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Overview
Winner of Heritage Toronto's Award of Excellence, Book category in 2005.
The pace of life in Toronto picked up after 1919 and never slowed down again. During the 1920s and '30s, Toronto went through massive changes that affected the physical and the social life of the city. In these two decades between World War I and World War II, Toronto was finding its place in the swiftly changing world of the twentieth century.
Toronto Between the Wars features 180 archival photographs of Toronto during this fascinating period. Each picture is accompanied by a captivating story about some aspect of life in the city.
During this period, cars became commonplace, the downtown skyline changed as new skyscrapers were built, and women's roles changed dramatically. Then the Depression sent the economy into a tailspin, unemployment became rampant and poverty took its toll. People struggled to afford the basic necessities and lived under the shadow of a growing threat of another war in Europe.
The text reveals little known facts, such as how a leading retail family kept their interest in a major downtown property secret for twenty years. Photographs capture unguarded moments with startling immediacy: a tired but happy group of disheveled merrymakers waiting for a bus; two women in flouncy bridesmaid dresses; an old man cleaning the statue of Queen Victoria; and children buying fish from an itinerant fishmonger.
With intriguing pictures and absorbing text, Toronto Between the Wars offers a rare opportunity to observe life in Toronto during a critical time in its history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770880689 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Firefly Books, Limited |
| Publication date: | 08/17/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 35 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Charis Cotter is a writer and editor specializing in Toronto history.
Read an Excerpt
The Presence of the Past
When I was seven, my parents and I would visit my great-aunt Eleonore, who lived in a dark and beautiful house in Lawrence Park. I enjoyed these visits immensely, not particularly because of my aunt (a small, upright and large-bosomed woman who was distantly friendly though somewhat suspicious of children), but because of the house itself. It had a name -- a romantic, full-blown name worthy of a house in a novel by L.M. Montgomery: Wyndekrest. It was a strange name for a house squeezed in beside a bridge on Mount Pleasant Road, about six feet below street level, with the front door looking directly into the wheels of the passing cars.
When the house was built in the 1920s, Mount Pleasant was much narrower and Wyndekrest stood at the crest of a small hill, with a lovely garden around it. By the 1960s only a narrow path remained between the house and the bridge. It led down to a wild ravine, where we would go to escape the grownups.
The house had its own attractions. Overshadowed by the encroaching road, it was extremely dark. The first thing you saw as you entered the sitting room was the balding head of a real brown bear who had been made into a rug and set under a grand piano. We ventured upstairs only for the bathroom, where a silver scalloped soap dish held tiny scalloped soaps. In the dark hail, closed doors hid the bedrooms.
A desk in the sitting room had bars across the side shelves, and my small hand could reach just past them to find the Niagara Falls purse made from the two crescents of a shell hinged together. A fading painting of Niagara Falls was glued to the outside of the purse; inside were red-paper compartments and, always, one silver dime.
The kitchen had a rather neglected air: long, narrow and inconvenient, and full of shadows. On each visit we had to perform the ritual of asking Aunt Eleonore politely if we could play with the things in the hoosier (an ingenious piece of kitchen furniture that combined cupboards and counter space). She would nod her head graciously, always maintaining the upright carriage that had seen her through many recitals at the Metropolitan United Church downtown, where she had been a well-known mezzo-soprano. Then we would scatter to the kitchen, settle ourselves on the floor, and lift the latch of the hoosier's lower cupboard.
Inside were all manner of exotic kitchen utensils: fluted muffin tins, cake pans, bread pans, hand mixers and many odd-shaped metal things with funny spikes and corkscrews. What were they for? We improvised, using them to cook fancy dishes, build pyramids and towers, or wage quiet wars that wouldn't attract the grownups' attention.
Aunt Eleonore's house was the first hint I had of what life in Toronto had been like in the twenties and thirties. My great-uncle, a lumber merchant, bought the newly built house in 1923, and most of the dark, dignified furniture came from Simpsons, which had the reputation of being more upscale than Eaton's. My father lived there with his aunt and uncle during school holidays in the 1930s. For me it was a ghostly house, full of memories and tantalizing glimpses of a life that was past. The piano and the bear underneath it were quiet, the kitchen utensils forgotten in a cupboard, the shadowy rooms silent and unused. I loved the idea that the house had once been something more, before the road had been widened, and that I was seeing only fragments of its true nature.
The presence of the past is all around us in Toronto, just as it was for me in the house in Lawrence Park. Within the modern city lie all the decades that came before. In houses, buildings, neighbourhoods, street names and people's memories, the Toronto of the 1920s and 1930s can still be found. Landmarks that were built then are still here: Union Station, the Eaton's College Street Building, the Bank of Commerce Building on King Street, Maple Leaf Gardens and the Royal York Hotel. Most of the street grid of the downtown core is unchanged. Many Toronto neighbourhoods were well established then, filled with houses that remain today. Many of the churches are still there, although some are now used as theatres, daycares or community centres.
Despite all the development of the downtown area in the last half of the 20th century, there are still traces of the Toronto that existed between the world wars, if you know where to look. But what about the people? Who were they? How were they different from us? How did they dress? How did they get to work? What did they do for fun?
The City of Toronto Archives, particularly the James Collection, provided me with a treasure trove of pictures of people and places from the twenties and thirties. The choices of photos and subjects in this book are personal and, in some ways, arbitrary. I did not try to cover every aspect of life in Toronto during the years between 1919 and 1939. I let the pictures lead me to the stories.
As at Wyndekrest, with its shadowed corners and truncated garden, it is possible to glimpse Toronto's past in what has survived. I hope this book will provide an opportunity to look at the present-day city and see how it is different, but still somehow the same -- the vibrant city where people lived out their lives during two exciting decades when the world was poised between one devastating conflict and another.
The period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second World War in Toronto is especially interesting because of the enormous changes that took place, both in the landscape of the city and in the lives of its inhabitants. These two decades were pivotal in Toronto's development from a Victorian city to the cosmopolitan metropolis it is today.
In the twenties Toronto and Canada were both finding their place in the unpredictable 20th century. Nothing stayed the same. Hemlines, music, gender roles and ways of getting around town were all transformed. The very foundation of capitalism, the stock market, displayed its unreliability in 1929 by crumbling, sending the economy into a tailspin and leaving thousands without work. Thirteen thousand Toronto men died in Europe between 1914 and 1918, and many who came back were not sure about what they had fought for. Canada had become a respected and independent nation through its contribution of men and arms to the war, and although patriotism and loyalty to Britain still ran high, Canadians' sense of themselves as Canadians (rather than as Britons living in the colonies) had grown stronger. Other values were shaken up. Women who had worked in factories while the men were away now had the vote and were not about to disappear back into the kitchen and long skirts. The young ones cut their hair, rolled down their stockings, started smoking and began going about in cars with men. Ironically, although people were loosening up their morals on every other front, the sale of liquor was prohibited until 1927. Toronto, that maiden aunt of cities, stepped cautiously into the modern world.
The twenties were in many ways the first modern decade of the 20th century, with the introduction of talking movies, the widespread use of gas and electricity and the change in attitudes to women. The pace of city life picked up after the war and never slowed down again. The automobile replaced the horse. Transportation systems amalgamated, expanded and still struggled to keep up. Airports and expressways were built. Radio, movies and mass advertising began to have a huge impact on everyday life, with the U.S. influence growing stronger.
Living conditions for the majority of Torontonians improved as slums were cleared and indoor toilets, central heating, electricity and telephones became the norm. Health care progressed, and there was a corresponding decrease in the death rate from the diseases that had ravaged the population in the previous century: tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, scarlet fever and whooping cough. Baby clinics and better child care lowered infant mortality rates.
This was a period of gro
Table of Contents
The Presence of the Past
Life in the City, 1919-1939
References
Photo Credits
Index
Interviews
Writing this book was a labour of love for me. I've always been drawn to the older buildings and neighbourhoods in Toronto, where I can catch a glimpse of the city of the past. The 1920s and 1930s in Toronto were particularly interesting, sandwiched between the two World Wars. Massive changes took place at this time, leaving their mark on the city and the people who lived here. A new and improved city-wide transportation system came into being; elegant Art Deco skyscrapers sprang up downtown; Prohibition, jazz and shifting social mores flavoured the twenties and the Depression and social unrest dominated the thirties. Hemlines went up, movies were more popular than ever, radio arrived and cars and trucks replaced horses.
The people who lived in Toronto in the 1920s and 1930s come alive in the evocative pictures in this book. The rich appear on horseback at a fox hunt and at the races at Woodbine Stadium in their furs and top hats. The poor sleep in a bandshell at Queen's Park and line up for food at a soup kitchen. Workers march in the May Day parade and two little girls take their dolls for a walk along Sunnyside boardwalk.
I discovered fascinating details about Toronto at this time, including what made a baby a winner at the annual CNE baby contest (health and cleanliness), what swimsuits were made of (wool) and what a jitney was (a truck used as a taxi during a transit strike).
I hope that readers will be as captivated as I was with this period in Toronto's history.