A Bit More Detail

• The Toronto Star pays respect to the late June Rowlands, Toronto's first female mayor.


• Google's Sidewalk Labs project, intended to remake Quayside, is already resulting in jobs--in New York City? MacLean's reports.


• The flooding at the L Tower downtown sounds terrible. The Toronto Star reports.


• Race, unsurprisingly, remains a significant divide in Toronto schools. NOW Toronto reports.


• The TTC is increasing bus service on the Dundas and Carlton routes to compensate for Bombardier's failure to deliver. CBC reports.

There’s a quintessential jumble of Toronto shacks on the southeast corner of Church and Dundas Sts. Cheaply built, like so much of Toronto, the jumble is ugly to unsympathetic eyes. Though awaiting a hearing at the Ontario Municipal Board over design details, the buildings will eventually make way for a proposed residential development. Yet, this quotidian corner has housed more Toronto life than seems possible in one place.

A visit to the deep wells of civic memory stored in the old city directories on the second floor of the Toronto Reference Library, randomly selecting volumes about a decade apart from 1915 until 1993, revealed that life. Here’s just a sliver of it.

Part of the redevelopment parcel includes an unpaved parking lot along Church, and buildings on both the north and south side of it bear ghost traces of the structures that once abutted them, addresses numbered 215 to 221. In 1915, Ebenezer Chesney’s cigar shop, the Porter Plumbing Supply Company and various apartment dwellers were here.

In 1925, Porter was still a going concern but the cigar shop was vacant, Hawley Auto Supply had moved in next door, and Samuel Barrett had started selling date products. By 1936, Seto Kwan had set up his tailoring business in Ebenezer’s old place, and Tire Chains & Accessories had opened next door along with the Collins Printing Company next to it. Porter was still in the plumbing business.

In 1947, Kwan had become a “Designing Tailor” and Church Cleaners and the Lewis Fur Company had moved into the block, while Porter Plumbing had evolved into Good Specialties Plumbing and Heating. By 1958, Master Brothers Business Machines was in operation here alongside M & R Enterprises Clothing and Novelties. In 1968, the Club Coffee Company was operating where Kwan once sewed, and next to it Athens Photo Studio had opened and Art Electric Construction had slipped in here too.

At Dundas West and Shaw, near Trinity-Bellwoods Park, there’s a conspicuous piece of Canada’s Cold War history.

On top of a 15-metre pole sits a massive electric air raid siren. Disconnected long ago, it’s one of just a handful of relics left over from when Toronto and the rest of Canada was seriously concerned about being caught up in a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR.

The idea of a peacetime, nationwide air raid alert system started in earnest in 1951, when the federal government under prime minister Louis St. Laurent commissioned 200 of electric, two-tone sirens from Scarborough company Canadian Line Materials, Ltd..

Provincial secretary Arthur Welsh said a co-ordinated system of sirens within the larger Greater Toronto Area would help in the event of a nuclear attack. “A bomb is not a respecter of municipal boundaries,” he said in 1951, adding that there was no plan to evacuate towns and cities in advance of an attack.

“Many people think some welfare organization would evacuate them, where they would be fed and clothed. That is not the case. In the past two wars, when soldiers in the trenches were attacked by mortar, they stayed and fought it out. That’s what we will do.”