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Grange makes strange bedfellow
Friday, March 26, 2004 - Page G2
The Grange, Toronto's oldest mansion, popped into the public consciousness again earlier this winter when architect Frank Gehry unveiled his proposed $195-million overhaul of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
In pictures of the rear elevation, the Grange appears as a dignified country house standing primly beside Mr. Gehry's tall stack of contemporary art galleries. You'd never guess from such respectful illustration what a mixed blessing the Grange really is.
On the plus side, the 1817 residence is a sturdily designed and beautifully restored brick souvenir of Toronto's earliest idea of architectural elegance. That idea was Georgian: sedate, officious, simple and symmetrical.
In the Grange, the general effect of gracious calm is reinforced by the central portico and tall columns, and by the strong gable arched over the structure's central block. The point of Georgian residential design, which has enjoyed popularity among nouveaux-riches down to the present day, was to advertise the worldly prominence of the occupants, and their devotion to order, civil harmony and propriety.
In the little colonial universe of York, D'Arcy Boulton, Jr., who built the Grange, had done well for himself in trade and land sales. Sarah Anne Robinson, his wife, was the sister of chief justice John Beverley Robinson. The Boultons knew everybody in town, and were related to several of them.
Though eventually surrounded and swamped by Victorian urban development, the Grange served the Boulton family well as a fashionable, comfortable suburban seat, visible evidence of their high social position, and as an expression of their world view.
In 1911, the house passed from its last private owner into public hands, becoming the first home of the Art Museum of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario).
That's when its career as a problem started. Every time in recent memory that the AGO has wanted to expand -- in the 1960s, the 1990s and now -- the Grange has kept the architects busy figuring out how to cram new facilities into the pinched strip between the house's back door and Dundas Street West.
One scheme floated in the late 1960s featured wings extending south from the main body of the museum along the east and west sides of the house. The plan was quickly scotched. Not only must the Grange stay exactly where it is, blocking the gallery's expansion southward, it appears that the aristocratic home must also not be offended by having any closer contact with the democratic museum than absolutely necessary.
The time will surely come when the Grange must yield to the space requirements of the AGO, and be moved down into Grange Park, or off the site entirely.
But whether it stays put or retires to some other part of the city, the building will remain a valuable reminder of much that is good and bad in Toronto's mixed historical baggage.
It recalls the determination of Toronto's first citizens to create a civilized clearing in the New World wilderness, and a secure niche for the eminently sane, conservative cultural values of the British Enlightenment. While it is stylish nowadays to ridicule the Family Compact -- that tight gaggle of bureaucrats, clergymen and businessmen that ran things during Toronto's first few decades -- we should thank them for establishing sound laws and sound learning here, and leaving us the idea of order expressed in every fine, clean line and balanced architectural detail of the Grange.
But the building also calls to mind a sharply less attractive fact about our town's history. From 1875 until 1910, the house served as the home and headquarters for Goldwin Smith, who typically appears in accounts of the Grange as a "historian" and even "one of the city's leading intellectuals." The wealthy English-born scholar certainly came with the right credentials to impress the locals.
He was educated at Eton and Oxford University, where he was a brilliant student, and had done service as a famous university reformer.
Before moving to Canada in 1871, he had been Regius professor of modern history at Oxford, and a teacher at Cornell. At least by the time he married a Boulton heiress and moved into the Grange, he had become a bigot and crank, and a fanatical anti-Semite.
In a stream of pamphlets, articles and books, Smith flogged his poisonous racial views, and (among others) his belief that Canada should join the United States as a step toward saving the Anglo-Saxon race from contamination by Jews, the Irish and others he called "enemies of civilization."
These, too, are things the Grange memorializes: the readiness of our Victorian urban elite to embrace anti-Semites such as Goldwin Smith, and the persistence -- long past Smith's day -- of racism in our private and civic institutions.
The Grange is a monument to much that is good and much that is evil, and to a great deal we should never forget about Toronto's past.
jmays@globeandmail.ca
© Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Friday, March 26, 2004 - Page G2
The Grange, Toronto's oldest mansion, popped into the public consciousness again earlier this winter when architect Frank Gehry unveiled his proposed $195-million overhaul of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
In pictures of the rear elevation, the Grange appears as a dignified country house standing primly beside Mr. Gehry's tall stack of contemporary art galleries. You'd never guess from such respectful illustration what a mixed blessing the Grange really is.
On the plus side, the 1817 residence is a sturdily designed and beautifully restored brick souvenir of Toronto's earliest idea of architectural elegance. That idea was Georgian: sedate, officious, simple and symmetrical.
In the Grange, the general effect of gracious calm is reinforced by the central portico and tall columns, and by the strong gable arched over the structure's central block. The point of Georgian residential design, which has enjoyed popularity among nouveaux-riches down to the present day, was to advertise the worldly prominence of the occupants, and their devotion to order, civil harmony and propriety.
In the little colonial universe of York, D'Arcy Boulton, Jr., who built the Grange, had done well for himself in trade and land sales. Sarah Anne Robinson, his wife, was the sister of chief justice John Beverley Robinson. The Boultons knew everybody in town, and were related to several of them.
Though eventually surrounded and swamped by Victorian urban development, the Grange served the Boulton family well as a fashionable, comfortable suburban seat, visible evidence of their high social position, and as an expression of their world view.
In 1911, the house passed from its last private owner into public hands, becoming the first home of the Art Museum of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario).
That's when its career as a problem started. Every time in recent memory that the AGO has wanted to expand -- in the 1960s, the 1990s and now -- the Grange has kept the architects busy figuring out how to cram new facilities into the pinched strip between the house's back door and Dundas Street West.
One scheme floated in the late 1960s featured wings extending south from the main body of the museum along the east and west sides of the house. The plan was quickly scotched. Not only must the Grange stay exactly where it is, blocking the gallery's expansion southward, it appears that the aristocratic home must also not be offended by having any closer contact with the democratic museum than absolutely necessary.
The time will surely come when the Grange must yield to the space requirements of the AGO, and be moved down into Grange Park, or off the site entirely.
But whether it stays put or retires to some other part of the city, the building will remain a valuable reminder of much that is good and bad in Toronto's mixed historical baggage.
It recalls the determination of Toronto's first citizens to create a civilized clearing in the New World wilderness, and a secure niche for the eminently sane, conservative cultural values of the British Enlightenment. While it is stylish nowadays to ridicule the Family Compact -- that tight gaggle of bureaucrats, clergymen and businessmen that ran things during Toronto's first few decades -- we should thank them for establishing sound laws and sound learning here, and leaving us the idea of order expressed in every fine, clean line and balanced architectural detail of the Grange.
But the building also calls to mind a sharply less attractive fact about our town's history. From 1875 until 1910, the house served as the home and headquarters for Goldwin Smith, who typically appears in accounts of the Grange as a "historian" and even "one of the city's leading intellectuals." The wealthy English-born scholar certainly came with the right credentials to impress the locals.
He was educated at Eton and Oxford University, where he was a brilliant student, and had done service as a famous university reformer.
Before moving to Canada in 1871, he had been Regius professor of modern history at Oxford, and a teacher at Cornell. At least by the time he married a Boulton heiress and moved into the Grange, he had become a bigot and crank, and a fanatical anti-Semite.
In a stream of pamphlets, articles and books, Smith flogged his poisonous racial views, and (among others) his belief that Canada should join the United States as a step toward saving the Anglo-Saxon race from contamination by Jews, the Irish and others he called "enemies of civilization."
These, too, are things the Grange memorializes: the readiness of our Victorian urban elite to embrace anti-Semites such as Goldwin Smith, and the persistence -- long past Smith's day -- of racism in our private and civic institutions.
The Grange is a monument to much that is good and much that is evil, and to a great deal we should never forget about Toronto's past.
jmays@globeandmail.ca
© Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.