Tag: toronto

Gas lights and radiant stars in Toronto’s old Grand Opera House

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…

Memories of Good (Jewish) Eats on Eglinton & Downtown

by Ellen Weiser If you’re a baby boomer, or more accurately, a Jewish Toronto baby boomer, undoubtedly you have fond memories of a time and place that lives only in our dreams. Let me take you back to where I’m constantly accused of living … in the past. If anything, it was cheaper. For myself…

Toronto’s Jews Think Big As Their Population Grows (2000)

From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 24, 2000 (JTA) The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto is trying to keep pace with the city’s growing Jewish population through a massive building and revitalization project. The most recent is a $150-million Jewish campus in the York region, the area just north of the city that is home…

Remembering Barbara Frum, CBC broadcaster (1937-1992)

From the Canadian Jewish News, April 1992 After an eighteen-year battle with leukemia, Barbara Frum died March 26, 1992 at the age of 54. The well-known broadcaster was rushed to the hospital after an interview with Mordecai Richler on March 10, suffering a high fever. She died of complications from leukemia. Tributes to the polite…

Esther Greenberg, age 7, accidentally shot (1915)

From the Toronto Star, Jan. 15, 1915 Esther Greenberg, a seven-year-old child, was shot by a stray bullet from a rifle practice in Kent Public School on Dufferin Street in Toronto and died the next day. Fifteen targets had been placed in as many public schools around Toronto to aid local army cadets in target…

Found: Some old police criminal registers from early 1900s

Toronto’s mean streets of a century ago recalled in old police register — Documents found in former police headquarters on College Street Genealogist Bill Gladstone looked through a number of thick handwritten criminal registers that turned up some years ago in a forgotten alcove of the Stewart Building, the former police headquarters on College Street, and…

Detective Benny Cooperman turns 30 (2010)

Some thirty years ago, writer Howard Engel gave the world Benny Cooperman, a new made-in-Canada literary detective whom the Globe and Mail and others would acknowledge as “the country’s first truly Canadian detective hero.” According to Cynthia Good, former senior editor at Penguin, Engel’s pioneering Canadian-Jewish detective opened the floodgates for scores of other Canadian…

All in a day’s work: Census takers in ‘the Ward’

“The Lot of the Census Taker in the Ward is Anything But an Easy One” is the title of the first story; its subtitle is “The Foreigners There Have No Idea of the Months of the Year, and It Takes a Long Time to Convince Them That the Information Is Not for the Tax Collector.”…

A Toronto baseball team from 1880

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…

Ing Quong, Chinese magnate, in his last procession (1912)

As “John Bull” he celebrated the inauguration of the Chinese Republic Guards Band Played Him Home Funeral of Well-Known merchant was a remarkable street scene yesterday — He was a patriot and a Christian — a wagon load of flowers ◊ Note: This article describes the funeral of Toronto businessman Ing Quong and is presented in…