[URBAN NOTE] Torontoist on Toronto's 1910 aviation meet

[rfmcdonald]

At Torontoist, David Wencer wrote this weekend just past about Toronto's first aviation meet.

“In the sight of the people of Toronto the dream of one thousand years came true last night,” wrote the Toronto Telegram on July 14, 1910. “Rising from the crowd like a creature of life and being, a monoplane circled above over the heads of the crowd, then departed southward and westward, sailing away like some fabled bird born on the wings of the wind.” The event prompting such rhetoric was the successful flight over downtown Toronto executed by Jacques de Lesseps, a French aviator participating in the Toronto aviation meet. “Toronto [has] seen the first great flight,” continued the Telegram, “the beginning of many others that shall annihilate our mighty distance and make the man of our city a neighbour with his brother on the wave-washed shores of the Pacific.”

The meet took place in July 1910, seven year years after Wilbur and Orville Wright had managed their first successful (if brief) aeroplane flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In the latter years of the 1900s, daring aviation pioneers made headlines across the world, experimenting with new aircraft, and making many more flights, some more successful than others. Torontonians’ first real opportunity to see the novelty of powered flight came in 1909, when Charles F. Willard provided demonstrations at Scarboro Beach Park. By some standards, Willard’s flights had been of limited success; although he managed to get his Curtiss “Golden Flyer” into the air on three occasions, each of his flights ended with uneasy landings in Lake Ontario.

In the summer of 1910, Canada’s first aviation meet took place near Montreal, organized by the Automobile and Aero Club of Canada. Though not financially profitable, the event attracted considerable public interest, with demonstrations and competitions featuring experienced pilots, most already famous for their flying exploits in other parts of the world.

One week after the end of the Montreal meet, a second week-long event was held in Toronto, organized in part by the Ontario Motor League, featuring many of the same pilots and aeroplanes. The site chosen for the Toronto meet was owned by the Trethewey family, and was a functioning farm near Weston, just southeast of Jane and Lawrence. The Globe reported that finding a suitable Toronto venue had proven a challenge for the organizers, as the site needed to be large and open, but also conveniently located along transportation lines, so that the planes and spectators could easily access the airfield. The Globe noted that “the Trethewey farm was thought of after [the thought of using] practically all open places in the city had been abandoned for some reason or other.”