By Adam Bunch
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Toronto’s first great baseball team — the old-timey Toronto Baseball Club of 1887
Tonight, for the first time in 20 years, the Blue Jays will start a new season as one of the favourites to win the World Series. But those glory days of...
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Toronto’s first hanging — and how it went wrong
In 1798, John Sullivan and Michael Flannery got drunk. They were drinking whisky at one of the very first taverns ever built in Toronto. The city was only...
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The story of Jackie Burroughs, a Yorkville laundromat, and two of the biggest drug-addled bands of the 1960s
Twenty years before she played Aunt Hetty on Road To Avonlea, Jackie Burroughs met Zal Yanovsky while he was living in a dryer in a laundromat at Dupont...
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Toronto’s first great Antarctic explorer
; This photo of Antarctica was taken more than 100 years ago — back in the days when most of the icy continent had yet to be seen by human eyes. It’s...
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The infamous, bloody 1817 duel at the corner of Yonge & College
In 1781, William Jarvis got shot. They say it’s probably the best thing that ever happened to him. Before that he was just an ordinary soldier...
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Elizabeth Taylor’s 1960s “love nest” at the King Edward Hotel
Cleopatra was a BIG movie. It had lavish sets. Elaborate costumes. Thousands of extras. It ran more than four hours long. At the time, it was the most...
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William Gibson and the Summer of Love — the author’s drug-fuelled days in Yorkville
It’s the summer of 1967. The Summer of Love. Hippie culture is at its height and Yorkville has become one of the biggest hubs for sex, drugs and...
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The story of Toronto’s first housecat
We don’t know much about Toronto’s first cat, but what we do know seems to suggest that he arrived on a July morning in 1793. Toronto was just...
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The 11,000 year-old footprints at the bottom of Lake Ontario
During the last ice age, a really, really, really, really big glacier covered pretty much all of Canada and the northern United States, including the...
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Toppy Topham crosses the Rhine — the story of Toronto’s life-saving WWII medic
The Second World War was nearly over. It had already been nine months since the Allies landed in Normandy. The 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion had been...
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An eyewitness account of the terrible night Hurricane Hazel hit Toronto
It was a Friday night in October of 1954. The rain had started coming down late that afternoon, but most people in Toronto weren’t worried...
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The “Ultimate Stuntman” who jumped off the CN Tower in 1980
Dar Robinson spent the 1970s earning a reputation as one of Hollywood’s greatest stuntmen. He did stunts in Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood films...