Sally Gibson is one of Toronto’s most cherished local heritage writers. Over the years she has won numerous awards and worked closely with the Distillery District, city archives and the Cabbagetown Regent Park Community Museum. Her three published books are staples for anyone wanting to know more about Toronto’s history, development, and potential.
More Than an Island: A History of the Toronto Island (1984)
Growing out of Gibson’s PhD thesis, More Than an Island is a wordy love song to a much debated and much appreciated spot of land in Lake Ontario. As local historian G. Mercer Adams said in 1882, “What ‘the mountain’ is to the Montrealer, ‘the island’ is to the people of Toronto.”
Home to the city’s oldest waterfront community, the island appears in early Mohawk Indian stories as the result of a huge storm caused by the Great Spirit. Since then it has continued to have a strong hold on the imagination of Toronto’s writers and inhabitants.
In fact, its role in the creation of the city is irreplaceable, as it was partly due to his plans for “the spit of sand” that Colonel John Graves Simcoe chose to found “York” where he did. His wife, Elizabeth, famously had a particular love of the Island, calling it “beautiful on account of its rotundity of form.” As a popular attraction during the depression, and at all times a home, the island has long served Toronto. In this book it finally receives the recognition that it deserves.
Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s (2006)
The most image-rich of the three books, Inside Toronto gives readers a glimpse into the private lives of Toronto’s historic inhabitants. Allowing access to spaces beyond the “city’s public face,” it is a catalogue of the interior spaces of houses, shops, and government buildings.
The primitive cameras used create images that are often overexposed, making the rooms appear bathed in a dazzling light and giving them an air of “magical realism.” The images allow us to scrutinise the minutiae of daily life in years gone by, providing an archive of snapshots “in which there was more detail than the hand can produce of the unaided eye detect.”
One picture shows the Cabbagetown Store at 283 Parliament Street. The biggest difference to the stores on Parliament Street today is the lack of branding on the products, which were delivered “without any tradesname to distinguish them from any other.” It is these tiny touches that bring the photos to life and recreate a previously unimagined world.
Toronto’s Distillery District: History by the Lake (2008)
Many Torontonians will have visited the Distillery District since its 2003 renovation. At the very bottom of Parliament Street, it is home to a range of the city’s most interesting cultural spaces. The old industrial brick walls are now bursting at the mortar with creativity.
In her most recent book, Sally Gibson uncovers the history of the area and examines its transformation from working distillery to artistic Mecca. She writes, “Sometimes it’s hard to ‘read’ heritage buildings, to work out their evolution from the time they were brand new buildings, perhaps through many changes, to their current condition.” But that is exactly what she does.
The tale of The Gooderham and Worts Distillery is a gripping one, and the book places great emphasis on the human aspect of the story. One of the most dramatic incidents is the suicide of James Worts, who threw himself into the company well after his wife, Elizabeth (Gooderham’s sister), died in childbirth. An explosion fire in October 1869 is another gripping tale, richly illustrated: “the ‘luminous mass of flames’ lighting up the Toronto sky, and throwing a ‘lurid mantle’ over the city.”
The book reveals information that you may not have known before. Had you realised that, as well as producing the Victorian “aqua vitae” (water of life), whiskey, the distillery was also responsible for feeding cattle, producing flour, manufacturing anti-freeze, and contributing ingredients for smokeless gunpowder during the war? However, it does leave a few mysteries unsolved – “strange artefacts, events, discoveries, disappearances, and unresolved questions” – that will keep you wondering beyond the last page.
