History
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Toronto Pride 1988 — new archival video of an earlier version of Pride and Toronto
Toronto editor and videographer/artist James Leahy has been mining his archive of late and just put together this fantastic 22 minute document of the 1988...
By Shawn Micallef -
How the first black hole ever discovered was discovered at the University of Toronto
This is a photo of a star called HDE226868. It’s a blue supergiant, more than 20 times as big and hundreds of thousands of times as bright as the...
By Adam Bunch -
MOD TORONTO: Modernism on the Toronto Islands
To coincide with the cover section of Spacing’s summer 2013 issue, we bring you a series of posts by local architect Robert Moffatt that examine...
By Robert Moffatt -
MOD TORONTO: A circular school — Lord Lansdowne PS
To coincide with the cover section of Spacing’s summer 2013 issue, we bring you a series of posts by local architect Robert Moffatt that examine...
By Robert Moffatt -
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