What do genealogists do when the weather is too nice to research indoors? They go outside. It’s summertime, so take advantage by learning about your local history on a walking tour or just walk about.
Heritage Toronto has launched a new walking tour called Creating Toronto: the Story of the City in Ten Stops. According to an article in Toronto’s Beach Mirror, “Every Thursday from July 10 to Aug. 28, participants will walk through the downtown core, listening to stories about 11,000-year-old footprints under Toronto bay, three Toronto city halls and an old rivalry between powerful businessmen.” The tours run every Thursday, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
Gooderham (Flatiron) Building, Toronto, 1895.
The 10 stories and stops that are part of the walking tour are:
1. Toronto’s First Master Plan (Jarvis and Front streets) — The tour begins in Old Town, near St. Lawrence Market, where surveyor Alexander Aiken first laid down a 10-block street grid system in 1793. St. Lawrence Hall was the site of the city’s first city hall built in 1845.
2. The Gooderham Flatiron Building (Church and Front streets) — This iconic building was built in 1891 for one of Toronto’s great industrialists, George Gooderham. His meat-packing business gave Toronto the old nickname, “Hog Town.”
3. Yonge Street (Yonge and Front streets) — The street itself was a major innovation that created a clear path through the forests and swamps of Upper Canada in the 1790s. In 1908, workmen were digging a waterworks tunnel under Toronto bay when they found clear footprints that were between 11,000 and 10,500 years old.
4. Union Station (Bay and Front streets) — Construction of railways in the 1850s transformed Toronto into a dominant, metropolitan city. It drew the wealth and resources of the province to the harbour facilities of the city. Union station is the largest and most opulant railway station in Canada.
5. Canada’s Financial Capital (Bay and King streets) — During the late 1880s, six- and seven-storey office buildings for major banks and other businesses were built along King Street, between Bay and Yonge Street. This first cluster of skyscrapers was the beginning of Canada’s financial capital.
6. Education (Bay and Temperance streets) — Toronto is home to four universities and five colleges, including Canada’s largest university, the University of Toronto. The city has a long history of innovation in education. One little-known innovation came in 1870, when Canada’s first veterinary school was built on Temperance Street.
7. Innovations in Medicine (Queen and Victoria streets) — Toronto’s oldest hospital, Toronto General Hospital, dates back to 1817. It is on this site that Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered insulin and performed the first insulin treatment in January of 1922. St. Michael’s Hospital has also had its milestone achievements being the first Canadian hospital to use ultrasound in 1983 to treat the human embryo.
8. Toronto’s Retail Rivalry (Queen and Yonge streets) — In the 1860s and 1870s, an intense competition between Roger Simpson and Timothy Eaton, two entrepreneurial retailers, fundamentally shaped Toronto’s commercial scene. The result of their rivalry built two of North America’s earliest downtown shopping centres; the Hudson’s Bay Centre and the Toronto Eaton Centre.
9. The Entertainment District (north of Queen and Yonge streets) — In front of the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre Centre, a strip of taverns, nightclubs and theatres that housed Toronto’s thriving music scene in the 1960s. In the 1980s, they once again became a centre for live theatre.
10. Old and New City Hall (Queen and Bay streets) — Ending the tour at the second and third city halls, the tour looks back on the city’s vast history and progress. A summer-long controversy in 1966 surrounded an extravagant piece of modern art that city council commissioned for the newest city hall.
To learn about this tour and others Heritage Toronto offers this summer and early fall, visit their website.
