Things my grandmother told me about growing up in Toronto

My mom’s mom was born in Toronto on June 9, 1923. That, I knew. What I didn’t know: that she spent the first twenty-five years of her life on Grace Street, around the corner from where I live now. Until she was two, her family—my great-grandparents, her brothers, and her—lived just north of Dundas Street West, and when she was two, they moved a few blocks north, to just below Harbord Street.

Last week, we got to talking about the neighbourhood, and she got to talking about how things used to be. Some highlights from what she told me:

KENSINGTON MARKET SMELLED: Her mother loved to go get chickens there, but my grandmother went with her just once, couldn’t stand the smell, and refused to ever go again. “It was gross,” she says.

BEING A SHORT KID PAID OFF: Streetcars—which had just started to be operated by a new public company called the Toronto Transit Commission—used to have a metal pole near their entrance, with a small band wrapped around it a few feet from the ground. If you were shorter than the marker, you paid the children’s fare, but if you were taller, your fare went up. (Children’s fares were 10 for a quarter, or two and a half cents cents each, by the way.) I asked: what happened if you were a little older, but still short? “That, I can’t answer.”

STREETCAR DRIVERS WERE “AWFULLY NICE.”

CASA LOMA WAS A BIG DEAL: Her dad and his brother, who immigrated from Austria together, founded a window-cleaning company here called the New York Window Cleaning Company. Their first big contract: cleaning the floors and windows at Casa Loma, the building of which had just been completed. “That was a big deal,” my grandma says: it led to lots of other business. As my copy of Mark Osbaldeston’s Unbuilt Toronto 2 tells me, by the time my grandmother was born, all was not well for Henry Pellatt and his mansion on a hill—he had moved out of Casa Loma, and there were plans to turn it into a hotel and add a new wing and fifty-six rooms to it. The new wing never got built, and so neither did all those new floors and windows.

BAY & QUEEN WASN’T A BIG DEAL: The New York Window Cleaning Company started off with one office, and then, when things started going well (thanks, Casa Loma!), moved to another one. Their first office? On Bay, north of Queen, where Nathan Phillips Square and City Hall is now. Their second? Bay and Dundas, where the Toronto Coach Terminal is now.

PROPERTY WAS REALLY, REALLY CHEAP: When, in 1925, my great-grandfather bought the six-bedroom home on Grace that my grandmother grew up in, he paid $4,100 for it. That doesn’t just sound inexpensive: if that price was typical and rose with inflation, houses like it would sell for $53,879.35 now; instead, they go for at least $700,000.

THERE WERE LOTS OF JEWISH PEOPLE AROUND: My grandmother’s Jewish, and when she was growing up, so was her neighbourhood: “99.5% Jewish,” she says. Part of the 0.5%: my dad’s mom and grandparents, who in a neat little coincidence lived on Ossington Street, just south of Harbord, a few blocks away. The two families didn’t know each other.

THERE WERE NO PORTUGUESE PEOPLE AROUND: “We had no Portuguese in Toronto when I was growing up,” my grandmother explained. There are lots there now, I explained. “That was Trudeau.” I have been unable to confirm this.

THERE WERE SOME ITALIAN PEOPLE, THOUGH, AND THEY WERE ALRIGHT: As Jews started moving away from downtown and up Bathurst Street, Italians started moving in. When one Italian family moved next door in the late ’40s or the early ’50s, my grandmother, by then married to my grandfather, tried to convince the parents to teach their son to learn to swim. In turn, they tried to convince my grandmother to eat spaghetti and meatballs, dropped it off at her house. She had to sheepishly take the food back to them, and ask to eat it there rather than in her home—it wasn’t kosher.

THERE WERE ALSO OTHER PEOPLE WHO WERE DIFFERENT FROM HER: At her elementary school—Clinton Street Public School—there was a class of “deaf-mute children.” (Her words.) My grandmother assured me that no-one was mean to them, but also told me that the two groups of children always played separately in the school yard, with the deaf-mute children “making their signals” to one-another, and just to one-another. Also, “I think there was one black boy in the school but nobody picked on him.” Good to know, Grandma.

Lead photo, of the rear of 184 1/2 Baldwin Street—what’s now better known as My Market Bakery—courtesy of the City of Toronto archives (series 372 s_0372_ss0001_it1298) is .