It’s still a bit too chilly out there for aquatic hijinks but I’m sure I’ll soon be complaining about the heat and humidity, something that I suspect is (at least) a century-old Toronto tradition.
In the meantime, there’s plenty more of the following sort of thing over at archive.org
“I find this provision almost Orwellian,” said Fred Vallance-Jones, an associate professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax and an expert in access to information law.
“It seeks to rewrite history, to say that lawful access to records that existed before didn’t actually exist after all, and that if you exercised your quasi-constitutional right of access to those records, well too bad, you’re out of luck.”The government is setting a precedent to move retroactively on any record it doesn’t want exposed, Vallance-Jones said.
“That to me is the deeper concern.”
Michel Drapeau, a lawyer, former military colonel and access-to-information author, noted there has never been a charge laid under the Access to Information Act, let alone a conviction.
He said the rationale of moving retroactively to prevent a possible prosecution is “a dangerous and unwelcome precedent” that should be as unwelcome to the RCMP and the administration of justice as to freedom-of-information wonks.
“The optics of it are not good: ‘Oh, so that’s the way it works now?’ If you do something against the law in the RCMP, you’ve got your friends in high places, they change the law,” said Drapeau.
Just a few high-def old maps I pilfered from around the web.
Download the whole pack here (caution, it’s 122 MB): http://www.torontocitylife.com/downloads/Toronto_Historic_Maps_HD.zip
With the recent dumping of snow that fell on Toronto I thought it’d be a neat idea to once again revisit the City of Toronto Archives to see how we, with all of our modern technology, fared against Torontonians of the past.
Sadly, the people of the the old Toronto dealt with the snow way better than we did. For starters, they didn’t always depend on rubber tires or internal combustion engines for getting around … check out the four-wheeled, woman-powered infant conveyance here:
Apparently, this method of transport was so safe that no one, including the children in the drivers’ seats, gave a second thought to wandering out onto Lake Ontario in it. I suppose it was definitely safer walking on the lake during the winter than in the summer — lot fewer big ships to watch out for:
The lake also offered natural relief to traffic congestion. Road packed? …
…why, just toss your best gal in the sidecar and hit the waters:
Apparently the compact “gravity-powered man car” was also quite popular, being able to go off road and being so easy to navigate that even young children could drive it. But the inability to go on level surfaces or uphill proved to be this form of transport’s undoing:
But, of course, some inventions of the era were so effective that they endured well into the modern day. Take the common “foot-car”, for example:
We can certainly learn a lost from the past, especially when modern technology fails us. Like they saying goes, don’t toss the baby out with the bathwater … unless, of course, it’s out on the lake, the safest place for newborns to be.
There are only so many ways to say “walking around aimlessly on a sunny weekend”…
With the weather being so hot lately, I’m sure almost every Torontonian has though, at least for a moment, of daring a dip in Lake Ontario. Okay, yeah, at times it might smell like rotting corpses, but it might be refreshing.
Unfortunately for me, getting anywhere near the water either meant a slog out west to the man-made beach near Bathurst and Queen’s Quay, or east to Cherry Beach, home of the sandy syringe.
For a while there were rumours of a new faux beach being constructed near my neck of the woods at the foot of Lower Jarvis — Sugar Beach — but this was, after all, a government project and the expected summer 2010 completion date couldn’t be trusted.
And then, in a sure sign that the universe is soon to end, I heard on my morning radio show that Sugar Beach was open for business. So I put on my most elegant thong, grabbed a towel, and headed down.
On the way there I couldn’t help but hearken back to Toronto’s past — how people used to refresh themselves in the waters of Lake Ontario, in style, and with class.
Prior to the forties it was considered improper to wade out into the lake, clothed or otherwise. The practice referred to as “wetting Willy” (William being a common name), being heavily frowned upon.
If you happened to be an insomniac somewhere in the neighbourhood of 26 years ago or, like me, just happened to be awake for whatever nefarious purposes, you may have flipped over to local channel Global TV and been treated to their late night (early morning?) test pattern fill-in, a gentle program named “Night Walk”.
As the name implies, the show is nothing more than one long, continuous, first-person steadicam shot of downtown Toronto streets set to dreamy jazz. I’m not sure if the purpose of the show was ever made clear — Was it simply filler for that lonely 4 a.m. time slot? Was it a form of video sleep aid? Was it interwoven with subliminal suggestions intended to keep you enthralled? (I could never peel my eyes away!)
Apparently only one episode of “Night Walk” was ever shot, but follow-up programs such as “Night Ride” continued the tradition in the same vain.
Unfortunately, Global stopped broadcasting these programs some time ago, but I’m of the opinion that it’s about time they were brought back. Perhaps on this very blog. ;)
(How many now-absent Toronto landmarks can you spot?)
…continued from previous part.
I hope I haven’t misled you, dear reader. As the name implies, Rosedale isn’t all weird and unusual structures. The common Meadow Rose is rumoured to still spring up there, if that’s any indication of the place’s frilly beginnings. Probably still some growing around some of the older buildings. A testament to the fact that some of those buildings have been around since Rosedale got the name.
Back in the day, the community was thought to be waaaay out in the sticks. Maids wouldn’t travel out there so people didn’t want to buy houses for fear of having to “rough” it. No shit. And there were some interesting goings-on too, like the disappearance of Ambrose Small in 1919, just after he’d sold all his theatre properties for $1.7 mill. Lots of suspicion on the wife, one of Small’s employees makes off with $100,000; sounds like good Sunday afternoon reading. Doesn’t Rosedale seem like a good setting for it?
Also there’s the story of Bill Bull, a prolifically ironic writer on church history, who in ‘31 had Al Capone trying to kill him. Hey, no one ever said that all the neighbourhood money was legit, did they? It certainly would explain why all the buildings have such imposing facades too. Plenty of spots for snipers to sit in wait for assassins. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that moats had once existed around some of these homes.
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