I love before and after photos. It shows how much things change and how much they stay the same. The above images are looking west on Queen St. West from the top of the Gladstone Hotel at Dufferin. The top image is from 1898 and the bottom one was taken in 2005. Click on either photo to see a larger version.
Toronto is lucky to have a great collection of images in the Toronto Archives, and we’re just as lucky to have a blog like Toronto Before dedicated to showing us how we’ve grown as a city. This is a great little blog with some nice tidbits of local history.
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My grandfather was a collector of rare books about Toronto. My dad has a lot of the tomes now, many of which are from the mid-to-late nineteenth century. I should try to put together a list of the titles and dates.
Although it is partly hidden in the 1898 photo, you can see the pedestrian stairway up to Parkdale Station’s platform from the south sidewalk under the bridge.
This is another example of the type of stair you featured in the West Toronto Station photos a while ago.
As you can see in the modern photo, the stairway is still there, but boarded up.
Steve
There’s lots of other interesting photos of the underpass construction in the archives as well. May be the same series, I’m not sure.
Not sure if it was in this archive series or elsewhere, but there are some similar construction pictures somewhere with the somewhat deceptive subject of “Queen Street Subway”. Steve Munro can attest to the fact that most Torontonians these days would probably think of something else other than the underpass at Dufferin…
The King Street Subway Overpass recently had a plaque installed, as part of the Liberty Village shopping centre entrance. It looks very nice and features one of those pretty painted benches.
It makes me wonder if we will ever get something more readable than that white painted block that says “QUEEN STREET SUBWAY 1898”.