by Dr. Stephen A Speisman Lewis Samuel, merchant and philanthropist, was born in 1827 at Kingston upon Hull, England. He married Kate Seckelman in 1850 and they had eight children including Sigmund, a prominent philanthropist and patron of the arts in Toronto. He died on May 10 May 1887 at Victoria, B.C. and was buried…
Tag: 19th-century
Gas lights and radiant stars in Toronto’s old Grand Opera House
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•THIS story, highlighting Toronto’s fabled old Grand Opera House on Adelaide Street, has been reprinted from the Toronto Telegram of 1924. * * * Glamor and Magic of the Great Old Days in Toronto, when Footlights Flickered While Real Brilliance Held the Stage A THEATRICAL SERIES Reminiscences of Thos. H. Scott, Sr., Who Was for…
Silas Hardoon, richest man in Asia
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•Becoming Hapsburg: The Jews of Austrian Bukovina
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•Becoming Hapsburg: The Jews of Austrian Bukovina, 1774-1918, by David Rechter. Hardcover, 214 pages. Published by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Portland, Oregon, 2013. www.littman.co.uk Author David Rechter, a research fellow in Modern Jewish History at Oxford, has made a full-length and comprehensively researched study of the Jews of Austrian Bukovina, beginning with the…
The Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia
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•Book Review: The Jewish Oil Magnates of Galicia (McGill-Queen’s) This 522-page hardcover volume combines two books in one. First, there is Valerie Schatzker’s non-fiction scholarly history from 1853 to 1945 of the almost-forgotten East Galician Jews who became early “wildcatters” and oil barons in one of the world’s first petroleum industries, concentrated in the region…
A Toronto baseball team from 1880
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•From the Toronto Evening Telegram, April 1919 Thirty-nine years ago up on the the old grounds in Queen’s Park, near where now stand the Parliament Buildings, the Clipper Baseball Club performed. That was in 1880, a long time ago, it is true, but not too long for even some of the present day “regulars” to…
“HE WAS THE CZAR’S GUEST”
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•Herman Kempinski was evidently a first cousin once removed to my great-great-grandfather, Rafael Glicenstein, and both came from the town of Konin, Poland. Herman, born about 1854, was one of the many thousands of Russian-Polish Jews to emigrate to the United States in the late 1800s: he left Konin at age 17 in 1872. He…
Ups & downs of a department store elevator (1900)
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•From the Toronto Star, 1900 Character Sketches Among the Throngs Who Travel Up and Down in the Big Departmental Stores of Toronto David Harum, who said, when striving with his rich friend, that many a wealthy man would duck his head instinctively at the cry, “beware bridge,” knew what he was talking about, for nearly…
First Home of Heintzman Piano Factory
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•From Toronto Evening Telegram, 1928 When King Street, from Yonge Street to the Market, was Toronto’s busiest shopping district, Heintzman’s piano factory was at number 117, just east of Church Street, opposite St. James Cathedral. This is a picture of the factory taken about 1880. “Ye Olde Firme” occupied these premises until removal to the…
Toronto’s ‘400’ Sometimes Visit Pawnbrokers (1914)
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•From the Toronto Star Weekly, June 13, 1914 “It is a great mistake,” said a local pawnbroker, “to imagine that the pawnbroker deals only with the poverty-stricken classes. The pawnbroker in a big way of business could reveal, if he so chose, some very surprising secrets of the business he transacts with customers whom the…