Photographs, blueprints and press clippings documenting the career of the late Toronto architect Harold Kaplan and his firm Kaplan and Sprachman are now in the Ontario Jewish Archives. Records of Kaplan and Sprachman’s work are also at the City of Toronto Archives, the Archives of Ontario and the National Archives of Canada. Kaplan’s two daughters,…
Many graduates of Harbord Collegiate Institute, once the centre of activities for Jewish teens in Toronto, have wonderful memories of their time at the school. The graduating class of 1953 recently held its 50th reunion dinner at Meron Banquet Hall, where 88 graduates, spouses and partners gathered, from places as far away as Kingston and…
THE following article, which appeared in the Toronto Star of January 8, 1912, summed up the various violent calamities that took the souls of 102 Torontonians during the past year of 1911. The article is reprinted in its entirety: 102 VIOLENT DEATHS IN TORONTO IN 1911 Suicides and Drownings Numbered 26 and 25 Respectively —…
This aerial photograph of Toronto was taken in 1910, when the science of flight was in its infancy. Note that the pilot is visible in the early biplane, which took off from the Aviation Park in Weston. The photo was obviously taken from a second plane, flying nearby. This poor reproduction doesn’t reveal much of…
Although most of the old Mount Sinai Hospital on Yorkville Avenue is gone, a prominent architectural firm has agreed to restore the only wing of the hospital still standing. The wing, built as an addition around 1928, was used as a nursing home after Mount Sinai moved to its present location on University Avenue in…
There were bull-frogs in the creek on the other side of Wilson Heights, Jackie told us: monstrous bull-frogs, the biggest he had ever seen. He had brought one home like a warrior returning from battle with a spoil. But he said the granddaddy of them all, the Moby Dick of bull-frogs, was still in the…
THIS article, by an unknown writer, is reprinted from the Toronto Telegram of July 7, 1928, along with the photo, restored from the microfilm. The photo at bottom, with an earlier view of “Old Bay Street,” has been added. DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN . . . the Temple Building used to loom up on the west…
THE Toronto Telegram reported on Friday June 1, 1928 the construction of these six buildings that would considerably alter Toronto’s skyline. Here is the caption information to this large illustration: * * * Great New Structures Pierce Toronto’s Sky Line Cost Millions to Construct Never in the history of Toronto has there been any year…
No, it isn’t an advertisement for Marlboro Cigarettes. Those dozen horses, seen in silhouette on an old railroad bridge that spans Yonge Street below Davisville, are the work of 34-year-old site-specific sculptor Robert Sprachman of Toronto. Entitled The Iron Horse, the sculpture consists of 12 life-sized silhouettes of horses arranged on the defunct Beltline Railroad…
A rare panoramic photograph of Toronto harbour, taken in 1910 from the top of one of the city’s first skyscrapers, has been transferred into video format and posted with some analysis and description onto YouTube. Toronto author and publisher Bill Gladstone, who maintains the website www.billgladstone.ca, came across the rare photograph in the US Library…
