Centennial walking tours take place starting this Saturday throughout summer

Print

E-mail

Text

West Toronto Junction Historical Society Centennial Chair Neil Ross, in association with the Junction Forum on Art and Culture, explores the "seamier side" of Junction life north of the railway tracks, during Saturday walking tours that begin this weekend.

Ross, in the role of famed Junction journalist A.B. Rice, editor of J.T. Gilmour's weekly York Tribune, leads the tours and will be joined by several 'Legends of the Junction' such as Mayor G.W. Clendenan, Principal Mary Cherry and pioneering librarian Elizabeth McCallum, among others. The walking tours are part of a year-long anniversary celebration that recognize 1908 as the year the Junction was incorporated as its own independent city, the City of West Toronto, which it remained for a year and 19 days.

This Saturday's (June 21) walk investigates two families in Carlton-Davenport that held the balance "between vice and virtue," according to Ross.

In one corner: The Heydons of Heydon House stand, at St. Clair Avenue and Weston Road, their red brick frontier palace site of the battle between workers at Canadian Pacific and the Union Stockyards. In the opposing corner: The Bulls of Tipperary, fervent Methodists, who carved a village from the wilderness, hold their ground. In the middle, reformer Dr. John Taylor Gilmour brings Carlton-Davenport into the Junction and lays the foundation for an independent city.

"They were the Junction's leading Hoteliers," said Ross of the Heydons. "You've gotta remember what a wild town it was before prohibition."

The brawl, said to have begun over a prostitute, according to Ross, launched the local prohibition and brought 10,000 people converging onto the Junction for last call. In the 1890s, Alexander Heydon ran the joint, Ross said. He was also the owner of the Subway Hotel, which is now the empty lot across the street from the former Canadian Tire site near Dundas West and Keele.

"Heydon House was an amazing combination of sophisticated entertainment and frontier sensibility," Ross said. "On the second floor, they're holding cock fights."

There are just so many "juicy stories," Ross said.

Like this one:

One night, Joseph Curly, "just an average working guy," Ross said, got drunk and headed home, making his way to the train station. When he got there, however, he realized he had no money and decided to walk to Weston. He never made it. His body was found bruised and battered. The mystery of his death was never solved.

"Fast forward a year later." Ross said. "The death of Joseph Curly and the Heydon House brawl led a Methodist pastor by the name of Shore to preach a sermon in which he describes the Junction as a sess pool of vice and inequity and that leads the town to go dry."

Other June highlights include:

- Dr. Jackson and the Miracle of Roman Meal

- George Heinztman: Transcontinental Piano Player

- A Funeral on Keele

- Stonehenge of the Junction

- "The Most Efficient and Cleanest Locomotive Ever Built"

- Underground Railroad to the Junction

- Final Resting Place of the Bulls

- A Mayor's Mansion

The walking tours take place t 1:30 p.m. after the Summer Concert at the Pacific and Dundas platform. Each tour will take approximately an hour and half. The current tour will run for the month of June. In July, Ross and crew will be exploring Indian Road.