History
-
How Toronto invented the PC, then forgot about it
The Royal York Hotel, September 25, 1973. Computer experts Mers Kutt, Gordon Ramer, Ted Edwards, and Reg Rea are standing around a small machine about the...
By Chris Bateman -
An illustrated history of baseball in Toronto
No one knows exactly when baseball was born. There’s a story about an American war hero, Abner Doubleday, inventing the game in the 1830s, but...
By Adam Bunch -
Stadia mania: Toronto’s six-decade quest for a civic stadium
The Stadocentre, Metrodome, Astrodome, and Tower Dome: Toronto historically has had no lack of imagination when it comes to dreaming up gleaming...
By Chris Bateman -
The bloody Burlington Races and the war for Lake Ontario
They appeared out of the darkness, looming above the waves. Ten warships sailing across Lake Ontario, far out in the water south of Toronto. They were...
By Adam Bunch -
A tour of Toronto’s skyline in the summer of 1930
The summer of 1930. It was the beginning of a difficult decade for Toronto, along with much of the rest of the world. The Great Depression had just begun...
By Adam Bunch -
“Fun and frolic” at a Toronto double hanging
“The morning broke dark and gloomy, and with the first faint streaks of early dawn the workmen were industriously employed in making ready the...
By Chris Bateman -
Marcel Duchamp and John Cage play musical chess in Toronto
On a cold winter’s night in 1968, a phone rang in an apartment on Spadina Road. The man who answered it was Lowell Cross, an American student at the...
By Adam Bunch -
The transformer next door
The lights are on but there’s no-one home at 640 Millwood Rd. The two-storey suburban home near Bayview and Eglinton doesn’t exactly stand out among its...
By Chris Bateman -
A Toronto statue from the graveyard of the British Empire
Our story ends in Toronto, but it starts nearly 12,000 kilometers away: in India, at a place called Coronation Park. It’s a grand, wide-open space...
By Adam Bunch -
Toronto is a geologic force: the Lost Rivers guide to the PATH system
Last month, I joined a Lost Rivers walk within the PATH system. Typically engaged with tracing the routes of buried creeks within Toronto’s topography...
By Daniel Rotsztain -
Welcome to your private nuclear fallout shelter
In 1959, the builders of Regency Acres, a 700-home subdivision in Aurora, Ontario, offered something no other homebuilder in the country could: a private...
By Chris Bateman -
Toronto’s rebel-fighting Freemason, William Jarvis
There’s a spot right in the middle of London, England, with a long-forgotten connection to the history of Toronto. It’s on the Strand, on the edge of the...
By Adam Bunch