If you’re ever bored, or hiding from a rainstorm, go to the forth floor of the Toronto Reference Library and page through the city directories and see the names of whoever lived at whatever address you want to follow over the year — and in the older books, find out what they did for a living. This exhibition is sort of like doing that — the history of Queen Street through public announcements in the Globe and Mail.
The Toronto Architectural Conservancy and the Market Gallery present
B U I L D I N G B L O C K S
on Queen Street West
1846 – 1890
The families, designers, speculators, shop-keepers, buildings and times of Queen West.
Based on The Toronto Architectural Conservancy‘s Call for Tender project which documents every such printed instance from the Globe newspaper, start to finish (1846-1890). This database accurately charts the evolution of Toronto over those 44 formative years. Queen Street as we recognize it still, had its genesis in these Globe pages alongside many other projects, large and small, City-wide.
Opening Saturday October 7th 2006
at the Market Gallery, St. Lawrence Market, second floor.
4 comments
Given the subject matter, the exhibition also ought to serve as a nifty (and at election-time, convenient) call to arms for those folks dismayed by the recent mystery demolitions on the S side of Queen W of Spadina…
Hey – they have those books at Robarts too… called Might’s directory, I believe.
I love this stuff.
Lucky…
They used to have a similar directory here in Vancouver. Unfortunately, they stopped publishing it in 1999 or something.
*sigh*
Mike> The new directories aren’t as good as the old ones — they stopped listing people’s occupations at some point.
When they did though, only the man of the house and then single females were mentioned in any detail. Poor girls got married and stopped existing back in the day.