History Feature

I GREW UP IN THE 1990s, in a small country on the Adriatic coast. At that time, freshly out of communism, Albania had a population of just over three million and was lauded as the poorest country in Europe. A lot of things had happened under the communist regime (which are – to say the…

I’M NOT ENTIRELY CERTAIN if Charles Dickens ever rode the London Underground . . . but, in theory, he could have – and that’s good enough for me. This thought first occurred to me back in early August. I was in London, and I’d just left the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street. The…

THERE IS A HOUSING SHORTAGE. We are encouraged to consume Canadian produce. And the federal government is contemplating modular housing. The year is 1941. Since Canada entered the war two years prior, a lot of changes have taken place at home. Factories producing war equipment have popped up in city suburbs across the country. Thousands…

“NONE OF MY RACE HAVE, PERHAPS, seen the different phases of one man’s history as I have.”[i] Thus wrote George Copway, near the beginning of his 1847 memoir. Both the book and its author were breaking new ground in the mid-nineteenth century. Copway’s autobiography was the first book published by a Canadian First Nations.[ii] It…

THE CLUES ARE SCATTERED throughout Parkdale. On the west wall of the Rhino, a deteriorating mural depicts the first Miss Toronto contest. On the northwest corner of Queen and Macdonell a second mural showcases a beach vista. The large archway of the Bathing Pavilion stands regally over the Sunnyside sands. They are all clues to…

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT a nondescript high-rise on Bloor Street between Huron and St. George was once the city’s most contentious piece of real estate. But, fifty years ago, it was exactly that. This building, not even really a high-rise anymore when measured against Toronto’s ever-rising altitude, once towered over its surroundings with anarchic…

IF YOU WERE ASKED TO NAME the most famous Canadian authors, who would come to mind? Margaret Atwood, surely. Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen. Mordecai Richler, L. M. Montgomery, Robertson Davies, . . . and probably a handful of others if you were given a moment to think about it. And yet, even if you were…

When he visited Toronto to shoot an episode of The Layover, the late Anthony Bourdain, with characteristic bluntness, kicked things off by bemoaning the state of the downtown core. “It’s not a good-looking city,” he said. He went on to amplify his reservations, declaring (I’m paraphrasing here) that the city had fallen victim to the…