Sean Marshall
Late last year, I wrote about the closure of the Hamilton City Centre mall, the last of Ontario’s downtown Eaton Centres to open. But Hamilton’s failed shopping centre wasn’t the only old downtown mall to close in recent years: Sarnia’s Bayside Centre, opened in 1982 as the Sarnia Eaton Centre, was recently demolished, with a […]
Toronto, Ohio, that is.
Over a century ago, Jarvis Street was Toronto’s most fashionable address, and home to prominent families including the Masseys, who made their wealth from the farm equipment industry, and whose names live on through Massey Hall, Hart House, the Fred Victor Mission, and Massey College. The wide boulevards allowed for lush street trees to flourish, […]
Opened in 1990, the Hamilton Eaton Centre will close for good on Boxing Day, 2022.
The hidden stairways to Toronto’s railway heritage.
Ontario’s first roads were trade routes established by First Nations, including the Toronto Carrying Place, which linked Lake Ontario, Lake Simcoe, and Lake Huron. These routes followed the topology and existing water courses, making navigation simple and avoiding steep hills. Many modern streets, such as Toronto’s Davenport Road, follow these old trails. With the establishment […]
In the 1950s, the TTC numbered its bus and trolley coach routes in a systematic fashion. But with rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s, that scheme came to an end.
Union Station’s Great Hall is one of Toronto’s great indoor spaces. The station was constructed during Toronto’s first great building boom, in an era that began with E.J. Lennox’s Old City Hall (completed in 1899), and concluded with the completion of the Bank of Commerce Building, opened in 1931. Work on Union Station, built for […]
An interactive map depicting intercity rail services in Ontario and Quebec in 1955
It’s worth wondering why Toronto has a street named after a Scottish politician who had nothing to do with its history.
Sean Marshall