A Real Life Sea Monster
Plus thousands of heritage sites suddenly at risk, giving the gift of Toronto history, and more...
Back in October, I wrote a little bit about the long history of sea monster sightings in Lake Ontario. They’ve been happening for centuries, including one beast who was seen in our city’s waters in the late 1800s:
It was the summer of 1882 when it was spotted off the shores of Toronto. A 15-metre-long blue-grey serpent, covered in bristles, swimming in the water near Fort York. According to a report by The Toronto Mail, it basked in the sun for a while, snorted at the Torontonians who’d gathered along the shoreline to gawk at it, and then disappeared.
We talked about that sighting in my Supernatural History of Toronto course and a lot of us figured the true origin of that tall tale might have been a sturgeon. They’ve been swimming around North America for 100 million years, can live to be more than 150 years old, grow to be nearly three metres long, and come into shallow waters during the mating season where they can easily be spotted by dumfounded humans.
But then, just as our course was about to wrap up, a man named Will Sampson caught something in Toronto Harbour that hasn’t been seen here in decades, maybe even centuries. At the end of October, the local fishing guide caught a muskellunge — “muskie” for short, “cabbage dragon” for awesomeness. And oh boy does that photo ever look a lot like the descriptions of mysterious serpents that were spotted in Lake Ontario throughout the 1800s.
Of course, not all the details match. I can’t imagine that even before pollution and over-fishing took their toll that muskies grew to be 15 metres long or could jump 50 feet in the air as some newspapers reported. But cabbage dragons have, at the very least, become the leading suspect in my mind. Their sinuous bodies, their colouring, even the fact they’re known to occasionally swim with their heads poking up out of the water… all those characteristics echo newspaper reports from more than a century ago.
For instance, one of the sea monsters was seen by a couple of children playing in Niagara in 1829 (“a hideous water snake, or serpent, of prodigious dimensions”), another by a ship’s crew on their way to Kingston four years later (“He swam … keeping the best part of his body under water”), and a third by a family near Belleville in 1842 (“a huge serpent which they described to be about the thickness of a man's body, and with a head proportionately large and very glossy… they discovered him basking in the sun, his head about four feet out of the water”).
As for our modern muskie: Once Will Sampson snapped his pic of the beast he released it back into the water. So that massive cabbage dragon is still out there somewhere. And hopefully, the catch is a sign the health of Lake Ontario is recovering enough that in years to come there will be even more sea monsters prowling the depths of our bay.
GIVE THE GIFT OF TORONTO HISTORY — WITH AN ONLINE COURSE!
Looking for a unique gift for a Toronto lover in your life? I thought you might be! So, now you can give them the gift of an online Toronto history course.
You can give any one of my four- or five-week courses for $75. They cover everything from the city’s most notorious murders, to the history of baseball, booze, the supernatural and the gross. You can pick the course you want to give, or let the recipient choose the one they’re most interested in themselves. (In which case they’ll also be able to pick from any of the new four- or five-week courses I create next year.)
All courses will be offered in 2023. And while the exact dates are TBD, all the lectures are recorded and posted to a private YouTube page — so even if they end up having a conflict, they can watch them whenever they like.
My big overview of the entire history of the city, From Hogtown To Downtown: A History of Toronto in 10 Weeks, is also available.
And if you’re a paid subscriber to this newsletter, you’ll get 10% off any course you give!
If you’d like to become a paid subscriber and save that 10% you can do that by clicking right here:
The Toronto History Weekly is a ton of work, so the only way I’ll be able to keep writing this newsletter is if a lot more of you make the switch. You’ll get 10% off all my online courses and be supporting all the work I do in sharing stories from the history of our city and our country. (And I’ve been dreaming up some more ways to thank you in the future, too.)
THOUSANDS OF TORONTO HERITAGE SITES ARE SUDDENLY AT RISK
Last week, I wrote about the Ford government’s plans to overhaul heritage laws in our province. This week, the bill passed — which means thousands of heritage sites in Toronto have been put at risk.
City staff now have two years to assess “listed” sites and decide whether to give them the full protection of being “designated.” But there are nearly four thousand Toronto sites on that list, and assessing thousands of properties that quickly seems to be an impossible demand. Any sites that aren’t “designated” within the allotted time will lose the protections they do have — and the City won’t be allowed to reconsider them for another five years.
As Storeys pointed out this week, there are some major landmarks on that list, including the Ontario Science Centre, Convocation Hall, Little Trinity Church, and the Wheat Sheaf Tavern. Even Queen’s Park itself.
It will now also be harder to give any of those sites “designated” status because they’ll be forced to meet two of the required criteria instead of just one.
Suddenly, the future is looking very uncertain for many of our city’s most precious historic sites.
READ MY FULL PIECE FROM LAST WEEK
READ THE STOREYS ARTICLE FROM THIS WEEK
A TORONTO CHRISTMAS HISTORY TOUR
In case you missed it last week, I’m offering a new walking tour this holiday season! Together, we’ll explore the history of Christmas in Toronto, uncovering yuletide tales of love, war, celebration and scandal. From Christmas trees and window displays to holiday parties and parades…
I’m planning to offer the tour twice:
Saturday December 17 — 3pm
Sunday December 18 — 3pm
We’ll meet outside Old City Hall. The tour will last about an hour and a half and finish basically right where we started.
Pay what you can.
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
PLAQUE NEWS — All of Ontario’s blue and gold heritage plaques are being reviewed. And some of them getting updated to better reflect the reality and diversity of our province’s past. Charnel Anderson takes a look at some of those updates for TVO. Read more.
AERIAL TIME TRAVEL NEWS — Jeff Allen has created a neat new tool for comparing aerial photos from Toronto’s past. You can explore a full map of the city, sliding back and forth over the last 70 years like magic. Check it out.
CONDOM NEWS — It was illegal to sell contraceptives in Canada until 1969. Nate Hendley takes a look at that history and the Toronto condom entrepreneur who took on the law. Read more.
OLD TORONTO NEWS — On Twitter, Eric Sehr takes a deep dive into what our city’s oldest neighbourhood looked like nearly a century and a half ago:
Click to read the full thread.
SILHOUETTE NEWS — …and he also dives into the details of another fascinating photo taken around the same time:
Click to read the full thread.
TYPHOID CARWASH NEWS — Victor Caratun put together a neat video that takes us through the last 200 years at the corner of King & John. It’s a particularly fascinating spot. Two centuries ago, it was home to the hospital that served typhoid-stricken Irish refugees during the Great Hunger (which I wrote about in The Toronto Book of the Dead). Decades ago, it was home to a carwash owned by the family of filmmaker Ivan Reitman (whose incredible life story I wrote about back in February). And today, it’s where the TIFF Lightbox stands:
LOST CLOCK NEWS — I was previously unaware that the Manulife building (on Bloor at Mount Pleasant, not to be confused with the Manulife Centre at Bay) originally featured a giant clock. But now I do. And I’m sad it’s gone:
DING DING NEWS — Toronto’s streetcar fleet was nearly dismantled half a century ago. In Spacing, Brian Doucet looks at how they were saved and the activists who saved them. Read more.
BANQUET HALL NEWS — Sneha Mandhan is studying the vital role suburban banquet halls have played in the history of our city. “I want to bring banquet halls into the public discourse because these are important spaces that we need to be thinking more about.” Read more.
BAD GIRLS NEWS — Autumn Beals has created an online tour of Liberty Village, a map called “Bad Girls” exploring the history of the neighbourhood “through the lens of women’s mobility in Toronto during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Check it out.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
AUTHOR TALK: LETTERS TO AMELIA
December 5 — 1:30pm — Runnymede Library
“Toronto-based author and letter writer Lindsay Zier-Vogel discusses Letters to Amelia, her debut novel inspired by her passion for Amelia Earhart, and the power of reading and writing letters for both connection and self-discovery. Zier-Vogel will read from this contemporary epistolary novel, and discuss our essential need for connection, and our universal ability to find hope in the face of fear.”
Free!
TALES OF CHRISTMAS PAST
December 8 — 7pm — Toronto’s First Post Office
“Many of us who celebrate Christmas have traditions that we feel are steeped and time honoured. But most of them aren't as old as we might think. Hardly any of the Christmas traditions that we know today were widely celebrated when the Town of York was founded back in 1793, and can instead be dated to the Victorian era. But we'll also look back at a time, before the Town of York even started, that Christmas was outlawed and celebrating it was illegal. Whether you're passionate about putting up the Christmas decorations, or like to channel your inner Scrooge, you'll be sure to find something of interest in this presentation!”
$16.93 for non-members; $11.62 for members.