The great historical organization Old Town Toronto 1793 (which has a storefront on King St. East in the St. Lawrence Hall) are hosting a great little contest: help them figure out the why/how certain streets got their names. There are prizes to be won. The deadline is May 31st (short notice, I know!).
Help name that street in Corktown
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Get the book ‘Toronto Street Names’ by Leonard Wise. Really cool book to have.
Got mine at Indigo in the Eaton Centre in the ‘I Heart Toronto’ section.
In addition, the aforementioned book uses the same picture on its cover as the current Spacing issue (6). Nifty.
Eric Arthur’s “No Mean City” has a great appendix of Street Name origins: “We in Toronto are curiously apathetic towards our history in terms of landmarks, street names, and the like; indeed, surely no city in the world with a background of three hundred years does so little to make that background known. Our children are brought up to take pride in the British beginnings of the city, but they have a limited knowledge of the vastly more exciting periods when the Senecas had a village on the site, when black-robed priests and French noblemen dwelt at times at the mouth of the Humber and wrote glowing letters home to France of the potential of Toronto as a settlement in the empire of Louis XVI” -Arthur, 1964
All Torontonians should read No Mean City. It was recently re-issued, with forwards by Hume, Mark Kingwell and a couple others.