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    Great Architecture and The Grand Hotels
    Great Architecture and The Grand Hotels
    Great Architecture and The Grand Hotels
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Great Architecture and The Grand Hotels

    By Bruce Bell

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    About this ebook

    Master Storyteller Bruce Bell captures the glories and downfalls, tragedies and comedies, as a bawdy city carved by slaves, freemen and women from thick hardwood forest on Lake Ontario emerges to become the most multicultural city on earth. This first in a series of 5 History of Toronto books is inspired by his acclaimed columns in The Bulletin, Toronto's famed Downtown community newspaper.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFrank Touby
    Release dateNov 11, 2010
    ISBN9780973011609
    Great Architecture and The Grand Hotels
    Author

    Bruce Bell

    Bruce Bell has been the popular monthly local history columnist for The Bulletin, Canada’s largest-circulation community newspaper, since 1999. In 2002 he was named by the City of Toronto the Official Historian of St. Lawrence Hall and St. Lawrence Market. In November 2003 Bruce was asked by the Ontario Heritage Foundation to host the 200th anniversary celebrations of St. Lawrence Market. In May 2004 Bruce was appointed Official Historian of Toronto’s King Edward Hotel as part of the famed hotel’s centennial celebrations. In October 2004 Bruce was appointed Honourary Historian of the Hockey Hall of Fame Heritage Building. In June 2006 Bruce was appointed Curator in Residence for the spectacular Dominion Bank Building, now One King West (built in 1914). In October 2006 Bruce was bestowed the title Honourary Historian of the 51 Division Heritage Building by Toronto Police Services for his work as a historian in 51 Division. Bruce sits on the board of the Town of York Historical Society and is the author of two books Amazing Tales of St. Lawrence Neighbourhood and the just published TORONTO: A Pictorial Celebration. Bruce is also the official tour guide of historic St. Lawrence Market where visitors from around the globe are constantly entertained by his amusing, fact-packed renditions of the Market’s and the area’s history. In April 2007 as part of the Fairmont Hotel & Resorts 100th-year birthday celebrations, Bruce was named Honourary Historian of the famed Fairmont Royal York Hotel. Bruce’s History Project, a plaque program marking historical sites with large bronze markers, to date includes Toronto’s First Jail, The Great Fire of 1849, the Hangings of the Rebellion of 1837 leaders Lount and Matthews and the Birthplace of Canadian Statesman Robert Baldwin. Bruce’s mission is to tell Toronto’s history through his tours, writings and lectures, including his sold-out shows at Toronto’s famed Winter Garden Theatre, in an informative and entertaining way. Visit Bruce’s website www.brucebelltours.ca to book a tour or to make a reservation for one of his upcoming events.

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      Book preview

      Great Architecture and The Grand Hotels - Bruce Bell

      Great Architecture and The Grand Hotels

      By Bruce Bell

      Book One in Bruce Bell’s History of Toronto

      Edited by Frank Touby

      Published by CBNG, Inc. at Smashwords

      Copyright 2010 by Community Bulletin Newspaper Group, Inc.

      This ebook is licenced for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be resold or given away to other people. If you wish to share this ebook or other books in the Bruce Bell History of Toronto series with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person from http://www.intoronto.org

      Chapter 1

      Left out: My childhood hockey anguish and the Hall of Fame

      I was born and raised in Sudbury during the bleakest time in that city’s history. After decades of unmanaged foresting and unprecedented pollution, Sudbury’s reputation in the 1950s and ’60s as an urban hellhole was cemented after it was chosen as the testing ground for NASA’s first Moonwalks. Sudbury’s landscape was beyond depressing; it was dreary at best. When it rained the water would run off the desolate black rocks flooding our basements for there was no soil to hold back the torrents. It’s better now after a few decades of re-planting but the scars, still visible in between the newly potted foliage, run deep.

      Sudbury looked its best after a snowfall when the barren hills would be covered with white fluffy snow. It was also during winter that the city became hockey mad.

      It’s hard for anyone who never lived in a small town to realize the effect hockey has on the psyche of residents living there.

      In Sudbury either you embraced the hockey culture, played the game so to speak, or you sat out the winter alone, in your room, banned from society.

      Hockey consumed Sudbury with every backyard including ours having a rink. Eddie Shack lived down the street and Leafs great George Armstrong lived next door.

      The soundtrack of my life includes the mantra of Sudbury, the thud of a puck hitting the boards over and over and over again.

      All my cousins played on one team or another, my teachers were in a league, the cops had one too, the priests, the bus drivers, the store clerks, firefighters, the so-called hockey moms had moms who played hockey, everyone played. Everybody but me. I was never deemed good enough to even imagine getting on a team.

      I was told again and again and again to sit it out: Get off the ice. Who is this guy? I don’t want him on my team. Hockey to me became something to fear and loathe, mostly against my own desire to at least be given the chance. My older brother John was the big hockey star of the family and like a thousand other kids had he been given the opportunity could have played in the NHL.

      Luckily my late father, who worked for INCO as a miner for 40 years, wasn’t one of those hard-assed, buzz-cut hockey dads and shared his love of both history and hockey with his sons equally.

      The irony of all this doesn’t escape me as now I live a mere stone’s throw away from the Hockey Hall of Fame, a building that embraces those two subjects my dad appreciated with equally zeal, hockey and history. Regardless of my own disastrous yet all-encompassing past with the game, I’ve come to cherish and respect the Hockey Hall of Fame both as a building and as an ideology inside and out.

      The entire 57,000-square-foot complex, including the 10,000 sq. ft. of the former Bank of Montreal, the visual symbol of the Hockey Hall of Fame on the northwest corner of Yonge and Front, is encased within BCE Place.

      You enter this shrine through a non-descript food court but after you pay your $12 you’re transported to another time and place.

      The ground floor is chocked full of memorabilia, everything from the heroic Jacques Plante’s first goalie mask to a re-creation of a Canadiens dressing room to what seems to be every puck, every stick, every coin that was ever used in one extraordinary game or another.

      But as cherished and revered as these icons of the sport maybe, they pale somewhat to what lay ahead.

      At the centre of the complex stands a striking former banking hall now renamed the WorldCom Great Hall, the core sanctuary of hockey’s incredible history.

      Placed around the walls of this Valhalla to hockey are double sheets of etched glass announcing each Honoured Member of the Hockey Hall of Fame.

      Hockey legends like Frank Mahovlich (inducted in 1981, 22 seasons with the NHL beginning in 1956) , Guy Lafleur (inducted 1988, 17 seasons beginning in 1971) Alex Delvecchio (inducted 1977, 24 seasons beginning in 1950) all names that lie deep within our collective subconscious heard only as if bellowing from the broadcasting booth by Foster Hewitt.

      At the very centre of the hall beneath a magnificent stained glass dome stands the greatest collection of trophies in the sports world, including the Vezina, Hart and Calder cups.

      But as treasured as they may be it’s another icon that stands at the heart of this entire complex that people come from all over the world to see: hockey’s most famous and desired prize, The Stanley Cup.

      To add to this almost religious experience for some those same visitors get a chance to view one of the most stunning interiors anywhere in our city a true masterpiece whose own story begins almost a century and half ago.

      As sad and insulting as it was that the Art Gallery of Ontario decided to close its very Canadian Group of Seven exhibit in order to save some money, this former banking hall—the visual symbol of the Hockey Hall of Fame—is every bit as important to our Canadian arts identity as the AGO is.

      Toronto in the 1880s was on a commercial upswing. From a windswept colonial outpost a mere half century earlier, we were then poised to be the most brilliant city the British Empire.

      To boost our claim we embarked on a building boom that for the next 20 or so years would see some of our most stunning construction projects take place.

      Most of what was to be built was due in part to the spectacular rise of

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