Motorman Armstrong was charged with manslaughter and held in jail for several weeks until inspection of the ill-fated streetcar’s braking system proved his statement to police that the system was totally ineffectual. Inspection also determined that a secondary safety feature installed by the company, something called a “Scotch dog,” which, when the crossing gates dropped, caused a five-inch-long bolt to rise above the streetcar tracks and derail the car before it reached the railway tracks, was also deemed totally useless at the speed the car was travelling.
Officials recommended that the level crossing be eliminated and a railway bridge be built as soon as possible. The bridge opened twenty-three years later.
March 21, 2010
View of Queen Street, looking west from the Grand Trunk railway crossing between De Grassi and McGee streets, circa 1892. Note the early electric streetcar on the Lee route stopped at the crossing gate. This route, from the St. Lawrence Market along King and Queen Streets to Lee Avenue in the Beach was only in service for short time.
A similar view in 2010.
The Birth of Toronto Island
It was 1858 when one of Toronto’s most treasured attractions, our own Toronto Island, first came into being. This historic event was recorded in the following day’s Globe newspaper:
The Peninsula Hotel Washed Away
A disaster which has for some time been anticipated occurred yesterday morning (April 13) with the washing away of Mr. Quinn’s hotel on the Island. The storm commenced early on the afternoon of the previous day (April 12) and towards night the breeze freshened, and continued blowing steadily from the north-east. Such was the fury of the tempest on the bay that serious fears were entertained that the hotel would be blown down, but it withstood the violence of the hurricane. Towards morning the waves were breaking on the beach in rear of the house and at about five o’clock the water made a complete breach over the Island, undermining the house and leaving it a total wreck, and at the same time making a wide channel four or five feet in depth which will make a convenient eastern entrance to the harbour for vessels of light draught. Fortunately, Mr. Quinn, who was anticipating the cataclysm, succeeded in removing his family and the greater part of his furniture to a small dwelling which he had erected a short time ago, a little to the west of his late residence.
Before this severe storm wreaked havoc across the young city’s waterfront, what was to suddenly become Toronto Island (while in this case “island” is a singular term, numerous large and small islands covering a total of 825 acres are involved) was originally nothing more than a series of long, sandy “fingers” of land known collectively as The Peninsula. This formation trailed westward from a swampy landmass at the east end of the harbour, an area originally called Ashbridge’s Bay, then the Eastern Harbour Terminal District, and now simply as the Port Lands.
A map of the Town of York (renamed City of Toronto in 1834) sketched prior to the tremendous storm that struck the young city on April 13, 1858, that resulted in the creation of Toronto Island. Note the narrow and extremely vulnerable isthmus that connects the town with what would later become the island.
Geologists tell us that much of the material that made up those “fingers” actually originated as sand and rocks that over countless centuries had eroded from the weather-worn surfaces of the bluffs located a few miles east of the town site. (This geological feature was first referred to as the Scarborough Bluffs in the late 1700s by Governor Simcoe’s wife, Elizabeth, soon after the couple’s arrival to take up residence in the new Province of Upper Canada).
It was the counter-clockwise circulation of water on this side of the lake that resulted in this eroded material migrating in a westerly direction. Over time, sufficient quantities of silt and sand dropped out of the solution when met by the outflows from the Rouge, Don, and Humber watercourses to create a substrate to which, centuries later, newcomers to the area added harbour dredgings and construction debris, resulting in the much enlarged Toronto Island that we have today.
While the first breach in the narrow isthmus took place more than 150 years ago, it wasn’t until this newly created channel was widened, made deeper, and stabilized over the next few years that it became a truly useful entrance and exit to and from Toronto Harbour.
April 11, 2010
The Eastern Channel had been in existence for less than half a century when a photographer captured these two ladies watching the passenger ships SS City of Ottawa and SS Chicora, a sailboat, and the tug D.W. Crow traverse Toronto Harbour’s Eastern Channel.
Titanic’s Toronto Connection
On April 18, 1912, the Cunard liner RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Carpathia arrived at the Port of New York carrying 705 survivors of one of the worst sea disasters in history: the sinking of the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic, which resulted in the loss of 1,503 of her passengers and crew. Among the survivors aboard Carpathia — Cunard’s much smaller Atlantic liner, which had been bound for Mediterranean ports when it’s crew had received the distress calls and without hesitation turned about and raced through miles and miles of thick pack ice to the scene of the disaster — was Toronto businessman and member of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, Major Arthur Peuchen, president of the Standard Chemical Company and a first-class passenger on the ill-fated White Star super liner. Peuchen had crossed the Atlantic dozens of times without incident. But this particular crossing was to change his life.
Peuchen’s Toronto-based company had developed a highly efficient method of obtaining acetone from the distillation of wood. This chemical was a key component in the creation of cordite, a propellant used in the manufacture of artillery shells. For many, including Peuchen, the prospect of a major conflict erupting in Europe was both bad news (for obvious reasons) and good news, because if war broke out, millions of artillery shells would be needed — and tremendous quantities of cordite would be needed to propel those shells toward the enemy lines. Companies in the acetone-producing business would not only be regarded as patriotic, but they would reap great financial rewards for their stockholders as well.
Lacking large wooded areas (most having already been cut down), it was painfully obvious that England would have to import the necessary acetone from countries where huge forests made it easy to produce the chemical in large quantities. As a member of the British Empire, Canada was an ideal choice, and Peuchen managed sprawling lots of timber from which his company produced huge quantities of acetone. Tankers would cross the Atlantic carrying all the acetone that the Mother Country would need.
The Cunard Line’s “no-frills” ocean liner Carpathia rescued 705 victims of the Titanic disaster that occurred more than one hundred years ago.
It was this business opportunity that resulted in the major visiting his business contacts in England, “just in case.” Following the meetings, Peuchen booked his return passage on the maiden voyage of the world’s newest and most luxurious ocean liner. He planned to be back in his Jarvis Street home shortly after Titanic docked in New York on April 17, 1912.
But everything changed at 11:40 on the evening of April 14, 1912, when the giant liner struck an iceberg. Less than three hours later she slipped under the North Atlantic’s icy waters.