The Street That Can't Be Renamed
Plus a "Don't Kill Toronto" billboard, the rise of piracy, and more.
RED TAPE NEWS — This week, I thought I’d begin with the history behind a bizarre local news stories that popped up recently. Toronto wants to rename a street, but according to the city’s own rules, it’s not allowed to. And I’ve decided the most entertainingly convoluted way to tell that story is to trace its roots allllll the way back to the late 1700s — to one of our city’s most notorious duels and a family called the Smalls.
I wrote about the duel in The Toronto Book of Love. You can find the full story there, but the short version goes something like this:
Elizabeth Small was the wife of a government official back in the days when Toronto was still the muddy wee frontier capital of York. And in the last few weeks of 1799, she found herself caught up in a sex scandal. After she snubbed another woman at a Christmas party, she was accused of having an affair with that woman’s husband: the attorney-general, John White. York was a gossipy little place, and the scandal was the talk of the town over the holidays. In the end, to defend his wife’s honour, John Small challenged White to a duel.
The two men met in a wintry field behind the parliament buildings (right near where the Distillery District is today) at dawn on the third day of the 1800s, pistols in hand.
John Small won the duel. He killed John White. And while he was arrested for murder, he was acquitted by a sympathetic jury. Still, the scandal exacted a terrible price. The Smalls were ostracized from polite society, essentially banished to their home on the edge of town, no longer invited to all the most important dances and balls.
But life carried on. The year after the duel, Elizabeth Small gave birth to a baby boy named Charles. He grew up there in that house on the edge of town, a spot that’s right in the heart of the city today. It was called Berkeley House; Berkeley Street is named after it.
Charles grew up to follow in his father’s footsteps, getting that same government job. And when his dad died, Charles inherited most of his property. He expanded Berkeley House into a mansion and also began working to develop the family’s country estate.
It was a big piece of property, a slice of woods, creeks and fields that ran all the way up from the lake to the Danforth along Woodbine Avenue. Charles had a farm there, where he raised prize-winning cows. He also built a vinegar factory, a tannery and some mills, making a dam across a creek to power them, creating a big pond in the process. That pond became known as Small’s Pond, and the creek became known as Small’s Creek. But they aren’t the reasons his name is familiar to Torontonians today. And Small isn’t the name we remember him by.
Charles Small’s full name was Charles Coxwell Small. So the road that ran along the western edge of his property became known as Coxwell Avenue. Two centuries later, it’s still one of the main thoroughfares in the east end, with a subway station and everything.
Back then, Coxwell Avenue ended at Queen Street. It didn’t continue all the way south to the lake; instead, it gave way to the woods and marshes that ran along the shores of Ashbridge’s Bay. But that land would soon be developed into to two big new Toronto landmarks.
One of them was a racetrack. A few years after Charles died, the Small family sold off some of his land to be turned into the old Woodbine Race Course, which would become a new home for Canada’s most prestigous thoroughbred race, The Queen’s Plate. Eventually renamed the Greenwood Raceway, it would play host to horses and jockeys and gambling addicts for more than a century. It’s still remembered in the name of the new Woodbine Racetrack far away in the northern reaches of Etobicoke.
Small’s Creek even had a role to play. One of its little tributaries was used to create a water feature in the middle of the racetrack. But that was a fleeting moment of glory for the waterway. Small’s Creek was about to disappear.
Toronto’s population was booming. And its infrastructure was having trouble keeping up. In the early 1900s, the city’s sewers still emptied directly into the lake, creating a layer of sludge that stretched across the harbour and far out into the disgusting water beyond — a fetid soup that was used to supply Torontonians with their drinking water.
The city decided it needed a treatment plant to clean up all that sewage before spewing it out into the lake. And since they didn’t want to build something so gross right in the middle of the city, they picked a spot just a little outside town… a spot by the foot of Coxwell Avenue.
The Ashbridge’s Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant was built just across the creek from the Woodbine Race Course. And since the creek itself was getting pretty gross — stagnant and polluted from the new subdivisions that were beginning to spring up on its banks — it was soon buried, just like so many other Toronto waterways. Small’s Pond was drained, too.
But the mundane detail we care about for the sake of this particular story is this one: a new road was eventually built between the racetrack and the sewage plant, on the spot where the banks of Small’s Creek had once wound their way down to the shoreline. It was essentially just an extension of Coxwell Avenue, heading south from Queen Street to the lake. It wasn’t very exciting: an industrial-looking strip of road with no businesses or houses on it at all. So empty, in fact, that no one bothered to give it a name or have it officially added to “Coxwell Avenue.”
And it wasn’t until 2019 that anyone noticed.
By then, the racetrack was gone and the water treatment plant had shifted to the south. In their place, Woodbine Park was created. It’s split down the middle by the nameless road. On the side where Woodbine Race Course used to be, there are some wetlands, and a big green field with a bandstand. On the other, the delightfully-named Main Sewage Treatment Playground has risen on the spot where the old treatment plant stood.
But when a Green P parking lot was built to serve the park, the problem of the nameless street suddenly became apparently. The lot needed an address, so the street needed a name.
The city rushed to give it one. Figuring that it might only be temporary, they called it “Lower Coxwell” — following the convention used for streets like Lower Simcoe and Lower Jarvis. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Most people travelling down that stretch of road probably don’t even realize it’s not Coxwell Avenue anymore. Even Google Maps think it is.
But now the city would like to properly name it, ditching the temporary moniker in favour of something that better reflects the history of the place.
The land where Charles Coxwell Small built his mills and made his pond has a history that stretches back much, much further than him. By the time Toronto was founded, it had already been home to First Nations and their ancestors for thousands upon thousands of years.
It was the Mississaugas who were living here when the British arrived to build their new capital. And some of them would walk along a trail that ran beside the creek on their way down to the lake to go fishing. In order to honour that history, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation suggested the new name of the street should be Emdaabiimok Avenue — “where the road goes to the water.”
There were some objections — from the police and fire service. They argue it would be dangerous to give a street that name because some people might find it difficult to pronounce. (Roncesvalles anyone?)
The local city councillor disagrees and is pushing for the renaming, but now, according to Francine Kopun’s article in The Toronto Star last week, city staff have discovered another problem.
Toronto’s own rules won’t allow Lower Coxwell to be renamed. At least, not for a good long while.
As it turns out, a street can only be renamed once a decade. So Lower Coxwell would have to wait seven more years. The rule is apparently meant to protect people from having to change their address too often. But in the case of Lower Coxwell, there aren’t any people or businesses on the street who would have to change their addresses at all. Just the parking lot.
So, while Charles Small’s middle name will live on in Coxwell Avenue either way, for now, the idea of renaming the last little bit of it in recognition of a history that stretches back much further than his prize-winning cows is hung up on a particularly absurd piece of red tape.
”DON’T KILL TORONTO”
BOOZE NEWS — I’m currently hard at working getting ready for my new online course, A Boozy History of Toronto. So I thought I’d share one of the most striking images I’ve come across during my research. It’s a billboard from about 1914, when Toronto was in the grips of the big battle over prohibition.
The city had been struggling over the question of whether people should be allowed to drink here — and how much — for at least thirty years by this point. It was one of the major issues in a pivotal municipal election all the way back in the 1880s, when a brewer ran for mayor against a leader of the temperance movement, William Holmes Howland. Howland won the election on a platform of “Toronto The Good,” a nickname that has stuck with the city ever since. Under his watch, the number of bars in Toronto actually started going down even whlie the population was skyrocketing. He reduced the number of liquor licenses and created the Toronto Police Morality Squad to crack down on anything he saw as “vice” — from drinking to gambling to sex work to homosexuality. The Morality Squad would be making arrests for a century to come.
But it was during the First World War that the fight over the idea of banning drinking altogether came to a climax. Both sides of the battle launched major propaganda campaigns, including the billboards in the photo above — which claimed that a drastic crackdown on drinking would “kill” Toronto.
The people behind those billboards lost. In 1916, the sale of alcohol was banned in Ontario. The prohibition era began.
The days of speakeasies and bootleggers had arrived, complete with dramatic shootouts on the waterfront, backalley booze poisoning customers, and smugglers sneaking across the lake from the U.S. under the cover of darkness…
All of which we’ll be talking about in the course.
If you’re interested, it kicks off on July 14 and runs for four weeks on Thursday nights. And if you can’t make it for any of those evenings, all the lectures will be posted on a private YouTube page so you can watch them whenever you like.
Oh! And! You can get 10% off the course if you become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. The Toronto History Weekly is a ton of work, so you’ll not only be helping it survive, but supporting all the work I do, and getting some perks in the process.
You can make the switch by clicking here — or subscribe for free if you haven’t already:
THE RISE OF PIRACY IN CANADA
SWASHBUCKLING NEWS — This was an absolutely HUGE week for another one of my projects. I’m the host and co-creator of Canadiana, a documentary series on the hunt for the most incredible stories in Canadian history. On Tuesday, we debuted the first episode of our new season — the first we’ve made in years. It’s an epic tale about the pirates who terrorized the East Coast for centuries.
You can watch it for free on YouTube right here:
We’re also doing a ton of press in support of the releease. This week I was interviewed about the series on CBC’s Metro Morning, Windsor Morning and by Active History’s History Slam podcast — which you can listen to right here:
QUICK LINKS
The best of everything else that’s new in Toronto’s past…
PRIDE NEWS — Jamie Bradburn shares a story about the homophobia of Toronto Mayor Art Eggleton and city council in the 1980s, when they refused to to proclaim Lesbian and Gay Pride Day. Read more.
PRIDE NEWS — Toronto Life shares photos and ephemera from the history of Pride, from its roots as a picnic on Hanlan’s Point Beach in 1971 all the way up to recent years. Read more.
MASS HERITAGE DESIGNATION NEWS — A series of 225 buildings along the Danforth were recently given a batch heritage listing, meaning that a proposal to demolish any of them will have to wait for city council to decide whether to allow it or not. In The Toronto Star, Shawn Micallef takes aim at the policy, arguing that such a blunt instrument threatens to making housing more difficult to build in the middle of a crisis — and on a street, with a subway, that seems to exactly the kind of place that density should be added. Especially since major streets are one of the very few places in Toronto higher density is allowed. Read more.
MODERNIST LOSS NEWS — Another key piece of Toronto’s modernist heritage is in danger of being redeveloped. The tower at University & Richmond went up in 1961, hailed by @ProjectEND on Twitter last month as “one of the first truly, unabashedly, modern office buildings in the country.” But now a proposal is looking to stick another tower on top of it:
The often-quoted-in-this-newsletter Alex Bozikovic shared his own frustrated thread about the plan, suggesting that “If you wanted to plan for a low-carbon city with high-quality architecture and maximum economic diversity, you would do the inverse of almost everything Toronto is now doing. It’s uncanny.” Read his thread.
BEACH NEWS — Dale Barbour (author of Undressed Toronto: From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside, How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850-1935) chats with Samantha Cutrara (host of the Source Story YouTube series) about the evolution of Sunnyside from an unlikely local swimming hole into a beachfront amusement park into the place it is today. Watch it.
SILHOUETTE NEWS — On Twitter, Brandon Steen shares an unexpected detail in the old signage of a hardware store that was once the Brockton Town Hall:
THEN & NOW NEWS: The Toronto Past Facebook page compares aerial photographs Bathurst & Eglinton taken in the 1930s and today. Take a look.
TORONTO HISTORY EVENTS
SUMMER HISTORY SERIES: THE KINGSWAY
July 21 — 7:30pm — Online — Etobicoke Historical Society
“One of Canada’s premier neighbourhoods, The Kingsway was the vision of one man, Robert Home Smith. A lawyer by training but a natural-born town planner, Home Smith took 3,100 acres of ordinary Etobicoke farmland and turned it into an elegant series of subdivisions that were deemed ‘A bit of England far from England’. Centered around the Old Mill, they offered not only a new vision of town planning but of upper middle class life in Toronto. So ‘jump on the bus’ with EHS Historian Richard Jordan for an enjoyable virtual journey through this picturesque and historic neighbourhood.”
Free for members; an annual membership is $25.
SUMMER HISTORY SERIES: ETOBICOKE’S HISTORIC LAKESHORE
August 18 — 7:30pm — Online — Etobicoke Historical Society
“Mimico, New Toronto and Long Branch share many things, including the streetcars of Lakeshore Boulevard West and the beautiful shores of Lake Ontario, but they have very different histories. Mimico is an older town, once the home of palatial estates. New Toronto had its start as a gritty industrial suburb. And Long Branch began as a gated, upper class cottage community and resort in Victorian times. Join EHS Historian Richard Jordan as he travels back in time on this virtual historic tour of Etobicoke’s three lakeshore communities.”
Free!
MY UPCOMING EVENTS
THE TORONTO CIRCUS RIOT: A TRUE TALE OF SEX, VIOLENCE, CORRUPTION AND CLOWNS
August 3 — 7:30pm — Online — Toronto Branch, Ontario Genealogical Society
The strangest riot in our city’s history broke out in the summer of 1855. It was sparked by a brawl at a King Street brothel, when some rowdy clowns picked a fight with a battle-hardened crew of firefighters on the most dangerous night of the year. That bizarre encounter would reverberate through the city. The circus performers had made a terrible mistake; those firefighters were members of the Orange Order, the powerful Protestant society that ruled Toronto for more than a century. And they wanted revenge. The circus grounds would soon become the scene of a bloody clash that shook Toronto to its core and laid bare the fault lines that once violently divided our city.
Free with registration!