TORONTO’S ENDLESS STREET FIGHT
The King St. transit pilot is the latest flashpoint on the city’s crowded roads. Earlier changes were just as contentious — including the arrival of automobiles
In the long history of Toronto streets, change has never come easily.
Downtown, where the streets are narrow relics of a Victorian age, there is little middle ground, only middle fingers.
The flipped bird on King St.’s restaurant row is the latest symbol of irritation, a stand-in for the frustration certain business owners feel toward city hall, and a transit pilot they say isn’t working for them.
Toronto was a city of walkers when it was incorporated in 1834, and that remained the main form of transportation (supported by transit) until the growth of its suburbs after the Second World War, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh says. The geography professor at Brock University researched Toronto’s streets for his book
Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press,
1860-1935. Torontonians paid for concrete sidewalks long before they agreed to finance asphalt roads, because most people simply didn’t use them, he notes.
Toronto has greeted change on its streets with excitement, anxiety, finger pointing, politicking, gloomy predictions and ideological bickering for most of its history. Even in the 1860s, when Toronto had close to 45,000 citizens and the roads were covered with filth and roaming animals, we argued about the “itinerant Toronto hog.”
“Have we no ‘health inspector?’ What are our ‘police’ doing?” one citizen wrote to the Globe in 1862, complaining about the pig nuisance.
“Rather than run over a human being, reverse your motor.” DIRECTIVE TO STREETCAR DRIVERS IN 1892
Another defended the pigs, because they were performing a valuable trash-disposal service. When a tenacious gutter pig bit the skirt of a woman walking on King St., the Globe demanded that the pig nuisance be an election issue.
“The affair was witnessed by many persons, who were incensed that a lady should be subjected to such a gross indignity, on the most public street in the city, in the forenoon,” the report noted. There was no ice sculpture or press conference, but the sentiment was the same: this street isn’t working.
As the city modernized in the late 19th century, and the patchwork of macadam, cedar block and asphalt streets took shape, the tension came from technological advances at the turn of the century, the gradual speeding up of the city with electric streetcars, bicycles and cars. Thousands of small decisions changed the balance of power in Toronto’s streets, leading to the declining status of not only the urban pig, but the urban pedestrian.
Electric Streetcar
By 1892, Toronto was an industrializing city with around 180,000 people, second only to Montreal in population. The city added 95,000 citizens between the 1881 and 1891 census — mostly immigrants from Britain, transplants from the countryside, and people who lived in newly annexed communities like Parkdale, Yorkville and Riverdale.
By 1892, the old town buzzed in anticipation of its first rapid transit network. Since 1861, horses had pulled the streetcars, but the company that took over the 30-year franchise in 1891 had promised to go electric. “The people are as enamored of electric cars as a small boy of his first rocking horse,” the Globe wrote that March. Historian Goldwin Smith wrote to the mayor that the horses who had pulled the streetcars “to be almost dying as they stumble along with enormously overloaded cars.”
The Toronto Railway Co. had a not-very-secret dress rehearsal a few days before the launch. A crowd gathered to watch company officials glide up Church St., powered by the scientific genius coursing through the “splendidly hung” wires. The crowd witnessed their first hop-on, an enthusiastic supporter — described as an “inebriate,” by the Telegram, and a “gentleman who was somewhat under the weather and not more than half sober,” by the Globe.
“Congrashulate you. It’s a fine ’xperiment,” he offered.
The first misgivings came from the soon-to-be displaced technology. As boys sprinted alongside the dark-chocolatecoloured streetcar, a horse reared in agitation. The Telegram reported that most horses looked at the streetcar with a mixture of satisfaction and contempt.
On launch day, Aug. 15, “gloomy predictions” spread with a false rumour that the streetcar had already killed.
There were conflicting reports about what happened to Charles Zedwick of Rochester, N.Y. Zedwick was in a passing horse streetcar, and either leaned out for a look at the new electric car on the opposite rail — or tried to hop into it. He fell in front of the electric car, hurt his shoulder and scalp, but recovered in hospital.
The next days brought reports of a spooked horse, a collision between a horsecar and an electric car, vows from “old ladies” never to ride the fearsome vehicles. The Toronto Telegram — which had headlined an earlier article “It is the trolley forever” — now called it a dangerous animal.
“It was a mistake, almost a crime, to admit the poles and overhead wires and swift running cars into the heart of the city,” they wrote two days after the official launch.
The paper called for prudence, because the vehicle “makes the little ones its favourite victims. It has crushed out scores of young lives all over this continent. Let Toronto pray for immunity from a mas- sacre of the innocents.”
Before this, being run over by a steam locomotive at a train crossing had been “the nastiest way of dying” on Toronto’s streets, notes the city’s chief curator Wayne Reeves — and the city began agitating for grade-separated crossings in the 1890s. The streetcar, built into the traffic of the city, posed another danger.
“Just as well for pilots of trolley cars to remember that their victims have to stay longer in the cemetery than they will have to stay in the car if safety were not sacrificed to speed,” the Telegram wrote.
Just two weeks after launch, on Sept. 2, Miss Heron, 61, was killed as she ran to catch the new electric streetcar at the corner of Church and Isabella Sts. According to the inquest, the driver, in his third day on the job, yelled, rang the gong and slammed his brakes, but Miss Heron “evidently became confused in the excitement of the moment.”
She ran in front of the streetcar, which was travelling at three miles an hour (5 km/h). She had contributed to her own death, the inquest ruled, but the driver also made a mistake, contravening Rule 19 of company policy: “Rather than run over a human being reverse your motor.”
After Heron’s death, an employee of the Grand Trunk Railway wrote to the Globe. The electric cars were here to stay, Walter Mepham said, and “like every new form of propulsion,” there would be death and casualties. He was right. Before the end of the year a cyclist and a law student would also die. Mepham called for Torontonians to adapt to the “altered conditions” of their city, but he also suggested the streetcar company provide red lights for their cars at night.
Toronto was now a streetcar city. Across the continent, the technology had compressed space and time, and Toronto Railway Co. soon retired its horses.
People could live in the suburbs and commute downtown, but the speed of the city didn’t change drastically, Mackintosh says. By the 1900s, he notes, the Toronto Street Railway Co. had a reputation — memorialized in city council minutes — as a “dreadful company” with overcrowded cars and underserved citizens.
It was a reputation that the next technology was ready to capitalize on.
Enter the bicycle
“I’m a terror on wheels/ I rip, and/ I strip/ The tar out of the pavements/ I scoot, and/ I swoop/ Upon innocent pedestrians,/ As the hen hawk upon the spring chicken./ I whiz, and/ I whirr/ And behind leave a stir,/ As the cyclone leaves heaps of wreckage./ I slam, and/ I bang,/ And my rattle I clang,/ And people I handle like baggage./ I’m rough,/ I’m tough,/ And generally hot stuff,/ I’m the lightning express of cyclists./ I’ve brimstone to burn,/ Aside I ne’er turn,/ I’m the scorcher with wings on my wheels.”
The poem — “Hot Stuff” — appeared in the Daily Star in summer 1896, when the newspaper estimated there were 15,000 to 20,000 cyclists in a city of around 200,000 people.
By the 1890s, the “safety bicycle” was easy to ride, mass-produced, and starting to come down from a high price of $100 to $200. By the late 1890s, working people could rent bikes or buy them used. It was a revolution in personal transportation. In his book, Mackintosh notes that bicycle companies played off the misery of overcrowded streetcars.
The bicycle was a liberator for many — but it added tension and speed to Toronto’s streets.
On June 17, 1897, James Coates, cycling