Mike Filey - From horse power to horsepower: toronto

TORONTO AND THE CAMERA SERIES

MIKE FILEY & VICTOR RUSSELL

FROM HORSE POWER
TO HORSEPOWER

TORONTO: 1890 1930

For Yarmila & Donna

And with thanks to

Staff of the City of Toronto Archives

Staff of the Toronto Sun Library

Charles Abel Photo Finishing and Irene

Pat Curran, CAA

Ted Wickson, Toronto Transit Commission

Nancy Hurn, Metro Toronto Archives

Bruce Humphrey, Humphrey Funeral Home

TORONTO AND THE CAMERA SERIES

MIKE FILEY & VICTOR RUSSELL

FROM HORSE POWER
TO HORSEPOWER

TORONTO: 1890 1930

Copyright Mike Filey and Victor Russell, 1993

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 brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press Limited. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Reprography Collective.

Design: Andy Tong
Editor: Judith Turnbull
Printed and bound in Canada by WEBCOM, Scarborough, Ontario

The publisher wishes to acknowledge the generous assistance and ongoing support of The Canada Council, The Book Publishing Industry Development Program of the Department of Communications, The Ontario Arts Council, The Ontario Publishing Centre of the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, and The Ontario Heritage Foundation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in the text (including the illustrations). The author and publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any reference or credit in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, Publisher

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Filey, Mike, 1941

From Horse Power to Horsepower: Toronto, 18901930

(Toronto and the Camera)
ISBN 1-55002-200-8

I. Transportation Ontario Toronto History. 2. Transportation Ontario Toronto Pictorial works. I. Russell, Victor L. (Victor Loring), 1948
II. Title.

Front cover photograph: St. Clair Avenue and Keele Street, c. 1925 (Mike Filey Collection)
Photo of Mike Filey (back cover): courtesy of the Toronto Sun
Photo of Victor Russell (back cover): courtesy of Records and Archives Division

We thank the Ford Motor Company of Canada and General Motors of Canada for permission to reproduce the Ford and Chevrolet ads that appear in this book.

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The six photographs in this section, which were taken by Frank W. Micklethwaite and date from circa 1890, show the city streets just before the onslaught of motorized vehicles not an auto or electric streetcar in sight, yet. The reader is challenged to identify the location of each photo. Stumped? The locations are listed on the last page of the book.

From the late 1890s to 1930, the city of Toronto underwent more change than at any period in its history. In a little more than three decades, the city was transformed from a moderately successful Victorian city to a 20th-century industrial urban centre. Throughout this period, the population grew unrelentingly, the area of the city expanded significantly (primarily through annexation of neighbouring municipalities), and the industrial sector of the citys economy established itself as pre-eminent.

As historian Jesse E. Middleton noted in 1923, Approaching the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, Toronto found itself no longer a compact little city, but a straggling big one, outgrowing its civic services as rapidly as a small boy outgrows his pantaloons (History of Toronto, 1923).

Successive municipal councils worked desperately to keep pace. Important changes were made in city governance, such as the first election of a board of control in 1903. Then, in 1912, the corporation underwent a major reorganization, creating a departmental structure that it hoped could provide such basic municipal services as roads, sewers, water, public transportation, and police and fire protection. Vast sums of money were committed to modernizing the city, and total capital expenditures grew from $5.6 million in 1900 to $82.5 million in 1930.

One of the key factors prompting all of this was the advent of the motor vehicle. Urban historians have recently begun to reevaluate the impact of motorized vehicles on the city, and there is a growing consensus that in the first three decades of this century the car, together with its cousins, the truck, the bus, and the electric streetcar, was the single most important factor in transforming the city from a 19th-century town to a 20th-century metropolis. Streets were paved, bridges were built, and traffic lights and signs were installed to organize the growing chaos. At the same time, car dealers and service centres became a regular feature of the streetscape, parking lots were opened, and Toronto experienced its first traffic jam. In response, local and provincial governments were forced to introduce a myriad of regulations, covering everything from licensing to speed limits. Public transportation was motorized, rationalized, and taken over by the municipality during this period and, with the addition of buses, began to play an important role in the movement of a burgeoning work force.

This book contains historical photographs of the city during these years. The emphasis is on cars, trucks, streetcars, buses all forms of the motorized vehicles that began to appear in increasing numbers on the streets of Toronto around the turn of the century. To some degree the book is a visual record of the various forms of transportation developed during the first 30 years of the 20th century. Fords Model T, Indian and Henderson motorcycles, the Witt streetcar, the Cadillac delivery truck, firetrucks, and even street-cleaning vehicles are all predecessors of the thousands of machines we now take for granted in our daily lives both at home and at work. However, when these vehicles appeared in public for the first time, they created excitement, if not wonder.