Windows onto Old Toronto

Sometimes I like to walk around Toronto streets and wonder what it all would have looked like in the beginning – back when it was called “York.” What was it like to walk along Bloor St. when St. Paul’s was a ‘countryside’ church and there was mostly wilderness to the north? Today, we walk the same streets under the same blue sky, but I imagine the city would be scarcely recognizable to an early settler.

This past week, I came across two resources that have been like a window onto the streets of old Muddy York. The first is a website dedicated to showcase historical maps of Toronto. Here is my favorite one:

Unlike a typical map, this gives you a perspective as if you were flying over Toronto Island looking north. It’s done in the most intricate detail – difficult to appreciate when you look at the whole. But you can zoom in to find each street and building as it appeared in 1876. Here’s what my neighborhood, St. James Town, looked like then:

Today it's home to about 24,000 souls living in 18 high-rise buildings. Imagine!

To get a perspective closer to the ground, there is a wonderful book titled Pen Sketches of Historic Toronto by J. Clarence Duff. The Red Lion Hotel, pictured below, gives a sense of the rural atmosphere on the city borders. The hotel was popular with locals, with its tavern and dance hall providing a warm atmosphere for social events.

I love this second one. The Church of the Holy Trinity was built on the outskirts of the city when it had about 20,000. Here, it’s pictured surrounded with peaceful cottages and greenery. 

 

What surrounds it today? That’s right, the Eaton Centre, the beating heart of our city shopping scene. At first it seemed to me a great shame that the church lies mostly forgotten when it used to be the focal point of the community around it. But perhaps that's what makes it a place of tranquility today. As summer is coming up, the leafy courtyard is well worth a visit for its own sake.

Sources

Historical Maps of Toronto. "1876 PA Gross Bird's Eye View of Toronto." Compiled by Nathan Ng.

J. Clarence Duff. Pen Sketches of Historic Toronto. Volume 2.

Catholicism in Quebec: Then and Now

Canada doesn’t stand much chance of ever winning a soccer title. But who needs soccer when your nation produced the Pope? Well, we came close (according to Maclean’s), but sadly cardinal Marc Oullet was bested by Jorge Bergoglio in last month’s papal election. The event got me thinking about Roman Catholicism in Quebec and how it developed to its state today.

Cardinal Marc Oullet with the former Pope Benedict XVI

From the founding of New France until the middle of the 20th century, the church was a defining feature of social life in Quebec. Religious leaders saw the new world as virgin territory, a haven of piety against the growing secularism in France. Did you know that Montreal was originally intended to be an outpost of religious devotion? 150 years later, while the Revolution raged in France, Catholic historians saw the hand of Providence in shielding religion in the St. Lawrence colony from secularism in the mother country. Even until 1960, Quebec had more clergy than both Ireland and France.

Today, the 80% of the people still identify with the Catholic Church, but only 20% attend church services. By Maclean’s assessment, they have become “allergic to the worship of their own deity.” So what happened? Essentially this: Quebec went though the same breadth of social change that took France 200 years. Let’s look at the forerunners of that change.

On August 1948, when Marc Oullet was just four years old, a group of painters in Montreal published the Refus Global. In the same tradition as The Communist Manifesto, they challenged the materialism and repression they saw in society. They accused the clergy of enslaving people in a regime of fear: “They have extorted with us a thousand times more than they ever gave.” Against this, they sound a call to freedom for the masses – “submissive slaves” – and their emotional development, material progress, and collective hope.

A sample work by one of the Montreal painters, Jean-Paul Riopelle. La Forêt Ardente

To be sure, power is often a corrupting force, and there’s no doubt that the artists had legitimate grounds for protest. At the same time, it would be unjust to forget that the church was the sole provider of social services to the sick, poor, and marginalized - not to mention the only caretaker of education for hundreds of years. I think it’s a shame that we're so quick to forget years of faithful service.

Well, what was the reaction to the Refus Global? It was condemned – universally. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines published articles overnight censuring the manifesto. Paul-Emile Bourdas, the lead writer, was fired from his position as an art teacher. The public wasn’t ready to question the church – not, at least, until the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.

You may remember the scene from The Devil Wears Prada: Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is consulting with her fashion minions when Andy (Anne Hathaway) snickers at their discussion over two apparently identical belts. Miranda turns and fixes her with an icy stare. In the dressing down that follows, she rebukes Andy for her false pride and points out that her ‘decision’ to buy the sweater she is wearing was, in fact, a choice made for her by the fashion industry. What was once avant garde trickled down into society where it shaped the fashion choices of Andy and millions of other unsuspecting people.

In much the same way, the Refus Global stands as the forerunner of secularism in Quebec. Though rejected at first, its ideas would later motivate the wholesale departure from the church – whether people were aware of it or not.

Sources:

Maclean’s article, “Cardinal Marc Oullet: The Canadian who Could be Pope,” gives interesting commentary on Oullet and the state of Catholicism in Quebec:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/02/18/the-canadian-who-could-be-the-next-pope-2/

You can read the full text of The “Refus Global” here:

http://thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/refus-global-manifesto

The Black Loyalists of Canada

I grew up thinking that Canada was the antithesis of the United States in its treatment of minority groups. In my mind, this was especially true of African Americans; the US had cotton plantations, while we had the Underground Railroad. Black History Month inspired me to do a bit of reading, and I’ve discovered that sometimes the true story is not so tidy. Let’s look back 230 years to the founding of Canada’s first black community – Birchtown, Nova Scotia.

Birchtown has its roots in the Loyalist migration out of the American colonies during the Revolutionary War. Those who refused to take up arms against the British, or at least doubted that the British were trying to enslave them, were ostracized by their communities. Strangely, the movement towards liberty and freedom had led to vicious persecution against all dissenting voices. Just over a decade later, the French Revolution would do much the same.

Those among the 70,000 who remained loyal to Britain came from all levels of society. They were soldiers, labourers, farmers, artisans, merchants. They were Dutch, English, colony-born, and German; Quakers, Methodists, and Huguenots. And among their number were 3,000 African Americans.

During the Revolutionary War, British authorities had encouraged slaves to leave their American masters, and they were promised freedom if they fought for the crown. Many took up the offer, and after the war was over, migrated north to find refuge in the remaining British colonies. Most of their number gathered together to settle in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. True to their word, the authorities had granted them land – albeit, smaller plots in less desirable areas – and there they settled on the other side of the Shelburne harbour. They named their community Birchtown in honour of the British commander who had authorized their passage from New York.

A black woodcutter in Shelburne, Nova Scotia - 1788

Like us, they wanted to live free of prejudice, to own property, to give a promising future to their children. They arrived in Nova Scotia dreaming of a “promised land” – and, appropriately, one of their prominent leaders was named Moses. This Moses Wilkinson was a former slave and fiery Methodist preacher. Moses helped to lead spiritual revival in Birchtown, and his presence led several young men to take up the ministry as well. And his labours did not pass unnoticed. So many of their number belonged to the Methodist denomination that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, learned of the community and wrote to encourage white Methodists in Shelburne:

The work of God among the blacks in your neighbourhood is a wonderful instance of the power of God; and the little town they have built is, I suppose, the only town of negroes that has been built in America – nay perhaps in and part of the world, except only in Africa… Give them all the assistance you can in every possible way.

Sadly, Wesley’s views were not shared by many of the white settlers in the area. Residents of Birchtown faced oppression, and even violence at the hands of their neighbours. They weren’t used to the Canadian winter, and their poor farmland was scarcely able to produce a crop. To sustain themselves, they were often forced to work in the lowest jobs for insulting wages. Perhaps the strongest testimony to their conditions was that, when the opportunity came for free passage to Sierra Leone (the new British colony), more than one third of Birchtown took up the offer.

I’ve come away from this story thinking that we Canadians have a small share of moral high ground on this topic. I am proud of the Underground Railroad, but we must grant that there is more to the story than that.

Sources

History of the Canadian Peoples, by Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel

The Structure of Canadian History, by J.L. Finlay and D.N. Sprague

Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People http://blackloyalist.com/canadiandigitalcollection/index.htm

"Adventurers in Paint": The Group of Seven

“Painting the Canadian scene in a Canadian fashion” was the vision of the artists who came to call themselves The Group of Seven. Between the years of 1920 and 1931, they held eight exhibitions of their works, and forever changed the landscape of Canadian painting. Rather than bore you with lots of text, today I want to let their paintings speak for themselves. Here are seven paintings by seven great Canadian artists!

The Edge of the Maple Wood

This first painting is by A.Y. Jackson. It might look like a muddy hill to us, but to the young Canadian artists at that time, it was “like a glowing flame packed with potential energy and loveliness.” That quote comes from Arthur Lismer, who saw the painting at the 1913 exhibition of the Ontario Society of the Arts with friends J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson, and Lawren Harris. They were so impressed that they invited Jackson to join their circle.

The Guide's Home

This painting by Arthur Lismer really shows the group’s debt to French Impressionism. Artists of that school used dabs of paint to express light and movement. With this painting, you can almost hear the rustle of the wind in the birch trees and feel the crunch of fall leaves underfoot.

First Snow, Lake Superior

Lawren Harris was a leader and visionary in the circle of young artists. One of the group wrote that art, for Lawren Harris, “was almost a mission. He believed that a country which ignored the arts left no record of itself worth preserving.” This painting of the north shore of Lake Superior shares the same smooth, rounded surfaces that are characteristic of his other works. He has simplified the ruggedness of the landscape to suggest a purified spiritual place.

Bisset Farm

Most of the Group of Seven painted with oil on canvas, but Franklin Carmichael developed a unique style with watercolour on paper. I like how this one displays the grandeur of the hills that rise high in the backdrop, set over the small, tenuous presence of the family farm in the foreground. Still to this day, our presence in Canada is small indeed in relation to the vast wilderness beyond our cities.

The Cloud, Red Mountain

Unlike most the group, Fred Varley preferred painting people more than lakes and trees. But when he took a teaching position in British Columbia in 1926, he couldn’t resist the grandeur and beauty of the Rocky Mountains. He wrote enthusiastically to a friend “British Columbia is heaven.” At first, I didn’t like The Cloud, Red Mountain, but it has grown on me since. Varley lifts our gaze to the sky above the mountains, with its rich deep blue in contrast with the sun-touched clouds.

Fire-Swept Algoma

The artists didn’t always paint scenes of arresting beauty; sometimes they turn our attention to the wild or destructive power of nature. In this composition by Frank Johnston, we see a hillside ravaged by forest fire. What I like here is how the artist shows us both the fierce and regenerative side of nature. If you look closely, you can see green blades of grass rising up from the forest floor.

Fine Weather, Georgian Bay

Georgian Bay was a favorite subject for the artists. Some of their most memorable works show windswept trees clinging for dear life to the rocky shoreline. In this one though, James MacDonald shows a rare view of the Bay in peaceful weather. The foreground shows three friends together enjoying the wide expanse of sun and sky, giving a vivid picture of how the artists saw themselves and their work. On a camping trip to Algonquin Park with his friends Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson, and Arthur Lismer, Fred Varley wrote that they were “all working to one big end… emptying ourselves of everything except that nature is here in all its greatness.”

Sources:
The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, by Anne Newlands
The Art History Archive, "The Group of Seven." http://goo.gl/vYfdS