The Estates of old Toronto is a bittersweet look at a less harried age and at the great properties that were ultimately swallowed up by Canada's largest modern city.
This guide to Toronto provides complete coverage of Canada's most diverse city. The guide opens with a colour introduction to the city's highlights, with photographs of attractions and sights from the CN Tower to Union Station. The guide reveals each of the city's many distinct neighbourhoods and the tranquil Toronto islands. There are discriminating reviews of the best places to eat, drink and stay, plus coverage of the arts scene, with features on Toronto's literary and theatre heritage. There is also extensive coverage given to day-trips from the city, including Niagara Falls and the Severn Sound.
Throughout history most people have associated northern North America with wilderness – with abundant fish and game, snow-capped mountains, and endless forest and prairie. Canada’s contemporary picture gallery, however, contains more disturbing images – deforested mountains, empty fisheries, and melting ice caps. Adopting both a chronological and thematic approach, Laurel MacDowell examines human interactions with the land, and the origins of our current environmental crisis, from first peoples to the Kyoto Protocol. This richly illustrated exploration of the past from an environmental perspective will change the way Canadians and others around the world think about – and look at – Canada.
A complete history of Toronto's Riverdale community, this book narrates the lives of early inhabitants, (reaching as far back as Simcoe's first settlement of the region), the construction boom of 1915, and the waves of immigration that made Riverdale one of Toronto's most diverse areas.
Toronto - the largest and one of the most multicultural cities in Canada - boasts an equally interesting and diverse architectural heritage. Architecture, Design and Craft in Toronto 1900-1940 tells a story of the significant changes in domestic life in the first 40 years of the twentieth century. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach to studies of residential spaces, the author examines how questions of modernity and modern living influenced not only architectural designs but also interior furnishings, modes of transportation and ways to spend leisure time. The book discusses several case studies, some of which are known both locally and internationally (for example Casa Loma), while others such as Guild of All Arts or Sherwood have been virtually unstudied by historians of visual culture. The overall goal of the book is to put Toronto on the map of scholars of urban design and architecture and to uncover previously unknown histories of design, craft and domesticity in Toronto. This study will be of interest not only to the academic community (namely architects, designers, craftspeople and scholars of these disciplines, along with social historians), but also the general public interested in local history and/or visual culture.
A colourful look at Toronto's pioneer roots, tracing the history of three neighbourhoods from their farming days to modern day. Includes: Don Mills: From Forests and Farms to Forces of Change As recently as 1970, wheat crops were grown at Don Mills — and no small amount, but enough to line Toronto’s grocery-store shelves with baked goods. Single-herd milk was also commonplace, thanks to this last vestige of the city’s agricultural past. By 1980, it had been paved over, but Scott Kennedy offers a glimpse of the way things used to be. 200 Years at St. John's York Mills: The Oldest Parish in Toronto St. John’s Church at York Mills was built in 1816 on land that had been donated by pioneer settlers: a little log building that was the first parish church in the City of Toronto. The brick church that stands there today, completed in 1844 and enlarged over the years, stands as a welcoming place of worship and repository of Canadian history. Willowdale: Yesterday's Farms, Today's Legacy In 1855, Willowdale post office opened in Jacob Cummer's store on Yonge Street. Today it is a bustling urban environment. Scott Kennedy recounts the notable stories of what happened in between and who was there as Willowdale evolved into a modern community.
As recently as 1970, wheat crops were grown at Don Mills — and no small amount, but enough to line Toronto’s grocery-store shelves with baked goods. Single-herd milk was also commonplace, thanks to this last vestige of the city’s agricultural past. By 1980, it had been paved over, but Scott Kennedy offers a glimpse of the way things used to be.
This story begins some 13,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, before travelling thousands of years ahead to the early pioneers and the farms they established, and right up to the present day. Readers will learn how the local St. John’s Anglican Church welcomed its first worshippers when Beethoven was still performing in the concert halls of Europe. They will meet Cornelius van Nostrand, born in 1730—twenty-six years before Mozart and eleven years before the first performance of Handel’s Messiah—and now at rest in St. John’s churchyard. This rich history also includes such diverse figures as Amelia Earhart—who discovered her love of flying at an aerodrome overlooking Hogg’s Hollow—and Northern Dancer, the most influential Thoroughbred racehorse in history. Members of the British Royal Family—including two Kings of England—were also regular visitors to the area, staying in later years with E.P. Taylor and his wife Winifred at the Taylors’ Windfields Farm, where Northern Dancer was also a resident.
Leading architect E.J. Lennox designed Casa Loma for the flamboyant Sir Henry Pellatt and Mary, Lady Pellatt as an enormous castellated mansion that overlooked the booming metropolis of Toronto. The first scholarly book dedicated to this Canadian landmark, Casa Loma situates the famous “house on the hill” within Toronto’s architectural, urban, and cultural history. Casa Loma was not only an outsized home for the self-appointed “Lord Toronto” but a statement of Canada’s association with empire, an assertion of the country’s British legacy. During and after the Pellatts’ occupation, Casa Loma was a major landmark, and it has since infiltrated the iconography and collective memory of the metropolis. The reception of Casa Loma, variously loved and abhorred by Torontonians, reflects many of Toronto’s major aspirations and anxieties about itself as a modern city. Across ten chapters, this book charts the history of Casa Loma from the purchase of the estate atop Davenport Ridge in 1903 and its construction from 1906, through to its sale and the dispersal of its contents in 1924, its subsequent life as a hotel, and finally its transformation into one of the city’s major entertainment venues. Casa Loma brings to light a wealth of hitherto unpublished archival images and documentation of the house’s visual and material culture, weaving together a textured account of the design, use, and life of this unique building over the course of the twentieth century.