Forever Yonge
TORONTO CAPTURED IN TELEGRAM PHOTO COLLECTION

LOOKING AT 1,000 digitized photographs from the Toronto Telegram Photograph Collection on York's Web site is to sometimes see a kinder, gentler Toronto before it grew BCE Place or the TD Centre.

Yonge Street, looking north from King Street, January 8, 1947.

Telegram photographers routinely stalked Union station to capture the arrival of immigrants - Dutch children in wooden clogs, Scottish lads in kilts and Polish mothers in kerchiefs. Aerial photographs show a boat-filled harbour, beachside amusement parks and a skyline dominated by the Royal York. There are streets - quiet, treed neighbourhoods unvisited by crime, a drab Danforth rattling with streetcars and scored with sagging overhead power lines.

The images were scanned from negatives as part of a pilot project by York Libraries' Archives and Special Collections to determine how much it would cost to preserve the deteriorating collection. In 1974 York acquired the collection of 830,000 negatives and 500,000 prints of photos taken from 1876 to 1971. Most images were shot from 1939 to 1971. Since then, vinegar syndrome (so named for the smell emitted when the chemicals on the negatives oxidize) has destroyed many of the negatives. The 1,000 existing images on the York Web site can be seen at http://info.library.yorku.ca/webpub/telegram/telegram.htm.

Toronto Telegram Photograph Collection,
York University Archives and Special Collections