Toronto Street Names: An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins

Toronto Street Names: An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins by Leonard Wise & Allan Gould was published in 2000 and is an alphabetical list. The authors provided histories across 236 pages and covered long as well as very short streets, but obviously couldn’t write about all of them. Nevertheless I was surprised when I approached a street name where it would have appeared in alphabetical sequence only to discover that the authors didn’t write about it. They included photos which I took pleasure probing deeper with my magnifying glass to read billboards and other signs in the background.

Sometimes the history was ambiguous, and I read numerous examples where Wise and Gould gave as many as three different theories, most often pertaining to different people having the same name who lived in the area where the street was named after. I took this book on holiday as it was the perfect read to leave for a little while and come back to, but even so, the histories did become boring very fast, as the origins often seemed the same: yet again another street named after a Canadian governor-general, an Ontario premier or a British prime minister. When they assigned an address for an extant house on a street they wrote about, I noted it to check later on Google Maps. Thankfully, 23 years after publication, all of the houses were still there.

I experienced an eerie coincidence at the exact moment when I started to read the paragraph about Scott Lane and Scott Street. I was riding the Halifax Transit bus route 8 into town when the canned announcement informed the passengers that we were turning left from Joseph Howe Drive onto Scot Street! I had the same kind of experience when I read a book about Hurricane Hazel three years ago.

I wish that the street names were printed in a colour other than pale beige. Although the names were in a larger font and all in capitals, it was difficult to see the names against the white pages. More contrast would have been appreciated. They supplemented the book with a six-page bibliography, which I will spend a good long time searching for titles either at antiquarian bookseller websites or will acquire via interlibrary loan.

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