O OFED
G ALLEY
OT P · N R
PUBLICATION
JAN 2021
Dear Reader, I can’t tell you how excited I am to share The Toronto Book of Love with you. It tells the history of our city, from long before it was founded to the modern metropolis of today, through tales of romance, marriage and lust. It’s the amorous follow-up to my morbid history of the city, The Toronto Book of the Dead. Toronto, like every city, is made of more than just bricks and mortar. It has a romantic architecture, too; it’s been built on stories of devotion, longing and heartache as much as concrete and pavement. In this book, you’ll find lovestruck fur traders, infatuated rebels, and heartbroken spies, centuries of courtship, crushes and kisses that have helped to shape the Toronto we live in today. It’s a book I’ve poured my heart into, and I hope it finds a place in yours. With all my best,
THE TORONTO BOOK OF LOVE Adam Bunch Exploring Toronto’s history through tantalizing true tales of romance, marriage, and lust. Publication: Canada Jan 19, 2021 | US Feb 16, 2021 FORMAT 5 in (W) 8 in (H) 464 pages
Paperback 9781459746671 Can $21.99 US $19.99 £14.99
EPUB 9781459746695 Can $10.99 US $10.99 £ 7.99
PDF 9781459746688 Can $21.99 US $19.99 £14.99
KEY SELLING POINTS Toronto’s history comes alive in the amazing true stories of romance and lust,
carefully curated to offer a sweeping yet intimate overview of Toronto’s past
Author wrote The Toronto Book of the Dead, “a deeply researched book” said the
Toronto Star, and which won the 2018 Heritage Toronto Award
Author is the creator of The Toronto Dreams Project and Canadiana, a web series
that was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for Best Web Program or Series
BISAC HIS006000 – HISTORY / Canada / General HIS054000 – HISTORY / Social History
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adam Bunch is the author of The Toronto Book of the Dead, creator of the Toronto Dreams Project, host and co-creator of Canadiana, and a contributor to Spacing Magazine. His work earned an honourable mention for a Governor General’s History Award in 2012. Adam lives in Toronto.
STAY CONNECTED #BookofLoveTO torontodreamsproject.com @TODreamsProject TorontoDreamsProject todreamsproject
MARKETING AND PUBLICITY Publicity campaign to media and influencers Consumer, trade, and/or wholesaler advertising campaign
Social media campaign and online advertising Digital galley available: NetGalley, Edelweiss, Catalist
RIGHTS Worldwide ABOUT THE BOOK Toronto’s past is filled with passion and heartache. The Toronto Book of Love brings the history of the city to life with fascinating true tales of romance, marriage, and lust: from the scandalous love affairs of the city’s early settlers to the prime minister’s wife partying with rock stars on her anniversary; from ancient First Nations wedding ceremonies to a pastor wearing a bulletproof vest to perform Canada’s first same-sex marriage ceremony. Home to adulterous movie stars, faithful rebels, and heartbroken spies, Toronto has been shaped by crushes, jealousies, and flirtations. The Toronto Book of Love explores the evolution of the city from a remote colonial outpost to a booming modern metropolis through the stories of those who have fallen in love among its ravines, church spires, and skyscrapers.
IN THE SAME SERIES The Toronto Book of the Dead 424 pages | 9781459738065 Can $21.99, US $21.99, £ 14.99
For media inquiries, contact Publicity publicity@dundurn.com For orders in Canada, contact UTP Distribution 1-800-565-9523 For orders in the US, contact Ingram Publisher Services 1-866-400-5351
dundurn.com @dundurnpress
The
Toronto
Book of
LOVE
The
Toronto
Book of
LOVE
adam bunch
Copyright © Adam Bunch, 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright. Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Dominic Farrell Cover designer: Laura Boyle Cover image: shutterstock.com/mamita Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The Toronto book of love / Adam Bunch. Names: Bunch, Adam, 1980- author. Description: Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200342878 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200342959 | ISBN 9781459746671 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459746688 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459746695 (EPUB) Subjects: LCSH: Love—Ontario—Toronto—History. | LCSH: Interpersonal relations— Ontario—Toronto— History. | LCSH: Toronto (Ont.)—History—Anecdotes. Classification: LCC HQ801 .B86 2021 | DDC 306.7309713/54—dc23
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada. Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions. The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher. Printed and bound in Canada. VISIT US AT dundurn.com |
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For Amy
5
Contents Introduction
XI
FOUNDING 1. A Torch in the Night 2. Scandals of the French Empire 3. Four Weddings & A Fur Trader 4. The Fires of Elizabeth Simcoe 5. The New Year’s Duel 6. A Dangerous Charivari 7. Shipwrecks & Disgrace 8. The Inspector General of Private Accounts
1 9 25 39 59 67 73 93
THE WAR OF 1812 9. The Myth of the Stirrup Cup 10. Should I Fall 11. FitzGibbon’s Leave
101 112 121
DEMOCRACY 12. The Rebel Isabel 13. No Pity for the Blacksmith
131 147
14. A Box for Mary James 15. Your Movements Are Watched 16. Adultery at Osgoode Hall 17. The Blue School Boys
160 171 178 183
THE BOOMING METROPOLIS 18. Escape from Kentucky 19. The Suspicious Oyster Shop 20. The Winter Accident 21. The Mother of Confederation 22. The Tomb in High Park 23. The Secrets of Jalna 24. “A Cry from an Indian Wife” 25. The Queen of Hearts
199 215 226 233 240 249 258 267
THE GREAT WARS 26. A Five-Dollar Date 27. Longboat’s Widow 28. Hemingway Hates Toronto 29. The Great Stork Derby 30. The Incorrigible Velma Demerson 31. The Clay Ladies 32. Heartbroken Spies 33. Miriam’s Judaica 34. The Blizzard
283 293 302 309 314 326 336 353 366
THE MODERN CITY 35. Little Green 36. I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way 37. Elizabeth Taylor’s Love Nest
371 390 397
38. The Napalm Girl 39. Maggie at the El Mo 40. The Michaels Epilogue: The Ongoing History of Kissing in Toronto Acknowledgements Selected Bibliography and Further Reading About the Author
401 408 418
xx xx xx xx
5 INTRODUCTION
I
n 1908, Toronto was a booming metropolis. More than two hundred thousand people called it home. It was expanding quickly, swallowing up neighbouring vil lages. The first skyscrapers towered above the downtown core, streetcars rattled through rush hour, and horses were just beginning to give way to cars. Construction was everywhere: new train tracks, telephone wires, sewers and street lamps were being installed. And at the bottom of the harbour, eleven metres beneath the surface of the water, city workers were putting in a water pipe. But one winter day, not long before Christmas, they came to a sudden halt. They’d found something remarkable down there on the bottom of the lake, just to the east of Hanlan’s Point, near the Toronto Islands — something that had sat there, undisturbed, for thousands of years. In an instant, those construction workers were transported back in time. Eleven thousand years ago, Lake Ontario was much smaller than it is today. The water level was considerably lower, so the shoreline was
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five kilometres further south. The area where Toronto now stands was a vast plain of subarctic tundra and spruce forest. The last ice age had just ended, and as the enormous continental glacier that covered the land retreated, great prehistoric beasts moved in. Mammoths and mastodons, ancient caribou, muskox, and bison roamed where lawyers, accountants, and shopkeepers do today. With them came the Paleoamericans, ancestors of today’s Indigenous people, nomadic hunters with stoned-tipped spears. Archaeologists believe they were the very first human beings ever to set foot on that land. And on one particular day, all those thousands of years ago, a family walked across the place where a city of millions would eventually be built. They were heading north from the lake toward what’s now downtown Toronto. They were wearing moccasins, and, for at least a few steps, they walked through clay, leaving their footprints behind. Over the next few thousand years, the lake grew, filling with water until it became the Lake Ontario we know today. And those hundred footprints, preserved in that clay, were hidden from view. That is, at least, until 1908 when those city workers discovered them. It was easily one of the most spectacular archaeo logical finds in Toronto’s history, quite possibly the earliest evidence of humans ever found in the city. “It looked like a trail,” a city inspector told the Toronto Evening Telegram. “You could follow one man the whole way. Some footprints were on top of the others, partly
INTRODUCTION
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obliterating them. There were footprints of all sizes, and a single print of a child’s foot.” Many think of history as a dry list of dates and events; too often, that’s the way it’s presented. But the discovery of those few footprints on the bottom of the lake provided a visceral reminder of the truth, an instant connection to people who lived and died thousands of years before the modern city was founded. People who might have lived in a world of mammoths and spears, but who seem to have been a family — who surely loved each other as we do, felt the same feelings we feel today. Toronto, as it so often is, was in a rush in 1908. The city wanted to build a tunnel and it didn’t want to slow down. So, the workers kept going. They simply poured concrete over the footprints and continued on with their work. After being miraculously preserved for eleven thousand years, the precious evidence of those human lives was gone in an instant.
Toronto has earned its reputation as a city that doesn’t always appreciate its past. Throughout the twentieth century, as the city grew into a metropolis filled with millions of people, much of its heritage was lost. Victorian storefronts were brought down to make room for parking lots. Whole neighbourhoods were razed for new developments. Thousands of precious archaeological sites were dug up and destroyed. As a result, Toronto is a place where it can feel especially difficult to connect with the past. And yet, it
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still surrounds us. As I wrote in The Toronto Book of the Dead, there’s no escaping it: the city of today was created by all those who have come before us. We live in their houses. We drive on their roads. We’ve inherited their traditions and institutions. Toronto — like every city — is a city of the dead. And while it can sometimes be hard to remember in a city that doesn’t have the romance of cobblestone streets and ancient monuments, those ancestors were more than just names on a page. They were, of course, people much like us. Victorians teenagers got jealous, stodgy old politicians felt joy, and the most reserved gentlewoman could feel heartsick with longing or giddy with the rush of a new crush. Settlers fought duels over salacious insults, and fur traders shared tender moments on their wedding nights. Even centuries ago, Wendat hunters felt the excitement of a first kiss. And that ancient nomadic family, walking through soft clay in their moccasins, knew what it was to fall in love. Love stories are one of the most powerful ways we have to connect with those who have come before us. An anecdote about how our parents met. A grandmother’s engagement ring or an old photo from a wedding day. A dusty love letter dug out of an attic or found stashed away in a shoebox hidden at the back of a closet. These treasures have been passed down through generations, along with the stories connected to them, a way of knowing more about who we are and where we came from. The city has its own heirlooms. Toronto has been the scene of countless romances, and no matter how many
INTRODUCTION
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old buildings come crashing to the ground, the evidence is all around us. The city’s love stories can be found in a forgotten monument, or an old poem, or the name of a west-end street. They are kept inside a lovingly carved box and the glow of a neon sign. You can smell them in the fragrance of a garden that blooms every spring. Through them, the dead can be brought back to life, passions resurrected as their blood flows again in tales of romance, marriage, and scandal. And in sharing those love stories, we learn more about ourselves and our city. No love story is just a love story. It’s a reflection of a time and of a place. Through tales of infatuated rebels, lustful clowns, and heartbroken spies, we can learn more about how our modern metropolis came to be. About the passionate, romantic, scandalous events that made the city the place it is today. Because Toronto — like every city — is a city of love.
FOUNDING
5
1 A TORCH IN THE NIGHT
A
concrete goliath towers over the University of Toronto. It has stood there on the corner of St. George and Harbord Streets for half a century, a brutalist colossus soaring fourteen storeys into the air. Robarts Library has earned its nickname; Fort Book is a fortress filled with information, its thick grey walls protecting millions of volumes. Venture inside its imposing exterior and you’re standing at the heart of the largest academic library system in the country. And just off to one side, through an unassuming revolving door on the southern edge of the building, you’ll find a treasure trove: a collection of some of the oldest and rarest books to be found anywhere in the world. It’s an awe-inspiring space. A cathedral of paper and concrete. There between the formidable pillars are soaring bookshelves stretching high above your head, five storeys into the air. This is the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library. Nowhere in Canada is there a bigger public collection of rare books and manuscripts — hundreds of thousands of
2
FOUNDING
them. Here, you can find a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, an original edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia, and Charles Darwin’s own marked-up proofs. There’s a Babylonian tablet from nearly four thousand years ago. Ancient Egyptian papyrus. And five hundred historic valentines, too. Tucked away in the archives beneath the library, kept safe in its place among some of the most precious books on earth, you’ll find an old, brown, hardcover tome. It’s hundreds of years old, worn by time. And as you carefully crack it open, you’ll be transported to another age. There, among its yellowing pages, you’ll find a brief, fleeting glimpse of the romances that once played out in the place where Toronto now stands. Centuries before the modern metropolis was founded, the northern shores of Lake Ontario were home to the Wendat. (Europeans called them the Huron.) Where there are now parking lots and condo towers, there were once Wendat villages: clusters of longhouses built on the hillsides above rivers and creeks. Vast fields of maize stretched off into the distance, the corn intermingled with beans and squash. The rivers teemed with migrating salmon as travellers came and went in their birchbark canoes. Wendat hunters prowled the immense forests beyond the fields, where bears, wolves, cougars, and moose roamed between the great old oaks and pines. Eagles perched in the treetops. Endless flocks of passenger pigeons, an aerial ballet of flashing colour, filled the sky. Thousands of people could live in one of those villages, living on the land their ancestors had called home for hundreds and thousands of years.
A TORCH IN THE NIGHT
3
Many of them were young and in love. The worn pages of that old book in the Thomas Fisher Library give us one account of those love affairs. It was written by a French soldier: Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce de Lahontan. He was a baron who’d been sent to Canada to wage war against the First Nations, but never took to his mission. He witnessed terrible atrocities committed in the name of the French Empire, and could never understand why his country was waging war against the First Nations instead of partnering with them. When he was sent off to command fur-trading posts in the remote reaches of the Great Lakes, he spent years living among the Wendats, developing a deep appreciation for their culture — even if it was coloured by the prejudices of his time. “A solitary Life is most grateful to me,” he wrote, “and the manners of the Savages are perfectly agreeable to my Palate.” When Lahontan returned to Europe, he published a series of books about his travels through the Indigenous lands of North America. And three hundred years later, you can find some of his writing in the Thomas Fisher Library, including a book with a particularly catchy title: New Voyages to North-America: giving a full account of the customs, commerce, religion, and strange opinions of the savages of that country with political remarks upon the courts of Portugal and Denmark, and present state of the commerce in those countries, Vol II. Lahontan’s accounts aren’t always entirely reliable — he wanted to sell books and add to his own glory — and while he respected the culture of the First Nations much
4
FOUNDING
more than some of his countrymen did, his condescending enthusiasm helped lay the foundation for the “noble savage” stereotype that persists to this day. But his books provide one of the few written sources we have from the era when the longhouses of the Wendat were a common sight on the shores of the Great Lakes — including what happened when young couples fell in love. On some nights, he wrote, there was a light in the darkness: the flickering yellow and orange of a young man moving between the longhouses, a torch in his hand. When he found the house he was looking for, he would slip inside, and she’d be waiting there for him, in bed. By then, they would have already spent time together, chatting during the day, sharing stories and laughing, but never crossing a fine line. They wouldn’t have kissed or cuddled or talked about anything to do with romance or love. Those were topics best left for the hours after dark. There in the longhouse, he would approach her bedside, his torch still flickering in his hand. His heart must have been beating nervously in his chest as he waited to see what she would do. If she chose to reject him, she would simply keep hiding under her covers until he went away. But if her answer was yes, she would blow out the light of the torch as an invitation to join her in bed. The Wendat enjoyed freedoms that the French soldier found both astonishing and admirable. Young men and women were allowed to sleep together without any promise of marriage. Having multiple partners was fine. And control was ultimately in the hands of the women; they decided who they wanted to sleep with and when.
A TORCH IN THE NIGHT
5
“A young woman is allowed to do what she pleases;” Lahontan wrote, “let her conduct be what it will, neither father nor mother, brother nor sister can pretend to control her. A young woman, say they, is master of her own body, and by her natural right of liberty is free to do what she pleases.” Young lovers developed relationships over time, gradually getting to know each other before making a decision about their future. A man was often about thirty years old before he decided it was time to get married. And when he did, he would propose to the woman he loved by giving her a gift: a beaver robe or a wampum necklace. If she took it, they would sleep together for a few nights before she made her decision. If she accepted his proposal, the wedding was held in the home of their oldest family member: a great feast with dancing and singing. According to Lahontan, the ceremony took place after most of the groom’s guests had left. The couple stood on a mat, holding a long wooden rod between them as the elders spoke and the newlyweds danced and sang. At the end of the ceremony, the stick was broken into pieces: one for each of the witnesses. Even married couples kept their physical affections private. Public displays were frowned upon. And while finding time to be alone could be difficult in a longhouse filled with people, couples might slip away into the fields or forests for some privacy. Lahontan seems to have mistaken this reserve for a lack of passion. “They are,” he wrote, “altogether strangers to the blind fury we call love. They content
6
FOUNDING
themselves with a tender friendship … one may call their love simple goodwill.” But the Wendats’ oral history includes tales of heartbreak and passion. And Europeans were amazed by the depth of their mourning when someone they loved died. A widowed husband or wife would barely speak for the first ten days after the funeral, lying on a mat wrapped in furs, their faces pressed to the ground. “They do not warm themselves even in Winter,” one missionary explained, “they eat cold food, they do not go to the feasts, they go out only at night for their necessities.” The mourning would last a year beyond that as they avoided feasts and gave no greetings their neighbours. Remarrying was out of the question during that year. Many grieving widows blackened their faces and wore dishevelled clothes long after their husbands had died. But in Wendat villages, unlike the cities of France, death wasn’t the only way a marriage could end. Divorces were commonplace. If a woman found herself falling out of love or married to a husband who failed to live up to his commitments, she could simply end their marriage. And he could do the same. “They are very careful in preserving the liberty and freedom of their heart,” Lahontan marvelled, “which they look upon as the most valuable treasure upon Earth: from whence I conclude that they are not altogether so savage as we are.” Still, not everyone shared the baron’s appreciation for Wendat romance. The first explorers and fur traders to reach the Great Lakes were followed closely by missionaries: the Jesuits in their black robes and the
A TORCH IN THE NIGHT
7
Récollets in their pointed grey hoods. Priests were horrified by the freedom they found there. Determined to turn Wendats into proper Catholics, they did everything they could to end divorce and stamp out premarital sex. The Jesuits even collected donations from their supporters in France: money they could give to Wendat wives so they wouldn’t leave their husbands. The missionaries were thrilled to see converted young women adopting a gloomy air to discourage the attentions of young men. And they wrote glowingly of one man who rushed naked into the woods in the dead of winter, rolling around in the snow to quench his urges. Many, however, refused to give up their romantic freedom in return for the priests’ promises of what God would do for them in return. Battles over love and marriage became an important front in the missionaries’ quest to wipe out Wendat culture and assimilate them — the opening salvos in a cultural genocide that would last for centuries. The Wendat suffered terribly as the long arm of European empires reached west into the Great Lakes. The first wave of smallpox is thought to have killed half the population in just six years. And then came the Beaver Wars: bloody battles over the fur trade engulfed the region for the better part of a century, killing thousands more. By the time Lahontan visited the Wendat in the late 1600s, they’d been driven from the northern shores of Lake Ontario; today, you’ll find the Huron-Wendat Nation just outside Quebec City. But Toronto is still filled with reminders of the days when their ancestors lived — and loved — in the place where the city now
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stands. A burial mound in Scarborough. Gorgeous pottery and countless other artifacts lifted from the earth. The curve of a street that still follows the route of an ancient portage trail. And even a book written by a longdead French solider kept in the archives beneath a concrete library.