es·pla·nade /ˈespləˌnäd,-ˌnād/ noun a long, open, level area, typically beside the sea, along which people may walk for pleasure. As we all know, Toronto's Esplanade did not quite turn out as originally envisioned. The 1852 Plan by John Howard described the area south of Front Street as...

One of the biggest rages of the Victorian Age was to view photography stereoscopically. What is a stereoscope? A stereoscope is a device for viewing a stereoscopic pair of separate images, depicting left-eye and right-eye views of the same scene, as a single three-dimensional image. A typical...

From: http://www.whatistoronto.ca/section-overview/michel-lambeths-toronto Michel Lambeth 1923-1977 His name is Michel Lambeth. Born Thomas Henry Lambeth in Toronto’s east end, he was in his early thirties when he first took to the streets with his camera. He’d gone to war at twenty, served...

One of the best photographers of "old" Toronto was James Victor Salmon, whose over 15,000 photographs are in both the Toronto Public Library and Toronto Archives. Many of his pictures are iconic images of the changing city (both downtown and the suburbs) and are an invaluable resource (and many...

A companion thread to thedeepend's thread on the 60's and 70's. In the same way that Eric Arthur described Toronto's mid-19th century architecture as "a late-flowering Georgian" period, Toronto experienced in the post-war era a late-flowering Modernism. One gem was the 1947 Adelaide Coach...

In this day of CAD, the art of the architectural drawing has been lost. Within the various collections of the City, TPL and Province are some wonderful examples.

Today we commemorate the deaths of significant persons with teddy bears, plastic wrapped flowers, hand-written notes and chalk messages. Edwardian Toronto handled things differently, and when Edward VII died on May 6, 1910, buildings went into mourning with elaborate displays of bunting...

Inspired somewhat by Urban Shocker's thread on Top 10 Toronto Rooms, I thought it would be worthwhile to look at a range of historic interiors (most gone, some still here) available on the various archival sites. While we all tend to concentrate on the architectural exteriors of Toronto's...

As many of you know, I love old maps, and we've all seen various editions of the Goad Fire Insurance Maps. The Toronto Public Library has recently revamped their website and have posted high-res versions of maps from their extensive collection. Here are a few: 1792: 1797: 1802: 1802...

On the Ontario History Quest Digital Collection website (http://ohqdigit.tpl.toronto.on.ca/) is an extraordinary set of photographs by Notman & Fraser documenting the major commercial (and some religious and educational) establishments of Toronto in 1872, almost like an early "website" of the...