A guided tour of historic Unionville, a little Ontario village bursting with historic buildings full of stories. Unionville is a village in the city – an unexpected oasis where time seems to move a little more slowly than in the hectic world of condos, commercial strips, and traffic gridlock. Since the late 1960s, when Unionville and its vintage Main Street were “discovered,” the village has been a magnet for visitors. Historic Unionville is ...
Unbuilt Victoria celebrates the city that is, and laments the city that could have been. For most people, resident and visitor alike, Victoria, British Columbia, is a time capsule of Victorian and Edwardian buildings. From a modest fur-trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company it grew to be the province’s major trading centre. Then the selection of Vancouver as the terminus of the transcontinental railway in the 1880s, followed by a smallpox ep ...
This important original work with stylish illustrations by the author/artist F.R. (Hamish) Berchem, promises to be a worthy sequel to his earlier book on Yonge Street, The Yonge Street Story 1793-1860 (now out of print). The fascinating story of Yonge Street has involved an endless array of memorable personalities including the young reporter Charles Dickens; publisher J. Ross Robertson; successful Scots merchants John MacDonald, John Catto, Ro ...
Brockville’s origins reach back to the resettlement of Loyalists following the American Revolution and the threat of American encroachment. Following the War of 1812, Brockville, along the St. Lawrence River, benefitted greatly from the rapidly expanding colonization. A centre for the political activity of the day and a focal point for the Orange movement, Brockville was often immersed in controversy. The end of the 19th century was the golden ...
Black Creek Pioneer Village: Toronto’s Living History Village is a recreation of a typical crossroads community found in Southern Ontario during the 1800s. Nestled on 56 acres of tranquility, the village is a step-back-in-time, a respite from the towering buildings and bustling traffic of the 21st century. Here, visitors discover the joys and daily realities of living in early Ontario. Here at the village, the sights, sounds and smells are tangi ...
The Yonge Street as conceived by Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe is celebrated, from its beginning as a First Nation’s Trail, to the Yonge Street we know today, extending from Toronto to Innisfil. Augustus Jones, the surveyor assigned by Simcoe, the French, the German pioneers, the Loyalists – all were to influence the building of Yonge Street. With the building of a route came tolls, inns, villages, more immigrants and ultimately an aven ...
Unbuilt Toronto explores never-realized building projects in and around Toronto, from the city’s founding to the twenty-first century. Delving into unfulfilled and largely forgotten visions for grand public buildings, landmark skyscrapers, highways, subways, and arts and recreation venues, it outlines such ambitious schemes as St. Alban's Cathedral, the Queen subway line and early city plans that would have resulted in a Paris-by-the-Lake. ...
In 1873, Henry Scadding, former rector of Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity, wrote the definitive history of early Toronto. His detailed portrait of the streets, customs and prominent citizens is a goldmine of sights and insights into a Toronto long-since disappeared. Toronto of Old was first reprinted in 1966 and has been out of print since 1973. The later version, edited by Frederick H. Armstrong is shorter than the original, with Scadding ...
Winner of the 2013 Heritage Toronto Award of Merit A Toronto Album 2 , companion edition to Mike Filey's immensely popular original album, is a photographic journey through bustling Toronto from the late 1930s to the early 1970s. Among the 100-plus photographs is a quartet that shows the remarkable changes to Toronto's skyline over a half-century. Others capture the 1939 royal visit, steam trains in their twilight years, the evolut ...
