Canadian Studies

From factory to condo: U of T students explore 'hidden histories' of Toronto lofts, other real-estate projects

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 20:43:43 +0000

From factory to condo: U of T students explore 'hidden histories' of Toronto lofts, other real-estate projects

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 12/10/2019 - 15:43

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The Candy Factory Lofts on Queen Street is one of several buildings that U of T undergraduate students researched as part of a digital mapping project (photo by David Cooper/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Jovana Jankovic

Topic

City & Culture

Canadian Studies

Cities

Faculty of Arts & Science

New College

Undergraduate Students

University College

Many of Toronto’s century-old industrial buildings have been converted into stylish – and expensive – residential lofts. The Candy Factory Lofts on Queen Street is one example, located across the street from Trinity Bellwoods Park and an array of upscale eateries, boutiques and cocktail bars.

Once a dilapidated space in an “undesirable” part of the city, the building’s 4,000-square-foot two-level penthouse suites now sell for millions of dollars in what Vogue magazine has called one of the “coolest” neighbourhoods in the world.

But the story of how Victorian-era factories and warehouses like this one became expensive condominiums doesn’t travel in a straight line.

In 2018, a group of undergraduate students at the ��Ƶ, led by Siobhan O’Flynn of University College’s Canadian Studies program, set out to uncover the histories hidden behind these buildings’ facades. Her third-year class on digital media created Hidden Histories: Labour to Lofts, a digital mapping project where students dove into archives to reconstruct the stories of industrial buildings in Toronto like the Candy Factory Lofts.

The information uncovered by O’Flynn and her students is presented through an interactive mapping tool called ArcGIS, which facilitates the creation of data-driven, shareable and interactive maps that are user-friendly and visually attractive. The following Toronto buildings are profiled as part of the project:

O’Flynn is a scholar and consultant who works with digital and interactive storytelling tools. She regularly incorporates original research and digital humanities methods into her undergraduate courses, such as in 2017’s award-winning Kensington Market app.

The Hidden Histories project was an ideal fit for Manik Saraf, a recent computer science graduate at University College with interests in social sciences and digital media production.

“As a computer scientist, I definitely think of myself as a ‘digital maker,’ so I was very interested in applying that mindset to this project,” says Saraf.

Saraf had already taken another class with O'Flynn, “and really enjoyed her teaching style,” he says. “This project allowed me to enhance my research skill set in a unique way. It also piqued my interest in local history, giving me a better understanding of the city I call home – from both a cultural and industrial perspective.”

Saraf’s experience aligns well with O’Flynn’s teaching goals, which help students increase their digital literacy, particularly digital research and data management.

“My goals are to introduce students to the digital tools and skills that will bridge into their future careers,” says O’Flynn. “Contributing to projects that live beyond the duration of a course is a rare opportunity for undergraduates.”

A condo unit inside the Candy Factory Lofts on Queen Street (photo by PSR Brokerage)

Students were assigned to research specific locales in the Hidden Histories project. Benjamin Rabishaw, a member of New College who recently graduated with a double major in English and human biology, researched the Reliable Toy Building in what is now known as Leslieville – named after the Leslie family, major property owners east of the Don River in the early 20th century.

“I learned about an unexpectedly thrilling fight between the original builder, Phillips Manufacturing, and the Reliable Toy Company, which aggressively took the site over after the Second World War,” says Rabishaw.

Rabishaw delved into municipal tax assessment documents, fire insurance maps and city directories from the late 19th and 20th centuries to trace the genesis of not only the building itself but the development of its surrounding areas –from a neighbourhood of nurseries and wooden cottages to the expansion of the Grand Trunk Railway and other large-scale industrial endeavours.

The Reliable Toy Company's former home in Leslieville was researched as part of the Hidden Histories project (photos by Toronto Public Library and Urban Landmark Realty)

“Researching this project was like watching a movie at only one frame every few minutes,” says Rabishaw. “There is a fair amount of drama in these snapshots when one stitches them together and imagines these transitions taking place in real time to real humans.”

The issues explored by the Hidden Histories project aren’t limited to architectural history. The project shed light on many related topics, including changes in cost of living, labour rights, workplace safety legislation, colonization and the history of industrial buildings as sites of work and union activism.

“This course has absolutely influenced my goals for the future,” says Rabishaw. “I want to discover more about working with data, especially to uncover human stories in unconventional places.”

OISE library brings influential voices from Canada's past to life through digitization of tapes from 1970s (with video)

geoff.vendeville — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 20:30:35 +0000

OISE library brings influential voices from Canada's past to life through digitization of tapes from 1970s (with video)

geoff.vendeville Fri, 09/13/2019 - 16:30

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OISE librarians Nailisa Tanner and Jenna Mlynaryk digitized and published recordings of interviews between famous Canadian politicians and Richard Alway, then a graduate student in history at U of T (photo by Johnny Guatto)

Topic

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

U of T Libraries

For decades, reel-to-reel tapes of conversations with some of the leading Canadian politicians of a generation sat in a corner of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, all but forgotten.

But this summer, librarians at OISE have digitized and published the recordings to give the public easy access to wide-ranging interviews with leaders including former prime ministers John Diefenbaker and Lester B. Pearson; Tommy Douglas, the Saskatchewan premier and former NDP leader who’s recognized as the father of universal health care; and Judy LaMarsh, a former secretary of state and the second woman to serve in federal cabinet.

The tapes were made in the early 1970s, shortly after the centennial of Confederation, to enliven Canadian history and civics classes in response to a blistering report on the state of education in these subjects. Edited versions of the tapes were sold through OISE until the early ‘80s for classroom use. The full recordings have never been available in their entirety, until now.

Nailisa Tanner, the collections and outreach librarian at OISE, and Jenna Mlynaryk, a master’s student in library and information sciences, put the unedited tapes online, along with transcripts and links to further reading. The originals will go to the ��Ƶ Archives at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for safekeeping.

The recordings – which range in length from 45 minutes to three hours – offer insights into these historical figures’ personalities that can’t be gleaned from a textbook, including the sound of their voice and manner of speaking.

“There’s a lot of information that’s difficult to convey in writing,” Tanner says. Through the OISE tapes, “we get more of a candid sense of who these politicians were. For example, we get a sense of the way John Diefenbaker was a really great storyteller, very animated and charismatic.”

The interviews were recorded in reaction to an indictment of Canadian history and civics education in the mid-to-late 1960s by A.B. Hodgetts, a teacher at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ont. He and his staff carried out extensive research involving questionnaires, interviews with students and teachers, and direct observation of classes in 247 schools in cities across the country. They found the courses to be almost universally “antiquated” and “dry-as-dust,” emphasizing rote memorization over actual learning.

OISE, then in its infancy, published the Hodgetts report under the name What Culture? What Heritage? and it became an unlikely bestseller.

Richard Alway, then a graduate student in history at U of T and an assistant at OISE, undertook an ambitious project: to record interviews with some of the top history-makers of his day to enrich Canadian studies classes.

“Here we are basically five decades, half a century, later,” says Alway, now 79 years old, in a video interview. “Therefore now they [the tapes] have another role. Indeed they are history themselves, they are part of the record.”

Alway later became the first lay president and vice-chancellor of St. Michael’s College at U of T.

Listeners should think critically about the interviews, he says, as they would other historical documents.

Take the interview with Diefenbaker, for example. “One of his great attributes and, I think, attractions for people was that he was such a terrific storyteller,” Alway says.

“All storytellers tend to embroider, at least around the edges if not even more centrally, on the theme that they’re portraying,” he adds.

Many of the conversations are significant today for different reasons than they were decades ago when they were recorded, Alway says.

In 1973, when he interviewed LaMarsh, one topic of conversation was a health plan by the Pearson government. But contemporary listeners may be more interested to hear her views on being a woman in politics and the law, which still resonate.

LaMarsh tells Alway that the media treated her as “a kind of a freak.”

“Things that a man could say, out of my mouth sounded unladylike and sort of un-soft and un-gentle, and it startled people and accordingly I was considered to be a hybrid.”

LaMarsh tells Alway that Pearson was less than enthusiastic about a proposal to hold a Royal Commission on the Status of Women. “He was not in favour of it – he was very irritated at me by my constant references to it and constant agitation for it,” she says.

The commission was nevertheless established in 1967. Three years later, it produced a report with 167 recommendations to reduce gender inequality.

Judy LaMarsh, one of Alway's interview subjects, in 1969 (photo by Reg Innell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Tanner says the LaMarsh interview stood out to her. “She talks about being perceived by the media as too loud, too shrill, not feminine enough – these are all things women in public still hear today.”

Robert Bothwell, the May Gluskin chair in Canadian history at U of T and author of The Penguin History of Canada, says the interviews may be useful to historians. “What you’ve got here is effectively eyewitness testimony,” he says.

The recordings can be helpful resources for teachers who want to bring the past to life. Bothwell has consulted videos of former prime minister Mackenzie King on YouTube, he says, just “to hear how the old boy sounded” so he could imitate him in lecture and get a chuckle out of his students.

Rose Fine-Meyer, in OISE’s department of curriculum, teaching and learning, says the criticism of history teachers in the 1960s wasn’t entirely fair. At the time, few teachers had access to resources beyond textbooks and encyclopedias, she says. But times have changed.

“If someone today is using a textbook and following it chapter by chapter, that is shocking,” she says.

History teachers have a wealth of resources at their disposal, including trips to museums or archives and sites with lessons plans. She adds that modern textbooks represent a wider array of voices and perspectives, some of which have been previously overlooked, such as those of Indigenous Peoples, Black Canadians and women.

The OISE tapes are one more arrow in teachers’ quiver, she says – including her own. She plans to use the interviews in classes meant for aspiring high school history teachers.

“I’m going to see what they craft out of [them] as lessons that they could use themselves and then I’m hoping they can put those into practice,” she says.

Two student-developed digital media projects recognized with heritage awards

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 04:00:00 +0000

Two student-developed digital media projects recognized with heritage awards

noreen.rasbach Wed, 03/14/2018 - 00:00

Cutline

U of T Scarborough students receive their heritage award from Lt.-Gov. Elizabeth Dowdeswell and Ontario Heritage Trust chair Harvey McCue (courtesy of the Ontario Heritage Trust)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

Sociology

U of T Scarborough

Undergraduate Students

An augmented reality app that guides users through a dynamic tour of 12 locations in Toronto’s historic Kensington Market.

A podcast that explores the experiences of Indigenous and immigrant communities living in Scarborough.

The two projects developed by students as part of ��Ƶ courses were honoured recently with the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award for Youth Achievement from the Ontario Heritage Trust.

Lt.-Gov. Elizabeth Dowdeswell and Ontario Heritage Trust chair Harvey McCue presented the awards to some of the students behind the projects at a ceremony recently at Queen’s Park, an annual event that recognizes contributions to cultural and natural heritage conservation, environmental sustainability and biodiversity by individuals and groups from across Ontario.

The Kensington Market: Hidden Histories app, which brings to life the layers of stories embedded in the area, was made possible by students in University College’s Digital Tools in a Canadian Context course. A companion online interactive map archives histories of 32 locations.

U of T expert on President Donald Trump’s first week in office

Romi Levine — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 20:50:47 +0000

U of T expert on President Donald Trump’s first week in office

Romi Levine Fri, 01/27/2017 - 15:50

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U.S. President Donald Trump meets with British Prime Minister Theresa May at the White House during a two-day visit to the United States (photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

Global Lens

Donald Trump

U.S. politics

Faculty of Arts & Science

Geography and Planning

Canadian Studies

Subheadline

Protectionist policies “will be really damaging for the United States”

President Donald Trump has spent his first week in office putting the wheels in motion on a number of his campaign promises – from building a wall along the country's border with Mexico to scrapping Obamacare.

Most of these actions came in the form of executive orders – documents that serve as legally-binding directives to government agencies to put policy into practice.

U of T News spoke with Emily Gilbert, an associate professor of geography and planning and Canadian studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science, about the implications of these executive orders and how Canada will be affected by these sweeping changes.

How will Trump’s executive order to build a wall bordering Mexico play out?

It's interesting what the executive order actually does because it's a statement by the president about intentions. But how it actually plays out is much, much more complicated.

I think the way the executive orders are made suggests a different kind of mentality around government. The devil will be in the details – it will be really interesting to see how it gets built and how that affects relations with Mexico both with respect to mobility across the border and trade.

Trump has made it clear his administration will be tightening its immigration policies – what are the implications for Canada and other countries?

They're troubling both for the United States and what it's come to represent, but also for our relationship with the United States and how equally implicated Canada is around border issues.

If there’s going to be a cancellation of visas for countries that are identified as harbouring terrorism, which is one thing Trump has said he's going to do, Canada is already implicated in the United States with our visa programs with vetting visa applicants according to U.S. standards. So if there's a moratorium from the United States on visas from certain countries, that could have immediate ramifications for Canada in terms of our own visa application process.

The other concern is the wall if it gets built. It has an impact on the mobility of Mexicans and Latin Americans into the United States and into Canada in terms of our openness to people from those countries coming as migrants or asylum seekers. We have legislation with the United States that prohibits refugees from claiming asylum at our land ports of entry, which is why we have seen people now circumventing the ports of entry and trying to come across the border in undocumented ways.

The third concern is that we are now working with the United States on shared entry-exit system. We are sharing information about individuals who cross at the land border and using the document of entry as the record of departure. If the U.S. is moving to harden their records of entry and exit, we are implicated in those processes and are also complicit in the kinds of ways of exclusion that will be enacted in the entry-exit program.

The controversial Keystone XL and TransCanada pipelines are expected to be given the green light by Trump – what does this mean for Canada?

Our federal government is saying this is a good thing because they've been advocating for moving ahead, but there are lots of people who are against the expansion of the pipeline – environmental activists, Indigenous peoples whose lands will be at risk because of those pipelines so I think this is going to have an impact on our government because Trudeau has tried to present himself as both an environmental leader but also an advocate for pipelines. I think it’s hard to hold those two contrary positions at once. This is going to force Trudeau's hand to be clearer about his intentions.

Trump was quick to scrap the Trans-Pacific Partnership and is keen on renegotiating NAFTA in support of a more protectionist agenda. How harmful will this be for America’s trade partners?

Canada will feel the brunt of some of those decisions. I'm all for renegotiating NAFTA but not for the reasons that Trump is.

But the protectionism Trump is signalling is already in place. It’s been in place since 2009 thanks to Obama and the financial crisis. Canada managed to negotiate some wiggle room there, and so it's going to be interesting as the idea of protectionism in the United States hardens – how much wiggle room Canada has or how much we're going to start looking internationally to diversify our trade.

How will the U.S.’s relationship with China change under Trump’s protectionist policies?

It's not going to be easy considering Trump accused them of currency inflation and negative trading practices that he associates with China. There's also the threat of imposing a tax on them as he's threatened with Mexico. I don't think he's laid the groundwork on a good collaborative relationship with China.

Certainly, China has become a much greater international trading country and has challenged U.S. dominance in that area. At the same time, China has become in the last couple of years the U.S.'s number one source of imports. It's going to be a really interesting relationship, but I don't expect it's going to be easy at all.

Could this kind of protectionism backfire?

In the early days it might be seen as a success story. The long-term implications will be really damaging for the United States.

We live in a globalized world now – and those kinds of protectionist policies are renouncing all senses of connection with the rest of the world. Some of the people in his party have suggested having policies that clearly benefit the United States and penalize other countries. That's just not a constructive way to engage with the rest of the world, and that will have all kinds of fallout both economically and in security issues.

ISIS, refugees and resisting nostalgia: experts debate Canada’s foreign policy future at Munk School roundtable

sgupta — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 15:25:49 +0000

ISIS, refugees and resisting nostalgia: experts debate Canada’s foreign policy future at Munk School roundtable sgupta Fri, 10/23/2015 - 11:25

Cutline

Hugh Segal (centre) and Stephen Toope (right) debate the future of Canada's foreign policy (photo by Johnny Guatto)

Terry Lavender

Author legacy

Terry Lavender

Topic

Global Lens

Canadian Studies

From factory to condo: U of T students explore 'hidden histories' of Toronto lofts, other real-estate projects

OISE library brings influential voices from Canada's past to life through digitization of tapes from 1970s (with video)

Two student-developed digital media projects recognized with heritage awards

Read more about the app

U of T expert on President Donald Trump’s first week in office

ISIS, refugees and resisting nostalgia: experts debate Canada’s foreign policy future at Munk School roundtable

Read more about the Three Priorities