History
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A brief history of the pigeons of Toronto
Pigeons have been living with people for literally as long as anyone can remember. They were one of the first animals we ever domesticated — sometime back...
By Adam Bunch -
Toronto’s first truly terrible leader — the slave-owning gambling addict Peter Russell
In 1796, John Graves Simcoe got sick. Just three years earlier, he had founded Toronto as the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. But now, he was...
By Adam Bunch -
Torontonians have been fighting over road tolls for nearly 200 years
Toronto was just a tiny little frontier town when its first road tolls were introduced. That was back in 1820; York wasn’t even 30 years old yet. There...
By Adam Bunch -
LORINC: Whatever became of Toronto’s first priority neighbourhood?
Almost a century before the United Way’s Poverty by Postal Code report (2004) begat the City’s “priority neighbourhood” strategy (2006), Toronto officials...
By John Lorinc -
How Napoleon is indirectly responsible for one of Toronto’s most beautiful walking trails
Nobody could beat him. Ever since the beginning of the French Revolution, France had been fighting wars with pretty much every single other big country in...
By Adam Bunch -
Spring comes to Toronto in 1837 — a first-hand account of the city’s transformation
One of my favourite primary sources for old Toronto history is Anna Jameson’s diary, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. She was a British...
By Adam Bunch -
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...
By Adam Bunch -
Good reads: March Issue of Fort York’s Fife & Drum available for free
The March issue of the Friends of Fort York’s quarterly newsletter, Fife and Drum, has just been released. The contents include: Student Essay on...
By Shawn Micallef -
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...
By Adam Bunch -
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...
By Adam Bunch -
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...
By Adam Bunch -
Richard Serra’s King City Shift revisited — sunrise to sunset
This past fall I revisited the Richard Serra Shift sculpture, found up in King City, and wrote about it in my Toronto Star column. The Ontario Heritage...
By Shawn Micallef