The secrets of Atlas Ave.
Two time capsules — one just discovered, with items going back 106 years, the other being put together now — help tell the story of the city and its residents, who are forever leaving ‘little footprints to the past’
All Toronto homes have stories, and they usually come and go with the people who live there. Unless someone thinks to hide a few secrets.
Jenny Reich and her family found the time capsule when they renovated their Atlas Ave. home last year. Contractors moved a fireplace on the second floor, and tucked in behind, out of reach of the flames, was an envelope of letters, receipts and postcards. It wasn’t the only discovery she made. A few months later she learned that a family down the street was in the midst of creating their own message to the future, choosing just the right Archie comic and photos for a time capsule of their own. Someday, a future resident might move a wall and inadvertently discover how much a cucumber cost in 2018, and maybe that person will stop and think about the lives that came before.
One of the contractors who found the envelope tucked behind the fireplace in Reich’s home thought it might have slipped behind by mistake, but she believed it was intentional, with the items spanning 1912 through the 1960s. They seemed like the kind of things you’d purposely leave behind to give a glimpse of life as it was. But who left it there?
“What is it about humans that need to leave something behind for the next generation? I don’t know where that comes from, but it’s cool to add to your own layer.” ANTHONY WESTENBERG WHOSE DAUGHTERS HAVE PUT TOGETHER A TIME CAPSULE
Toronto city directories, available on the library’s website, are a great resource for historical mysteries. The directories tell you, by address and last name, who was living where in any given year. Historically, the directories skew towards men — although some working women and widows are listed. I had a look to see who was living at 90 Atlas Ave. during the eras narrated by the receipts and papers, and it became apparent that many of the people were different generations of the same family, along with a few boarders.
One of the newer items in the time capsule, likely left by the person who put it in the wall, was a charge account for Eaton’s in the early 1960s, for A.L. Coolidge.
Alan Coolidge shows up in the city directory at that address for a few years in the early ’60s. An online search revealed a recent obituary for an Alan Lawrence Coolidge living in Oshawa, and several names in the obituary matched the history of the home.
One afternoon this summer, Sylvia Coolidge answered the phone, even though it was a Toronto number and she usually lets those go to voicemail this time of the day — telemarketers being as persistent as they are. I told her this call was a little out of the blue, but a time capsule had been found at a home on Atlas Ave, a few blocks north of St. Clair Ave. Yes, she lived there almost 60 years ago, and yes, she recognized the charge account Eaton’s for a Viking portable sewing machine that cost $133.85. Her husband, Alan, had purchased it.
“My first sewing machine!” she says. “That was it, it was from Eaton’s.”
She and her husband were newlyweds in the attic apartment of his grandmother’s home, trying to make it in the city. Sylvia tore apart her old clothes and sewed new outfits for her children on that machine, purchased in the family’s first experiment with a charge account, when times were really tight. She isn’t sure, at first, if her husband was the one to leave the time capsule behind, but she put me in touch with her son Paul, the family genealogist, for the rest of the story.
The Knox family — Alan Coolidge’s grandparents — first appear at the home in the 1939 city directory.
James Knox, born in Ireland, and his wife, Effa, born in the United States, had met in Thunder Bay and married in 1906. They raised their four children in Detroit, and then in northern Oshawa, where they farmed and had an orchard before moving to Atlas Ave. in their later years. Most of their children were grown, except for their youngest son, Stan, who they had adopted. He was a teenager.
They owned the home on Atlas and often had tenants renting the other floors. James planted some more fruit trees in the big backyard. There is still a cherry tree, and a peach tree today — a beautiful, spindly thing that still produces a few inedible peaches.
When James died in 1952, Effa stayed on the main floor, another couple rented the second floor, and her grandson Alan Coolidge moved into the attic apartment in1960 with his wife, Sylvia, and their young family. Alan worked for a stockbroker downtown. Sylvia remembers everyone crammed into the tiny kitchen at the back of the house pitting cherries in the summer, and the peanut butter sandwiches that Effa made for her grown son Stan year round. He would throw them in the trash in the garage, until he was found out.
Many of the neighbours were Jewish or Italian, and a synagogue was built on St. Clair W. The Birnbaums next door always brought over pickles, and the big brick home buzzed with activity. Effa — who sometimes went by Effie — had quilting bees and listened to preacher Billy Graham on the radio. Sylvia got a job at Woolworths, and a girl across the street babysat her son Paul, but Sylvia didn’t like missing out on those early years, so she gave up the job.
After Effa died in 1961 and the house was sold to a FinnishCanadian family, Alan and Sylvia Coolidge stayed in the house for a few more years, taking another room on the second floor, within hearing distance of the Siamese cat belonging to the new owners’ parents.
Their oldest son, Paul Coolidge, now 57, remembers looking down from the second floor, watching his dad come down the street with ice cream cones. The family left in 1963 when Alan got a job at a trucking company in Oshawa, Paul says, and then at General Motors. “We thought we’d died and gone to heaven,” Sylvia says. “We had money to spend on Christmas.”
This summer, she was in the process of packing up the Oshawa home she and Alan shared since 1965.
She didn’t recognize some of the items in the time capsule — a Christmas card addressed to “Grandma Donna,” a child’s painting. They might have come from other tenants. But as the weeks go on and she has more time to think about it, she is convinced. There were too many items from different generations of her husband’s family — postcards, a letter from a great-aunt in Vermont — for him not to have had a role in it. Alan probably talked his Uncle Stan into it, she thinks. Leaving something for the future, not knowing when it would be discovered — that was something her husband would have done. He died in the fall of 2017, just a few weeks before the fragments of his life were discovered.
“I can’t believe that Al passed away and then it was found. I wish he was here when they found it, then I would have known about what was going on,” she says with a laugh. “Because I don’t have a clue why or when this happened, I don’t have any memory of it. But then I was busy, too.”
Atlas Ave., running north of St. Clair Ave. W., in between Dufferin and Bathurst Sts., was once a dense cedar and pine forest north of an Indigenous trail
After settlers came, the land was cleared for farmland, and then, as the rolling meadows were parcelled off at the turn of the century, it became Kennedy St., sparsely populated, with streams and grazing fields. “Farmers, do you want to sell your farm?” the realtors asked in bold, enticing print in the city directory advertisements
It was a faraway place until the St. Clair streetcar came in 1913, and then more homes began to rise, everything from sturdy brick houses to a shack made of
wooden egg boxes. The Reichs’ home, a three-storey farmhouse with a big maple tree in the front yard, is believed to be from this pre-war era.
The 1913 fire insurance map shows one brick home and two wooden houses on the lot that is linked to the current house in city files. According to tax assessments, the brick home was owned by Miss Jessie McNab as far back as 1909. McNab was the well-known daughter of a Toronto lawyer who had built the Dundurn Heights estate, and by 1909, she owned this big lot on Atlas, and a few more along nearby Dundurn Ave., in addition to her home on St. Clair Ave.
During the First World War, some farmland was taken over by a church to help grow food, the men of Atlas went to fight, and Jessie McNab created the Canadian Women’s Home Guard, an allfemale brigade that drilled twice a week in the neighbourhood, waiting to be called into service. (McNab would later give 10 acres of her undeveloped land over to returned veterans to farm at the close of the war.) In 1916, Kennedy St. became Atlas Ave., a growing street just north of Toronto. It was in the middle of York township, an entity that was independent of the city but which had been shrinking for years, pieces of it swallowed by the growing city of Toronto. Now the street is bordered by brick homes, the majority of them holdouts from a century ago, their interiors modernized with pot lights and granite countertops.
A few doors north of the home where the Coolidges used to live, Anthony Westenberg and his daughters are building a time capsule, selecting the same kinds of things that Alan and Uncle Stan hid away all those years ago.
Westenberg has croissants on the table, and Jenny Reich comes in with rhubarb cake and the Coolidge time capsule from her home. Westenberg and Reich realized that they were on opposite ends of the capsule game earlier this year at the schoolyard, and it sparked a conversation, about homes being silent witnesses to history, the clues you find, the clues you leave behind, the “little footprints to the past,” Reich says.
“What is it about humans that need to leave something behind for the next generation?” Westenberg asks. “I don’t know where that comes from, but it’s cool to add to your own layer.”
Westenberg is renovating the base- ment of his First World War-era home, and a few months ago, he and his daughters started building a similar package. He wanted to capture life in 2018 with a few photos of his neighbours: a man and his cherry tree, a neighbour at the knifesharpening truck. His daughter Fenna, 12, painted a water skier to put in the tin box. Her younger sister, Bella, 10, is including a story she wrote about a mermaid trapped under the modern city, in long-lost Garrison Creek, which used to flow nearby until it was covered as the city modernized and sewers were built.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun, going underneath everything,” Bella says. “She wants to be in the big city. It will be a huge adventure of how she gets back to the sea.”
The sisters debate including their coin collection, and a beloved Archie comic, its pages softened by time. What if they want to read it again?
“We have way older ones,” Bella says and she goes upstairs to find one. (The Archie comics were bought secondhand and they are out of date, their dad says — with “boy-crazy Veronica and hubba-hubba Reggie” — and he wondered about what the people of the future might think of them. But oh well: “You want to put your best foot forward, but you want it to be real, you don’t want to overthink it,” he says.)
They are careful about technology. When a golden record of sounds from Earth, including Beethoven’s music was attached to the sides of twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977, Westenberg notes, NASA included a record player so any “spacefaring civilization” might understand what Earth is like.
“We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed,” then U.S. President Jimmy Carter said in a message recorded in electronic impulses. “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.”
In the future, there is no guarantee that the people of Atlas Ave. will be able to extract information from a memory stick. So Westenberg and his daughters told their story in tangible ways: Here is a TTC token. Here is a picture of Bella and Fenna getting freezies at the corner store. Here is a trinket from the pawn shop down the street.
Their dining-room table is covered by ephemera from time capsules of the present and past — which Bella and Fenna read eagerly.
In the Coolidge capsule, there is a fundraising letter written in the early days of the Second World War to the members of a masonic service group, with a salutation that seems like it is reaching out to the future: “Dear Prophets,” it begins.
(The Coolidge family is not sure if that letter relates to James Knox. In one of their old photos he is wearing a Loyal Orange Lodge sash, but no indication he was a member of “Rani Ghar Grotto.”)
Reich has already framed that letter for her wall — a testament to the house’s history. She plans to put the rest of the time capsule in a crawlspace so someone else can find it someday. She offered Sylvia Coolidge the receipt for the sewing machine, but Coolidge was OK to leave it be. Reich says that her family will add their own layer to the capsule before they put it back.
Later that day, Westenberg sends an email. He’s been thinking about the balancing act of time capsules. “You want to put your best self forward (do you admit that you read Archie comic books in the bathroom?), but too much of yourself and it’s bragging. You want it to be spontaneous and genuine, but too much whimsy seems to trivialize the serious business of sending a secret message to the future,” he writes. “Too much slick preparation makes the time capsule come across as contrived. Also, the daily mundane sounds boring, no? Or is it?”
You never think your own stuff is interesting, Jenny Reich says later. But something as simple as a receipt for a sewing machine becomes remarkable in time, those pieces of everyday history that show how much things cost, what the paper felt like, how it was printed.
Maybe, Reich and her family will include a bill of her own, but she notes that modern receipts disintegrate easily. They’ll definitely have their children write something, and who knows, she says. Maybe in 50 years, someone will find it, and find them too. Reich says they’ll be happy to connect with that future family making “our house their home.”
Maybe that family will be inclined to add their own layer.
Katie Daubs is a reporter and feature writer based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @kdaubs