REMAKING DOWNTOWN TORONTO: POLITICS, DEVELOPMENT, AND PUBLIC SPACE ON YONGE STREET, 1950-1980 DANIEL G. ROSS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAMME IN HISTORY YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO, ONTARIO MARCH 2017 © DANIEL G. ROSS, 2017 Abstract This study explores the history of Toronto’s iconic downtown Yonge Street and the people who contested its future, spanning a period from the 1950s through to 1980 when the street was seldom out of the news. Through detailed analysis of a range of primary sources, it explores how the uses and public meanings of this densely-built commercial strip changed over time, in interaction with the city transforming around it. What emerges is a street that, despite fears for its future, remained at the heart of urban life in Toronto, creating economic value as a retail centre; pushing the boundaries of taste and the law as a mass-entertainment destination; and drawing crowds as a meeting place, pedestrian corridor, and public space. Variously understood as an historic urban landscape and an embarrassing relic, a transportation route and a people place, a bastion of Main Street values and a haven for big-city crime and sleaze, from the 1950s through the 1970s Yonge was at the centre of efforts to improve or reinvent the central city in ways that would keep pace with, or even lead, urban change. This thesis traces the history of three interventions—a pedestrian mall, a clean-up campaign aimed at the sex industry, and a major redevelopment scheme—their successes and failures, and the larger debates they triggered. The result is a narrative that ranges widely in theme: planning, automobility, and youth culture; vice, moral regulation, and citizen activism; capitalism, corporate power, and urban renewal. Engaging with the North American and international historiographies of these topics, it places the politics of downtown in Toronto in larger historical context. It offers an account of urban transformation that emphasizes complexity in the interaction between ideas, structures of power, and the often idiosyncratic decisions of a range of downtown actors. An increasingly interventionist local state, dynamic capital investment in retail and real estate, and diverse citizen mobilizations all contributed to transforming Yonge Street, helping to create the modern, globalized downtown shopping street and public space we know today. ii Acknowledgements My own journeys downtown began early, riding the subway with my father to his office a few blocks from the Yonge Street Strip. By the time I was thirteen I was making the trip on my own, just one of a steady stream of bored teenagers from all over the city visiting Yonge’s arcades, record stores, and head shops. Wandering downtown was the perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and Yonge offered spectacles—religious evangelists, buskers, break-dancers—that were missing in sedate west Toronto. Later, as an undergraduate student I quit loitering and went to work, spending my evenings and weekends as the tiniest cog in one of the city’s most successful money-making machines: the Eaton Centre. It was around that time that I began to wonder how the Yonge Street I knew was built, and what had been there before. I didn’t know it, but that was the start of a different type of journey. This city has been an inspiration, and so has the wonderful community of scholars I have encountered since I began this dissertation. At York University, Marcel Martel, Colin Coates, Marlene Shore, Craig Heron, and my other teachers have been true mentors, opening doors for me, challenging me to think my ideas through, and providing a model of a supportive, democratic, engaged pedagogy. Over the last seven years I’ve also had the privilege of learning from a fantastic group of graduate students, many of whom have become not just colleagues but collaborators and friends. Our department’s cafés en français have provided years of conversation, laughs, and support. Within the wider historical profession, I’ve appreciated the chance encounters at conferences and the long-term connections that have helped shaped my thinking and this dissertation. Over the years, the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) and the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) have been particularly welcoming. My sincere thanks to examiners Roger Keil and Harold Bérubé for their valuable feedback on my work, and to Richard White and the Toronto Political History Reading Group for offering comments on earlier versions of this thesis. Finally, my work with ActiveHistory.ca has been both challenging and rewarding. iii My fellow editors and the project’s many allies have helped me appreciate the importance of an engaged, public-facing historical practice, and I am grateful to be part of such an inspiring project. Historians are only as good as their archives, and I have been fortunate to work at some very good ones indeed. My sincere thanks to staff at the City of Toronto Archives, the Archives of Ontario, the Clara Thomas Archives, the Toronto Public Library, and the City of Toronto for their help and patience with my many requests for information and access. Former Mayor David Crombie gave generously of his time over a series of coffees, and prompted me to take the challenges of municipal governance seriously; so did Janis Cole and a number of other people who were there at the pivotal moments of my study. This dissertation was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada Graduate Scholarship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Avie Bennett Historica Doctoral Scholarship. I am deeply grateful to these agencies, to Dr. Bennett, and to the citizens of Canada and Ontario for their financial support. Elements of this project took shape during a stay at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester, where I was welcomed by Simon Gunn and the Centre’s faculty and graduate students. Other sections were written at the Brooklyn Public Library, with plenty of inspiration from Gotham and my dear friend and colleague David Reid. I’ve been fortunate to have a family that has encouraged me in my choices, and supported me with love, advice, and, more than occasionally, food and shelter. Thank you Mom, Da, Anna, and Jacob. This project is dedicated with all my love to Lauryn, my partner on this journey and in life. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents v List of Images vi Introduction: The Street and the City 1 Chapter 1. Streets for People: The Yonge Street Pedestrian Mall 30 Chapter 2. Toronto the Good?: Vice and Virtue on the Yonge Street Strip 118 Chapter 3. “A New Heart for Old Toronto”: Building the Toronto Eaton Centre 202 Conclusion: Making and Remaking Downtown Yonge Street 297 References 312 v List of Images Image 1: Map of Yonge Street 7 Image 2: Yonge at Queen, 1929 15 Image 3: The department stores 17 Image 4: Yonge at night 20 Image 1.1: The ideal of the pedestrianized downtown 39 Image 1.2: Sleep-in in City Hall Square 45 Image 1.3: Where car is king 47 Image 1.4: Crowds on the Yonge Street Mall 65 Image 1.5: Fashion show 68 Image 1.6: Opening ceremonies of the Dragon Mall 76 Image 1.7: Main Street Canada 79 Image 1.8: Youth on the pedestrian mall 88 Image 1.9: The underground city 103 Image 2.1: The Strip by night 126 Image 2.2: Places of amusement 129 Image 2.3: Body rub promotions 133 Image 2.4: Flyer for Caesar’s Spa 140 Image 2.5: 42nd Street, New York City 153 Image 2.6: Anti-pornography demonstration 156 Image 2.7: Police on Yonge 165 Image 2.8: Shoeshine boy 187 Image 2.9: Demonstration at New City Hall 191 Image 3.1: Eaton’s map 208 Image 3.2: The City for Tomorrow 211 Image 3.3: New and Old City Halls 220 Image 3.4: Eaton’s lands c. 1950s 223 Image 3.5: Growing ambitions 242 Image 3.6: The 1966 Eaton Centre 250 Image 3.7: Save Old City Hall 263 Image 3.8: Little Trinity Church 271 Image 3.9: Eaton Centre model 284 Image 3.10: The 1977 Eaton Centre 289 Image 4.1: Yonge-Dundas by night 306 vi Introduction: The Street and the City In September 1975, Toronto threw its first birthday celebration for Yonge Street, 180 years after it opened to traffic. Downtown businesses, civic leaders, and citizens came together to honour the street and its evolution from colonial road to bustling urban thoroughfare. For five days, retailers on Yonge decorated the sidewalks and offered special promotions, alongside a series of public events intended to draw people downtown. These included free musical performances in nearby Nathan Phillips Square and the lighting of “the world’s largest candle,” an 11 million candle power flare visible across the city, atop a downtown skyscraper on the night of September 5. The next day, a crowd of 1,000 watched as Toronto Mayor David Crombie gave official sanction to “180 Years Yonge Week,” before helping cut and share out a 300lb birthday cake in front of City Hall.1 The cake was painstakingly decorated with a 1795 map of the colony of Upper Canada–now Ontario—just one of many references to Yonge Street’s particular place in local history. Earlier on the same day, reenactors bearing muskets and clad in green felt marched down the street to commemorate the Queen’s Rangers, the soldier-settlers who carved out what was then the colony’s first north-south road, and the basis for agricultural settlement in the area.