MUDDY YORK. RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT. TORONTO THE GOOD. THE CITY THAT CLOSES ON SUNDAY. THE CITY THAT WORKS. If Toronto’s history seems to be constructed mostly from myths, it’s probably because we’ve done such a bad job of telling its story. Building a city museum would be the best place to start correcting that. Every great city, and most of the not-so-great ones, have a museum devoted to city history. New York has several, as does London, but Toronto has nothing. The story of why this is so, it appears, could fill a museum of its own.
Exhibit A: The Canada Malting Silos sit abandoned at the foot of Bathurst Street. For the second time since being emptied in the 1980s, they’ve lost a chance at a new life. In the ’90s, they were the much-hyped future home of the Metronome project, whose dream of a Canadian music museum died two years ago when the city withdrew its support for the project but is mummified online in a website.
As the heritage site’s owners, the city bumped Metronome aside with the intention of building a museum devoted to city history on the site, but after proceeding with studies and community consultation, the project was allowed to quietly expire last fall, just as the search was about to start for investment partners.
The official story, according to Karen Carter, a museum administrator with the city’s culture department, is that it was a pre-emptive victim of the recession. “Due to the economic downturn in the fall, that process did not go forward, because the economic climate was such that it wasn’t seen as feasible that we’d get numbers from a developer that made sense, or that any developer would entertain such a venture at the time.” But she says that the city-museum project is still being pursued, albeit a bit more virtually. “Currently a lot of things are in a holding pattern with the built form, so we’ve been concentrating on the website.”
“WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACHIEVE WITH THIS ARTICLE?” asks Jane Beecroft, in her vast but cluttered office on the second floor of an old bank at Queen and Church.
Beecroft is the president of the Community History Project, and a veteran of the city’s heritage community who’s seen a long line of city museum projects come and go without ever breaking ground.
Old City Hall, Maple Leaf Gardens, St. Lawrence Hall, the foot of Yonge Street — the Canada Malting site has now joined this list of venerable sites, a series of ghostly footprints all over the downtown that were once considered potential homes for a museum devoted to the city of Toronto. The mills were the closest we’ve ever come, but a long history of unfulfilled promise has, quite understandably, left heritage and history boosters feeling defeated and demoralized when the subject comes up.
“Nothing ever happens,” Beecroft tells me. “There’s no political will to do it, and the politicians have all the power and all the money. It’s our money, and the public gets no benefit from it. There’s no museum for our natural heritage, for our archaeology, for our aboriginal heritage — nothing.”
Alec Keefer agrees. “There is no committment to heritage in the city,” he says “It doesn’t exist.” Keefer is an architectural historian and acting president of the Toronto Architectural Conservancy who also leads walking tours of city neighbourhoods. He’s a walking catalogue of the city’s built history, but he despairs of seeing a city museum getting built, as long as city government has anything to do with it.
“Where they have great city museums, it’s largely wealthy people who retire early and work for free,” Keefer says. “There is professional help, but if you want a great historical society, Cleveland, Ohio is a tour de force, and it’s almost all volunteers. That’s in their culture, that the not-for-profit side should be dominated by volunteers and philanthropy, and we have no philanthropy.”
IF YOU WANTED TO SEE what kind of museum Toronto could have, it’s probably best to go to Chicago, another lakefront town with a robust industrial past. Both Toronto and Chicago suffered massive fires at the height of their industrial zenith. In Chicago, the fires of 1871 and 1874 destroyed the holdings of the Chicago Historical Society. But the society rebuilt and thrived, and survives to this day as the Chicago History Museum, in the building it moved into in 1932, at the south end of Lincoln Park.
Over 150 years old, Chicago’s history museum is the sort of facility we can only dream of, housing a locomotive and a vintage streetcar in its newly renovated galleries, alongside a peerless collection of diaries and oral histories. Though it gets some money from the Chicago parks department, it’s an entirely independent institution — a good thing, according to chief curator Libby Mahoney.
“I’ve always felt that one of the advantages we’ve had is that we’re not part of the city bureaucracy,” says Mahoney. “It’s a bit riskier in terms of funding, but overall it’s more to our advantage.” And, she says, their independence allows them to tell stories that the city might not approve of, such as the 1968 protests of the Democratic National Convention that led to violent riots and the infamous “Chicago Seven” trial.
And then there’s the Pointe-à-Callière in Montreal, only 17 years old, and probably one of the most spectacular museums in the country, with its archaeological vault, built over the excavated remains of the old market square from which the city grew. Constructed almost entirely with funds from all three levels of government, it’s a very Canadian project — indeed, one might cynically even say it could probably only happen in Quebec.
“A big city like Toronto or Montreal is one that has a big impact on the development of the region, and it’s important to tell the story, whether it’s from archaeology or history,” says Christine Conciatori, a project manager at the museum. “I think there need to be different groups interested in keeping the history and heritage alive. There have to be the authorities, municipal and provincial, and they have to be sensitive to the idea, and want to give it value. Everybody has to be willing to give that value, and if you have a museum it’s a plus for tourism, it’s a plus for schools and the cultural life, and we all know that cultural tourism is important for cities.”
IT ALWAYS COMES DOWN TO MONEY. As long as the recession lasts, Toronto’s government can always plead poverty with projects like the city museum, but it raises the question — why was it never built when things were booming?
It isn’t for lack of material. Aside from the city’s archives — housed in their own building on Spadina Road (pictured above), and under the auspices of the city clerk’s office — there’s a warehouse on Atlantic Avenue full of artifacts, including the archives of the defunct Eaton’s department-store empire. There are the small collections held at the 10 heritage properties owned by the city — which includes historic homes like Mackenzie House, Spadina House, Colborne Lodge, Gibson House, as well as Montgomery’s Inn, and the site that the city’s Karen Carter describes as the “jewel in the crown”: Fort York.
It wasn’t always so — the old fort next to the Gardiner was downloaded before World War One by Ottawa on to the city, who reluctantly took it over after pressure from military heritage groups. It’s a national historic battleground right in the heart of a city’s downtown, and Alec Keefer isn’t alone in wondering how much the city would save if Ottawa took it over again. “If you figure out a way for the feds to agree with that, let me know,” says Karen Carter. “I would be very interested to know how that would happen.”
And then there are the many small private heritage groups in and around the city, such as Beecroft’s Community History Project, which owns and runs the Tollkeeper’s Cottage at Bathurst and Davenport with a staff of volunteers. Keefer wonders what happened with the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre that was supposed to open in the John Street Roundhouse (pictured) — it currently languishes online while the Roundhouse site resembles an abandoned model railway, with plastic-wrapped rolling stock and buildings strewn about the site, while rumours of turf wars percolate through the heritage community.
Keefer wonders if it might have been completed earlier if railway enthusiasts hadn’t had their energies dispersed in rail museums in Halton, Niagara and Elgin County.“It would be nice to have a train, but the Americans bought them all,” Keefer recalls. “We had the Roundhouse, but it’s a brewery now.”
LOOKING FOR A SILVER LINING to the bleak tale of our city museum, Keefer wonders why we need to worry about a location, a multimillion-dollar budget, or even a collection. He imagines a temporary, high-tech virtual museum devoted to the city’s crucial railway history located on the top floor of the Toronto Carpet Factory building at King and Mowat, overlooking two of the city’s rail corridors. “You’d stand or sit in a venue and then the four walls and ceiling would be about the railways. The train would go over you — that story, with no objects and no staff, would be every other Thursday at 10 o’clock — a two-hour experience.”
Karen Teeple, manager of the city’s archives, also likes the idea of a virtual museum. “I think we need to think beyond the actual physical building at this point.” Michael Comstock of the Old Town Toronto Alliance is hopeful that St. Lawrence Hall, in the heart of the city’s original downtown, will be revived as a venue, while Jane Beecroft supports a series of small museums around the city, each devoted to an aspect of its history — an idea she submitted to the city the last time they were shopping for suggestions, back in the ’80s.
If you were a bit paranoid, you might wonder if the institutional failure of will that’s stood in the way of a city museum might be because, perhaps just subconsciously, city bureaucracy is all too aware that it might be obliged to showcase the city’s long history of failures — the subways never built and the heritage buildings razed, our dismal relationship with expressways like the Gardiner, and the upper hand that developers have always had in building this very unplanned city. It’s a fascinating story, but hardly an edifying one.
Looking darkly over the history of an idea that’s never happened, Michael Comstock wonders if the city isn’t the only one putting obstacles in the path of a city museum. “When you say that Toronto doesn’t have a museum, it could be because we don’t want one.”