This article is published in conjunction with Spacing issue 71, which focuses on Toronto’s waterfront. The issue will be available shortly at the Spacing Store and other fine bookstores, and in subscribers’ mailboxes. In 1841, Thomas Young — one of the first professional architects to practice in Upper Canada (Ontario)  — prepared a through what isContinue reading "Marking Lake Ontario’s lost shoreline"

Coated in grime and rust, Ontario Place is a sorry shadow of its once exuberant past. It’s little wonder the provincial government under Premier Doug Ford is targeting the site for redevelopment. For almost a decade, Toronto’s Space Age amusement…

No single development has transformed Toronto’s skyline quite like the Toronto-Dominion Centre. The arrival of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s twin office towers in the late 1960s signaled a dramatic and permanent change in the city’s prevailing…

There was no place quite like the Coal Bin for Toronto’s young singles in the early ‘70s. Located in the heart of the city’s booming downtown, surrounded by gleaming new office towers, the crowded 300-seat basement room was one of the first bars in…

It was about 1814 when John Vanzant buried one of his young children in a quiet corner of his Wellington Street property in the Town of York. The grave site, six feet long and four feet wide, was set back from the unpaved street in a small grove of…

After topsy-turvy election, Toronto ultimately opted to stick with the plain old status quo. Incumbent Mayor John Tory won a near historic landslide victory over his main rival Jennifer Keesmaat Monday night, taking more than 63 percent of the vote.…

It didn’t take long at all for newly-elected Ontario premier Doug Ford to plunge Canada’s largest city into a political and constitutional crisis. Since winning a majority for the Progressive Conservative party just over three months ago, ousting the …

In the seconds before his body hit the water, Barney Cipriani pictured his family. Tumbling and rolling through the air as he dropped 110 feet from the top of a scaffold, the 41-year-old from Detroit called to mind the faces of his three kids – two…

On the last Friday of July, less than six hours before the registration deadline to run for Mayor of Toronto, the city's former chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat, was at her office and checking Twitter. The night before, the Toronto Star had broken …

It’s not clear how Arthur Goss acquired his first camera. It was the 1890s and photography was a technical and expensive hobby for a teen recently sent into the workplace to help support his family following the death of his father. However he came …

Over a few terrifying minutes on Monday afternoon, a man in a rented cargo van committed one of the worst mass murders in Toronto’s history. Aiming the vehicle down crowded sidewalks for more than a mile, 25-year-old Alek Minassian struck and killed …

In March 2012, more than a hundred civil-engineering students at McMaster University crowded into a gymnasium at the school's Ivor Wynne Centre. At the head of the room was an anvil, and attached to the anvil were several long chains that ran the …

There’s a mystery on the walls of almost every Toronto subway station. It’s in the leg of the letter R, the tail of the Q and the angle of the S. The station name, etched in big, round characters along the length of the platform, is written in a …

The girl in the photo is facing the camera. She's wearing gloves, stout shoes and a long, button-up winter coat that reaches almost to her ankles. Her dark hair is tied back neatly. She may be dressed smartly, but she is surrounded by terrible …

In Toronto's west end, next to historic Fort York, a few hardy ice skaters glide and crunch around a figure-8 trail. A sharp wind blows off Lake Ontario making the air feel like 5°F, but that doesn't discourage them from making gentle circuits of the …

For years, arrivals to Toronto via its Pearson International Airport emerged into a sunless area beneath an overpass 14 miles from downtown. Until recently, anyone without a ride waiting for them outside the terminal would have to settle for a taxi, …

The Toronto subway system left the city on Sunday. After almost a decade of construction, a 6-stop extension of Line 1 breached the northern municipal boundary and traveled 1.5 miles into York Region, the area that adjoins Toronto’s northern …

Bill McNeil and Judy Perry were among the first people ever fixed up by a computer. In 1957, three decades before the first dating websites and 55 years before Tinder, the 33-year-old CBC radio reporter and the 29-year-old former president of the …

​On November 13, 1961, Toronto, Ottawa, Windsor, North Bay, and cities across Canada were destroyed by nuclear bombs. More than 2 million people were incinerated and another 1.5 million were burned or exposed to fatal levels of radiation in the …

The Camisso family never expected a parade when they bought their first house, a little suburban bungalow in the new Wishing Well Acres subdivision near Sheppard and Victoria Park Avenues, but that’s what they got. Metropolitan Toronto chairman Fred …