↗ View this article in the original PDF newsletter
Sources & Further Reading
ome lovely new little parks have been S installed on Liberty Street by the City and the local Business Improvement Association. Designed by PLANT Architects, they include congenial benches and carefully selected plantings, all in a shady row on the south side of the street. The project was built by CSL Group for a construction cost of about $540,000. Its defining feature is the Timeline (p.13), a set of 19 granite blocks each engraved with two lines about an aspect of the history of Liberty Village. They’re an expensive lesson on how useful it is to actually read a book or two before literally carving nonsense into stone (more on this below). Plantings are a mixture of perennials and evergreens arranged with all four seasons in mind. Mostly native to Ontario, they were chosen for their attractiveness to bees and butterflies and their tolerance of shade and salt.
The hefty benches are made of reclaimed European hardwood salvaged from ports in the Netherlands. About 200 years old, they were originally mooring posts. The timber is bolted to the sidewalk through powder-coated steel brackets. The plantings are a deft mixture of evergreens (for the winter) and perennials that bloom throughout the spring and summer. Matthew Hartney, the designer, explains they were chosen “for their resiliency in an urban environment, pollinator attraction, salt and shade tolerance, and maintenance.” Most species are native to Ontario and will, he hopes, “mature to create dense, verdant gardens.” The stone used for the Timeline is Picasso
granite with a flamed finish, quarried Place trail is established by the Wendat, in Quebec. HGH Granite of Dundas, linking Ouentironk (Lake Simcoe) to Ontario, did the engraving, and it is Ontari’io (Lake Ontario).” Nine thousand beautiful. years ago, the shoreline of Lake Ontario It’s a shame that so many of the was about five kilometres south of its assertions of the Timeline are wrong. present location and Lake Simcoe did Before committing the work to stone, the architects were assured by the City’s the architects were assured project manager that the Timeline had … that the Timeline had been vetted by the City historian. That been vetted by the never happened and it’s obvious that no other professional historian saw it either. City historian The project manager involved – lucky for him – no longer works for the City. not exist. The geological reasons for this “We didn’t have a single guiding source,” are explained in the beautifully designed explains the author, who generously HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois provided his research to the F&D. By to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets, edited this, we understand him to mean that he by Wayne Reeves and Christina Palassio did not actually read a book on the history (Coach House 2008). of Toronto. Much of the industrial and As for the Wendat (the Huron), scholars railway history of the area was reliably agree that they began to emerge as a taken from articles (many by Steve Otto) distinct people, along with the Neutral, in the F&D and from period plates of Petun and, south of Lake Ontario, the Goad’s insurance atlas. Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and The rest was cobbled together from BIA Mohawk, around the year 1300. Even an pamphlets, Wiki articles, fragments of author fully sympathetic to their story – reports and a few journal articles. Scouring Kathryn Magee Labelle, in Dispersed But the internet – rather than visiting the library Not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenthand getting some guidance – only works if Century Wendat People (UBC 2013) – one discriminates among the sources and begins her chronology of the Wendat in already has an outline knowledge of the 1400. And the source cited by the author, subject. Although one fine account of the which is an informal account by an Ottawa city’s history, particularly for prehistoric high school teacher, prudently concedes – times – Ron Williamson’s Toronto: An writing of the ancient makers of the trail Illustrated History of Its First 12,000 Years – that “we have no way of knowing who – appears among the author’s sources, it these people were.” He’s right. clearly had no effect. The next entry for 1650 is true enough, The very first entry of the Timeline is although “conflict” understates what was a case in point. Reaching back to 7,000 essentially genocidal warfare: literally BCE, it says “The Toronto Carrying
granite with a flamed finish, quarried Place trail is established by the Wendat, in Quebec. HGH Granite of Dundas, linking Ouentironk (Lake Simcoe) to Ontario, did the engraving, and it is Ontari’io (Lake Ontario).” Nine thousand beautiful. years ago, the shoreline of Lake Ontario It’s a shame that so many of the was about five kilometres south of its assertions of the Timeline are wrong. present location and Lake Simcoe did Before committing the work to stone, the architects were assured by the City’s the architects were assured project manager that the Timeline had … that the Timeline had been vetted by the City historian. That been vetted by the never happened and it’s obvious that no other professional historian saw it either. City historian The project manager involved – lucky for him – no longer works for the City. not exist. The geological reasons for this “We didn’t have a single guiding source,” are explained in the beautifully designed explains the author, who generously HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois provided his research to the F&D. By to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets, edited this, we understand him to mean that he by Wayne Reeves and Christina Palassio did not actually read a book on the history (Coach House 2008). of Toronto. Much of the industrial and As for the Wendat (the Huron), scholars railway history of the area was reliably agree that they began to emerge as a taken from articles (many by Steve Otto) distinct people, along with the Neutral, in the F&D and from period plates of Petun and, south of Lake Ontario, the Goad’s insurance atlas. Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and The rest was cobbled together from BIA Mohawk, around the year 1300. Even an pamphlets, Wiki articles, fragments of author fully sympathetic to their story – reports and a few journal articles. Scouring Kathryn Magee Labelle, in Dispersed But the internet – rather than visiting the library Not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenthand getting some guidance – only works if Century Wendat People (UBC 2013) – one discriminates among the sources and begins her chronology of the Wendat in already has an outline knowledge of the 1400. And the source cited by the author, subject. Although one fine account of the which is an informal account by an Ottawa city’s history, particularly for prehistoric high school teacher, prudently concedes – times – Ron Williamson’s Toronto: An writing of the ancient makers of the trail Illustrated History of Its First 12,000 Years – that “we have no way of knowing who – appears among the author’s sources, it these people were.” He’s right. clearly had no effect. The next entry for 1650 is true enough, The very first entry of the Timeline is although “conflict” understates what was a case in point. Reaching back to 7,000 essentially genocidal warfare: literally BCE, it says “The Toronto Carrying 250 Fort York Blvd, Toronto, Ontario M5V 3K9 info@fortyork.ca www.fortyork.ca
thousands of people were slaughtered or captured, and the rest – perhaps 8,000 more – were forced to either flee or be absorbed into one of the nations of Haudenosaunee. Diseases from Europe devastated all of the First Nations around the Great Lakes and were one of the causes of the fighting (see “Competing Pasts: Narratives of Haudenosaunee warfare in Ontario during the 1600s,” F&D July 2020). Both of these entries to the Timeline reflect the need to include the history of the area before the arrival of the French. Indeed, the author tells the F&D that “consultations with Indigenous elders … informed the content.” But the Humber River and its portage trail are about ten kilometres from Liberty Village. The Wendat, when their Confederacy was destroyed in 1649, were living between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe in what we call Huronia. Closer to home, the Mississaugas had a council grounds on what is now the site of CAMH – a story told in the previous F&D – and, given the proximity of the lake and Garrison Creek, the likelihood of ancient villages or campsites in or not far from Liberty Village is fairly high. For some insight into the possibilities, see A Master Plan of Archeological Resources for the City of Toronto (August 2004), highlighted in the summer 2021 issue of Spacing magazine and available at www. toronto.ca. The Timeline’s entry for 1793 is wrong in one important detail: the fort was built first, and the town then grew up on the harbour to the east. A subtler point is the author’s misunderstanding of the many meanings of the word “garrison.” It is, first, a body of troops permanently stationed somewhere; second, what the townspeople of York called the collection of buildings that became Fort York; and third – how it’s used here – a corruption of Military Reserve, sometimes called the Garrison (or Ordnance) Reserve, which was the open land mostly west of the fort that now includes Liberty Village. The Fife and Drum 11
The Battle of York was, yes, in April 1813, and fought largely on what’s now the CNE grounds, but the rest of this entry is nonsense. The Military Reserve had long since been cleared of trees, for many reasons, and there was no shipbuilding to speak of – except for one sorry attempt, reduced to charcoal on the day of the battle. We can skip ahead to the First World War. That “most industries in Liberty Village are adapted for the production of armaments, weapons, and bombs” is also nonsense. “Armaments” is a fancy word for weapons; none were made in Liberty Village during the first war; and “bombs” – understood to be munitions that are dropped from aircraft – have never been made here. During the first war Inglis began making artillery shells, with indifferent success; a nearby plant made components for them; and the Toronto Carpet Factory is said to have made blankets and greatcoats. The memorable phrase “armaments, weapons and bombs” originates in a paper written in 2007 by a German masters student working on an environmental studies degree at York University. The essay by Thorben Wieditz (which is about the neighbourhood’s gentrification) is also the apparent source of the entry for 1939-1945, which says local factories were “converted once more for wartime defence production.”
The production of arms and munitions the north-east corner of Liberty Village in Liberty Village during the Second and its head office building still stands World War was orders of magnitude on King Street. How could it be left out? greater than 30 years earlier, famously “We looked at this,” explains the author, including the Bren light machine gun. “but the old Massey-Harris buildings are Inglis, workplace of the Bren Gun Girl – not actually within the Liberty Village the original of America’s Rosie the Riveter BIA limits.” A more vivid example of the – made 186,000 of them, nearly a third influence of business on public history of the needs of Commonwealth armies could hardly be found. worldwide. It also made a similar number As lame as the author’s research was, he of 9 mm pistols and during the war was and PLANT Architects were assured by a City official that their work had been Massey-Harris was left out seen by professionals and was good to go. And so they had these wonky fragments of history engraved in stone and installed among Toronto’s proudest contributions in the parks. The Timelines are right at to victory. (For more about this, see the feet of everyone resting on a bench. “Second World War industry surrounded Some of these stones need to be replaced, Fort York,” F&D December 2019.) and the BIA Office of the City is on the Finally, we may note what is missing hook for that. But first, the text needs to from the Timeline: Massey-Harris, once be thoroughly reworked by a professional the greatest producer of farm equipment Toronto historian. in, as they said, the British Empire. Its factories sprawled across eleven acres in
Featuring a selection of articles from the past 20 years of
Original printed pages
