Lost Toronto by Doug Taylor was a large and wide lap-spreader. Nevertheless I did take this book on a trip to Toronto on the bus and subway, which rendered me unable to splay it open a full 180° while I was seated next to someone. I did experience and fully appreciate the large and detailed photos once I had an entire kitchen table to open it up and review it. I used a magnifying glass to analyze almost every photo, as historical minutiae such as wording on signage was too valuable to ignore.
Taylor wrote about buildings lost to the wrecking ball. He organized them by destruction date, so chronologically by each building’s death, starting in 1890 and ending in 2017, when HMV Music on 333 Yonge Street closed for good. I travelled down memory lane many times while perusing these pages, with fond reminiscences of visits to the Riverdale Zoo when my family used to live in East York up until 1971. The zoo closed in 1974. More recent demolitions were the closing of some of my favourite stores, such as A&A Records in 1993, Sam the Record Man in 2007 and the World’s Biggest Bookstore in 2014.
Some of the lost things were not buildings, as there was a spread devoted to “Old Streetcars”. I loved riding those PCC cars, especially during the long ride along Queen Street East from Yonge to the Fox Theatre, where I would watch Beatles movies in the early 1980’s. The CNE Grandstand was imploded in 1999. I saw many concerts there, the last one being Paul McCartney in 1993.
Taylor erred a few times with the dates and made a couple misspellings. The Bank of Toronto building on the southwest corner of King and Bay was demolished in 1965 yet a caption indicates that the photo was taken in 1983. The cars and fashions lead me to believe that the photo dates from 1963. The photo on the left in the A&A Records spread had to be from the early 1980’s or even earlier. It cannot be from the mid-1980’s as indicated. When I was shopping in the area on a regular basis in the early 1980’s I used to go to a neighbouring secondhand record store called Vinyl Museum, yet in this particular photo that store hadn’t yet taken over the old Le Chateau. Vinyl Museum was definitely north of A&A’s by the middle of the decade. As for typos, perennially misspelled St. Catharines was printed as St. Catherines and it just didn’t look good when the Allen Theatre, which its name in literal lights, was written as Allan on the page header.
One of the buildings, the notorious Ford Hotel on the northeast corner of Dundas and Bay, I did not recall at all. It was demolished in 1974, albeit. By the seventies its reputation had sunk to the lowest standards of hospitality. I didn’t even know that a young boy, nine-year-old Kirk Deasley, had been murdered there. Going on-line to read about the case broke my heart. It wasn’t long after that the hotel was razed.