Suburbs get the star treatment in exhibit
Once a city is built it doesn’t take long for it to seem like it has always been there. The trees and bushes grow in, the streets and houses become familiar and the human life there dominates our memory.
Yet a large part of Toronto was still farmland in the living memory of many Torontonians: Just 50 or 60 years ago there were crops instead of cul-de-sacs. This is why the current exhibition at the Toronto Archives, Wide Open World: A celebration of the suburbs in Toronto, is compelling. Photos from the archives’ vast collection, some never before seen by the public, have been brought out to create a reflection of Toronto as it grew quickly after the Second World War.
The exhibition curator, archivist Manda Vranic, says the archives received a number of suburban picture collections over the past five years that deserved their own showing. The thought of an archival Toronto photo- graph might conjure a Victorian or Edwardian image, perhaps a 1920s flapper, yet these photos, all from the 1940s until the 1980s, are a more recent wave of history.
Buildings and houses aren’t just the exhibition focus, Vranic says, but the people who live and lived in the suburbs are represented, too. There’s a photo of men learning to disco dance in 1978 and one of a concert on the Eringate Park pool building roof, a 1975 scene that evokes a small-scale,
Etobicoke version of the Beatles final rooftop concert in London.
One photo from 1946 encapsulates the immediate post war era, with the “Gibbs family” — mom, dad and little kid — looking at the acre lot near Churchill Ave. in North York where they would ultimately build their home.
The name of that street, the new family starting out, and the optimistic, expansive expectation of a new and clean life after the horror of war are all present in this picture. Today, Churchill runs right into heart of the skyscraper core of North York’s City Centre area, and is emblematic of how we build residential houses today, when space is at a premium, versus then, when there was so much more space to be gobbled up.
New houses were plentiful; all built in the golden era of the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (now Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation) when the expectation to own one’s home was a reality for many, and when rental and truly affordable housing was built across the country.
The lead photograph in the exhibition, of two girls standing in Queensway Park, surrounded as it is today by wee wartime houses built for returning veterans, also illustrates the social need and quantity of housing built. Quality was another issue though as another photo shows a woman shoring up her basement staircase on Dawes Rd. as many of these veteran houses were built on the cheap.
Building cheap has been a Toronto tradition for a long time so all the complaints about today’s cheap condominiums are not without prece- dent. I once heard Toronto architect Brigitte Shim say this city was “built with sticks,” referring to the pre-war housing stock, largely built humbly though now often worth seven figures.
“Thrift, Our Strength,” could be a Toronto motto.
Wide Open World also shows a suburban landscape that is always in flux. On one wall is a montage of new suburban housing types, some in rather dramatic mid-century modern styles. Ten of them had their addresses listed and, checking on Google Street View, I found two of them had since been replaced by monster homes and others have had their mid-century design elements removed or altered. The city is an ever-evolving creature, even in its newest precincts.
Schools like the tiny Centennial Road School in Scarborough, pictured in 1947, were opened, later to grow much bigger. Shopping plazas like the Golden Mile and 6 Points Plaza catered to new, car-based lifestyles, apartment buildings boasted of great views, and leafy backyard scenes were common. The future was bright.
One section of the exhibition consists of pamphlets and advertisements that sold the suburban way of life to consumers.
“Freedom” and “work free modern living” are examples of the tone of the sales pitches, with scenes of indoor rec room entertaining and outdoor poolside lounging. Highball cocktails were plentiful. All this “casual living” would be a “boon to the hostess too.”
Ads for electric baseboard heat recall a time when hydro was cheap, something people still think it should be, judging by the politics involved in pricing today.
The exhibit is worth a visit, and some of the anachronistic and gendered lifestyle depictions are amusing, but it’s also useful in helping understand how recent a creation modern Toronto is.
Aerial photos that show subdivisions leapfrogging between those farmer fields suggest an economic velocity that continues today in the form of highrise cranes, though in a much less affordable way as it once happened.
Wide Open World is free and runs until August at 255 Spadina Rd.