Then & Now

Then & Now
Author: Denise Benson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Nightclubs
ISBN: 9781927513286

The history of Toronto's nightlife reveals its pulse.From award-winning veteran music journalist and DJ Denise Benson comes Then & Now: Toronto Nightlife History, a fascinating, intimate look at four decades of social spaces, dance clubs, and live music venues. Through interviews, research, and enthusiastic feedback from the party people who were there, Benson delves deep behind the scenes to reveal the histories of 48 influential nightlife spaces, and the story of a city that has grown alongside its sounds.

Toronto Then and Now®

Toronto Then and Now®
Author: Doug Taylor
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-06-01
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1910904074

Toronto has long been a financial powerhouse in North America, and this is represented by its many grand bank buildings. Canada's capital may be Ottawa, but the financial power emanates from this thriving city, the fourth most populous in North America.Sites include: Toronto Harbour, Fort York, Queen's Quay Lighthouse, Toronto Island Ferries, Queen's Quay Terminal, Canadian National Exhibition, Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion, Princes' Gates, Royal York Hotel, Union Station, City Hall, St. Lawrence Market, St. James Cathedral, Canadian Pacific Building, Bank of Montreal, Dineen Building, Elgin Theatre, Arts and Letters Club, Old Bank of Nova Scotia, Ryrie Building, Masonic Temple, Osgoode Hall, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Gurney Iron Works, Boer War Monument, CN Tower, Old Knox College, Victory Burlesque Theatre, Maple Leaf Gardens, University of Toronto and much more.

The Chinese Community in Toronto

The Chinese Community in Toronto
Author: Arlene Chan
Publisher: Dundurn
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2013-05-18
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 1459707710

The history of the Chinese community in Toronto is rich with stories drawn from over 150 years of life in Canada. Sam Ching, a laundryman, is the first Chinese resident recorded in Toronto’s city directory of 1878. A few years later, in 1881, there were 10 Chinese and no sign of a Chinatown. Today, with no less than seven Chinatowns and half a million people, Chinese Canadians have become the second-largest visible minority in the Greater Toronto Area. Stories, photographs, newspaper reports, maps, and charts will bring to life the little-known and dark history of the Chinese community. Despite the early years of anti-Chinese laws, negative public opinion, and outright racism, the Chinese and their organizations have persevered to become an integral participant in all walks of life. The Chinese Community in Toronto shows how the Chinese make a significant contribution to the vibrant and diverse mosaic that makes Toronto one of the most multicultural cities in the world.

Unbuilt Toronto

Unbuilt Toronto
Author: Mark Osbaldeston
Publisher: Dundurn
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2008-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1550028359

Unbuilt Toronto explores the failed architectural dreams of Toronto. Delving into unfulfilled & largely forgotten visions for grand public buildings, landmark skyscrapers, roads & highways, transit systems, & sports & recreation venues, the authors outline such ambitious but ultimately unrealised schemes as St. Alban's Cathedral, the "Newark 2011" subway system, & a 1911 city plan that would have resulted in a Paris-by-the-Lake. Readers will lament the loss of some projects (such as the planned construction boom for the Olympics), be thankful for the loss of others ("City Hall was supposed to look like that?!?"), & marvel at the downtown that could have been (with underground roads & walkways in the sky). With an eye on the future as well as the past, the author takes stock of Toronto's status quo in 2008 & offers some bold predictions on the city's architectural future.

Undressed Toronto

Undressed Toronto
Author: Dale Barbour
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2021-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0887559514

Undressed Toronto looks at the life of the swimming hole and considers how Toronto turned boys skinny dipping into comforting anti-modernist folk figures. By digging into the vibrant social life of these spaces, Barbour challenges narratives that pollution and industrialization in the nineteenth century destroyed the relationship between Torontonians and their rivers and waterfront. Instead, we find that these areas were co-opted and transformed into recreation spaces: often with the acceptance of indulgent city officials. While we take the beach for granted today, it was a novel form of public space in the nineteenth century and Torontonians had to decide how it would work in their city. To create a public beach, bathing needed to be transformed from the predominantly nude male privilege that it had been in the mid-nineteenth century into an activity that women and men could participate in together. That transformation required negotiating and establishing rules for how people would dress and behave when they bathed and setting aside or creating distinct environments for bathing. Undressed Toronto challenges assumptions about class, the urban environment, and the presentation of the naked body. It explores anxieties about modernity and masculinity and the weight of nostalgia in public perceptions and municipal regulation of public bathing in five Toronto environments that showcase distinct moments in the transition from vernacular bathing to the public beach: the city’s central waterfront, Toronto Island, the Don River, the Humber River, and Sunnyside Beach on Toronto’s western shoreline.

Toronto's Visual Legacy

Toronto's Visual Legacy
Author: Steve MacKinnon
Publisher: James Lorimer & Company
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2010-04-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1552774376

Twenty-five fascinating images that offer a 360º panorama of the Toronto's downtown in 1856-57 mark the beginning of the use of photographs to document Toronto's growth, its achievements, its great civic works, and its citizenry. Since 1856, the City of Toronto has been commissioning photographs to document and to promote it. This book, published to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the city's incorporation, brings together more than 100 of these images, selected by city archivists from their collection of hundreds of thousands. Waterworks, roads, and bridges, many of them familiar landmarks today, are seen as they are being built. The Bloor Street Viaduct, the R. C. Harris water filtration plant, and the old and new city halls are all celebrated in these images. Toronto's citizens are also captured in these photographs, going about their affairs on the street, as proud workers, or as spectators at public events. At times, in an effort to raise public concern about poverty and poor housing conditions, city photographers have documented conditions for residents in low-income neighbourhoods. Some of these photographs are included here, in an impressive series of poignant images. In the past fifty years, as Toronto has grown into the cosmopolitan metropolis it is now, city photographers have recorded the construction of key projects like the Yonge Street subway, the new City Hall and the CN Tower while documenting major public events and celebrations. This book offers a visual overview of Toronto's history and at the same time documents attitudes and values expressed by City officials, from 1857 to the present.

Indigenous Toronto

Indigenous Toronto
Author: Denise Bolduc
Publisher: Coach House Books
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1770566457

WINNER OF THE HERITAGE TORONTO 2022 BOOK AWARD Rich and diverse narratives of Indigenous Toronto, past and present Beneath many major North American cities rests a deep foundation of Indigenous history that has been colonized, paved over, and, too often, silenced. Few of its current inhabitants know that Toronto has seen twelve thousand years of uninterrupted Indigenous presence and nationhood in this region, along with a vibrant culture and history that thrives to this day. With contributions by Indigenous Elders, scholars, journalists, artists, and historians, this unique anthology explores the poles of cultural continuity and settler colonialism that have come to define Toronto as a significant cultural hub and intersection that was also known as a Meeting Place long before European settlers arrived. "This book is a reflection of endurance and a helpful corrective to settler fantasies. It tells a more balanced account of our communities, then and now. It offers the space for us to reclaim our ancestors’ language and legacy, rewriting ourselves back into a landscape from which non Indigenous historians have worked hard to erase us. But we are there in the skyline and throughout the GTA, along the coast and in all directions." -- from the introduction by Hayden King

Any Night of the Week

Any Night of the Week
Author: Jonny Dovercourt
Publisher: Coach House Books
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1770566082

The story of how Toronto became a music mecca. From Yonge Street to Yorkville to Queen West to College, the neighbourhoods that housed Toronto’s music scenes. Featuring Syrinx, Rough Trade, Martha and the Muffins, Fifth Column, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Rheostatics, Ghetto Concept, LAL, Broken Social Scene, and more! “Jonny Dovercourt, a tireless force in Toronto’s music scene, offers the widest-ranging view out there on how an Anglo-Saxon backwater terrified of people going to bars on Sundays transforms itself into a multicultural metropolis that raises up more than its share of beloved artists, from indie to hip-hop to the unclassifiable. His unique approach is to zoom in on the rooms where it’s happened – the live venues that come and too frequently go – as well as on the people who’ve devoted their lives and labours to collective creativity in a city that sometimes seems like it’d rather stick to banking. For locals, fans, and urban arts denizens anywhere, the essential Any Night of the Week is full of inspiration, discoveries, and cautionary tales.” —Carl Wilson, Slate music critic and author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, one of Billboard’s ‘100 Greatest Music Books of All Time’ “Toronto has long been one of North America’s great music cities, but hasn’t got the same credit as L.A., Memphis, Nashville, and others. This book will go a long way towards proving Toronto’s place in the music universe.” —Alan Cross, host, the Ongoing History of New Music “The sweaty, thunderous exhilaration of being in a packed club, in collective thrall to a killer band, extends across generations, platforms, and genre preferences. With this essential book, Jonny has created something that's not just a time capsule, but a time machine.” —Sarah Liss, author of Army of Lovers

Toronto

Toronto
Author: Allan Levine
Publisher: D & M Publishers
Total Pages: 594
Release: 2014-09-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1771620439

With the same eye for character, anecdote and circumstance that made Peter Ackroyd’s London and Colin Jones’s Paris so successful, Levine’s captivating prose integrates the sights, sounds and feel of Toronto with a broad historical perspective, linking the city’s present with its past through themes such as politics, transportation, public health, ethnic diversity and sports. Toronto invites readers to discover the city’s lively spirit over four centuries and to wander purposefully through the city’s many unique neighborhoods, where they can encounter the striking and peculiar characters who have inhabited them: the powerful and powerless, the entrepreneurs and the entertainers, and the moral and the corrupt, all of whom have contributed to Toronto’s collective identity.

Toronto

Toronto
Author: Edward Relph
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2013-08-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812209184

Extending a hundred miles across south-central Ontario, Toronto is the fifth largest metropolitan area in North America, with the highest population density and the busiest expressway. At its core old Toronto consists of walkable neighborhoods and a financial district deeply connected to the global economy. Newer parts of the region have downtown centers linked by networks of arterial roads and expressways, employment districts with most of the region's jobs, and ethnically diverse suburbs where English is a minority language. About half the population is foreign-born—the highest proportion in the developed world. Population growth because of immigration—almost three million in thirty years—shows few signs of abating, but recently implemented regional strategies aim to contain future urban expansion within a greenbelt and to accommodate growth by increasing densities in designated urban centers served by public transit. Toronto: Transformations in a City and Its Region traces the city's development from a British colonial outpost established in 1793 to the multicultural, polycentric metropolitan region of today. Though the original grid survey and much of the streetcar city created a century ago have endured, they have been supplemented by remarkable changes over the past fifty years in the context of economic and social globalization. Geographer Edward Relph's broad-stroke portrait of the urban region draws on the ideas of two renowned Torontonians—Jane Jacobs and Marshall McLuhan—to provide an interpretation of how its current forms and landscapes came to be as they are, the values they embody, and how they may change once again.