with the flip of a page. It’s also not clear how or why each entry was chosen, or what, if anything, wasn’t included. A brief biography of each contributor is included at the back of the book (placing them alongside each entry might have made more sense), but there’s no discussion of why each writer was chosen. It almost feels as though everything were thrown together accidentally, or haphazardly. A little more formality would not have been amiss.

Neither would some exploration of the themes that provide a common thread between entries, particularly the notion that no matter how much we evolve as a city, we can’t seem to shake certain obsessions.

Consider that Charles Hastings, Toronto’s medical officer of health in 1911, “vehemently opposed the development of modern apartment buildings as a solution to downtown housing needs, claiming they’d degenerate into tenements”. Or that from about 1870 — when the “pace of urbanization in Toronto had become the subject of public interest” — the “city’s newspapers began to publish annual reports about building activity in each ward”.

Or that as early as 1896, King was proposing to improve living conditions in the Ward through improved transit, cycling, and mixed social-class housing. While writing about tuberculosis, Cathy Crowe notes, “As a street nurse, I was always drawn to Goss’s photos because they mirrored what I had witnessed in the flophouses, shelters and streets of contemporary Toronto”.

And a 1918 report released by the Bureau of Municipal Research, a non-profit advocacy group, recommended that “public schools should be open for community use after school hours”, and “any new housing developments should include adequate municipal services and employment opportunities for residents”.

Did you know?

• Several blocks of Toronto’s first Chinatown were razed to make way for Nathan Phillips Square
• The Hospital for Sick Children sits on land that in 1947 was a trailer park for people who couldn’t find alternate housing
• The Ward’s bootleggers were often older women who relied on the trade to survive; one of the Ward’s most notorious bootleggers, Bessie Starkman, was assassinated by an Al Capone henchman in 1930
• Before the formation of the Group of Seven, Lawren Harris did many paintings of the Ward; his first known painting of the area was titled In the Ward and exhibited in 1912
• America’s sweetheart, Mary Pickford, was from the Ward, and grew  up in a brick home on University Avenue north of Gerrard Street
• The colourful houses on Gerrard Street, home to many artists and writers, inspired the creation of Mirvish Village

It seems ironic that the real story of the Ward, then, in a book that attempts to resurrect the memory of the area, is left out. The challenges faced by the Ward are as present as they ever were, and remain unresolved today. Our city has become one great ward, and as contradictory as the Ward itself once was. Let’s hope, though, that our future will not be limited to a random collection of essays in a book.

It’s a myth that only the Conservatives can be trusted with managing the economy.

Under their “stewardship” we are the only G7 country in a recession, and while Mr. Harper argues how “risky” it is to trust either opposition party with managing the balance sheet, his government has run successive deficit budgets and our economic outlook is far from glowing. The relatively weak Canadian dollar has yet to spur a silver lining moment for the manufacturing sector. While the Conservatives pretend to want to focus the debate on the welfare of the economy, it’s really the last thing they want. There is more political ground to be gained on the low road: practising the politics of division and fear while sabre-rattling abroad and highlighting their management of the terror file.

In the first French-language debate of the federal campaign, Harper steered a familiar “us versus others” tack when discussing his government’s move to strip health care away from refugee applicants.

“We have not taken away health care from immigrants and refugees,” he said. The only place we have refused it is for bogus refugee claimants who have been refused and turned down; we do not offer them a better health care plan than the ordinary Canadian can receive. I think that’s something that both new and existing and old-stock Canadians can agree with.”

There is an inherent dishonesty and underlying racism in Harper’s comments.

Refugee claimants are applicants pure and simple, so his use of the word “bogus” is wilfully inaccurate and unnecessarily disparaging.

The Annex is full of “old stock” in the sense that Mr. Harper intends, but it’s also in the middle of a richly diverse city, and a university town in itself. We wonder what indigenous peoples think of the “old stock” reference; surely after over 10,000 years, their length of tenure in this country should trump the constituency to which Harper refers.

The federal government cast a wide net here when they withdrew basic medical coverage from all applicants, whether or not they are accepted as a result of their hearing. Under the limited policy, refugees claimants are eligible for care only when they pose a threat to public health. That means no coverage, for example, for heart problems, pregnancy, infant vaccinations, diabetes, or any other ailments that threaten the health of the refugee but aren’t a demonstrable risk to public health.

The meanness of the 2012 modifications to the Interim Federal Health Program is underscored by a 2014 decision that found the cuts unconstitutional after they were challenged in federal court.

“The 2012 modifications to the Interim Federal Health Program potentially jeopardize the health, the safety and indeed the very lives of these innocent and vulnerable children in a manner that shocks the conscience and outrages our standards of decency. They violate section 12 of the Charter,” wrote Federal Court Justice Anne Mctavish in her decision.

It’s the only time Section 12 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — which protects against cruel and unusual punishment — has ever been used successfully outside of a criminal proceeding.

The federal government, which was denied a stay pending an appeal, has subsequently revoked the modifications to the program, but only under protest. Having spent $1.4 million in legal fees on the matter thus far, the Harper government intends to continue its appeal of the ruling should it be elected.

It’s time to stop falling for the “old stock” references — really a dog whistle call designed to be heard by only the voters Mr. Harper figures he needs to keep and those he can sway — and call his bluff.

Let’s talk about the economy: successive Liberal governments before Mr. Harper ran budget surpluses while managing to reduce the overall debt. Perhaps the Harper Conservatives are neither true conservatives nor the appropriate spokespeople for Canadian values.

I read the September Gleaner article “A haven for children’s literature”, on the 20^th anniversary of the Lillian H. Smith library, and I was instantly brought home to my old neighbourhood in Toronto. I remember fondly afternoons spent reading a book in the garden behind the library. Or wintry afternoons spent roaming through the stacks, looking for something of interest. Of particular interest to me was the mention that this library was a descendant of the first free-standing library in the Commonwealth. Living as I do in the UK right now, where we have seen swaths of libraries closed and boarded up due to cutbacks, it was especially delightful to note that Lillian H. Smith is doing so well. Congratulations to the dedicated staff who have created such a welcoming, warm space in Toronto.

Dr. Gillian Best

Former Gleaner contributor

Thank you for your article in the August 2015 edition “Breaking bread with friends, Harbord Bakery marks 70 years”. It was a joy to be reminded of the rich history of the Harbord Bakery and how intertwined
it is with the neighbourhood.

Raffi Kosower, Roslyn Katz, Susan Wisnewski, their families, and the incredibly friendly bakery staff are the leading lights of Harbord Street. Without this family and the dynasty of the Harbord Bakery we would not have the vibrant Harbord Street we have today.

Best regards,

Neil Wright
Chair, Harbord Street BIA

I lived above the Harbord Bakery (“Breaking bread with friends”, August 2015) in the early ‘60s. A newcomer to Toronto, I initially saw only space (furnished one-bedroom) and location (close to the U of T) that were right for me; however, I was soon to learn what a legendary roof I had found.

The Kosowers were ideal landlords – there when you needed them – who surprised me shortly after my arrival with a wonderfully decorated and personally inscribed birthday cake! The children were very much on the scene, mirroring the many family friends among the regular customers.

I cooked my first Thanksgiving turkey there (mixed reviews), soothed weekend guests startled by early-morning church bells, and – TV sets then still a rare bonus in such rentals – shared my screen with friends for the Kennedy/Nixon debates and Sunday night’s “Bonanza”. In time I acquired roommates and a bigger apartment, but never again an address that was so widely recognized with so much warmth.

The Gleaner article caught the place I remember. Thank you for the trip back!

Lois Reimer, Toronto