Evocative Images of Lost Toronto

[thecharioteer]

Further to your Rossin House panorama, deepend, here's one from September 22, 1915 (95 years ago, next Wednesday, weather seems like today's) from the top of the Royal Bank Building at King and Yonge:

 

[thecharioteer]

And in a Toronto version of Monet's "Haystacks", here are three views over the course of a year in 1925, from the same position, looking east from Union Station (note the "Bay Street Temporary Bridge" emerging):

Seen here 4 years later:

And here:

On the bridge:

 

[Urban Shocker]

[/QUOTE]

Lombard Street ( for so I think it is, bottom right ) strikes me as a real loss as an extinct ensemble of High Victorian commercial buildings. Though grander edifices bit the dust here and there, and folks hereabouts seem to particularly mourn losing the rest of the block that the Gooderham Flatiron was a part of, little Lombard had a charming collective unity to it, from what few images I've seen. I almost swoon as I swoon for the lost Georgian city that went before when I think of little Lombard.

 

[J T CUNNINGHAM]

Every tyme I pass the old Coroner's Office, I wonder how many are aware of what had transpired in the N/W room.

As an aside, Chris, the clerk, was found murdered in a hotel room east of this city in the late 60's; a good man, gone too early.

R I P.

Regards,
J T

 

[adma]

One thing that vanished in the 4 years btw/temp Bay bridge pictures: the old Customs Warehouse to the E (is that the end process of site clearance in the latter picture?)

 

[LowPolygon]

Lombard Street ( for so I think it is, bottom right ) strikes me as a real loss as an extinct ensemble of High Victorian commercial buildings. Though grander edifices bit the dust here and there, and folks hereabouts seem to particularly mourn losing the rest of the block that the Gooderham Flatiron was a part of, little Lombard had a charming collective unity to it, from what few images I've seen. I almost swoon as I swoon for the lost Georgian city that went before when I think of little Lombard.

i think that's right--another street with a similar character would seem to be Colborne, where there is a bit more remaining than on Lombard...

i've always loved the block between Church and Leader Lane...shame that the other side of the street was torn down for that parking lot--and double shame that the parking lot has stayed a parking lot after all this time...

 

[LowPolygon]

Further to your Rossin House panorama, deepend, here's one from September 22, 1915 (95 years ago, next Wednesday, weather seems like today's) from the top of the Royal Bank Building at King and Yonge:

this one is quite amazing--very interesting to see just how dense the area around St Lawrence market was, especially with the towering Gooderham block on the south side of a very narrow Wellington St E....

 

[DSC]

That's a great photo and you can see the South and (old) North St Lawrence Market buildings with the covered arch between them and the full extent of the Taylor's Safeworks building - the front of which still exists as 145 Front Street East (corner of Frederick).

 

[LowPolygon]

.

 

[Blovertis]

Very timely. We're all going to be checking into the Ford Hotel soon.

 

[adma]

Surprisingly (or not) elegant Deco lobby--another case where had it survived another 20 or more years, it could have been restored, or at least campaigned for...

 

[thecharioteer]

I almost swoon as I swoon for the lost Georgian city that went before when I think of little Lombard.

So little is left of Georgian Toronto, it's a pleasure to stand in front of the relocated Commercial Bank facade by William Thomas (1845) within the BCE Galleria and admire its proportions, details and materials, a hint of the old city:

Photo by Phillipp Klinger on Flickr

Before William Thomas emigrated to Canada, he designed Landsdowne Crescent in Leamington Spa, England, in the 1830's, a typology that unfortunately never took root in Torotno:

 

[Urban Shocker]

Wasn't there another row of Thomas buildings that didn't survive the demolitions preceding BCE Place? I seem to recall some sort of outcry in the late '80s, and a last ditch attempt to save them. Maybe adma knows.

I'm not sure it is automatically "unfortunate" that we didn't get residential rows like Landsdown Crescent, handsome though they are. After all, we've got a legacy of nice little semi- and detached dwellings almost in the heart of our downtown that is distinctive for a major city. Neither London, New York, Paris, Rome, nor Berlin etc. have anything like them - land prices were already high enough in the Georgian and Victorian age that larger row house developments were called for. Here, ours were often the first structures built on empty land subdivided from the Park Lots granted by Simcoe, at a time when this was a comparatively minor urban outpost, and rather than form a continuous wall they offer views between of sky and horizon that's still very "small town Ontario" in feel. A treasure for sensitive developers to work with/around.

 

[thecharioteer]

True, but we also never achieved the urban scale in our residential housing commensurate with a major metropolis. As charming (and livable) as our Victorian side streets may be, they are the remnants of suburban subdivisions, not the manifestation of the kind of vision that John Nash brought to London and Bath or (dare I say) Hausmann brought to Paris. Even earlier, the idea of a "town" house gave us the delights of Place Vendome or Pariser Platz. Though originating in an aristocratic tradition (Nash's Cumberland Terrace gave the impression of multiple townhouses forming a palace), this form of housing proved incredibly flexible in adjusting to changing demographics and social standing, in the same way I suppose as our typical Toronto Victorians, but with more flexibility and higher densities. Our residential scale has predominantly consisted of 2 to 3 storey houses and postwar hirises. We have nothing similar to the urban vision of the London terrace, the NY brownstone or (since you mentioned Rome) the Roman palazzi and our city will always be more a village than a capital because of it.

 

[Urban Shocker]

The presence of a ravine system - difficult to build over, impossible to ignore - also reinforces a village-like connection to the natural world that's been part of how Toronto presents itself to the world. Those Victorian/Edwardian photographic picture books, proudly displaying our Richardsonian Romanesque cultural, residential and economic buildings to boost the prestige of the city, also include images of the Humber and the Don as a counterpoint to the urban. I suppose the Family Compact, with their generous land grants north of Queen, were the closest we ever got in the waning days of Georgian elegance to an aristocratic stand-in that might have built the sort of grand boulevards of row houses seen in major cities. But they weren't a self sustaining elite, the city wasn't major, and as the decades passed they gradually parceled up and sold off their lands as they needed a bit of cash.