City
Goad's Fire Atlas of Toronto
Goad's Fire Atlas of the City of Toronto and Suburbs is quite possibly my favourite in a long list of maps. Although not the artistic feat that P. A. Gross's Bird's-Eye View of Toronto (1876) represents, there's a whole other level of meticulousness and precision on display in Charles Goad's cartography.
As is noted in the introductory information on the Atlas from the Toronto Archives, "Fire insurance plans were originally compiled by mapmakers and leased to insurance companies, who used the information about building sizes and construction materials to determine the fire risk and therefore the cost of insurance premiums." And, from a pragmatic standpoint, these maps now allow researchers "to determine when a building was built or demolished, details of building materials, the position of a building on a lot, lot and address numbers, and lot sizes and shapes."
But for me, there's more to it than this. With its identification of buildings both big and small, Goad's Atlas operates like a proto-Google Satellite map, where the viewer can get a sense for the urban environment on a street by street basis rather than just in a macro capacity. For the contemporary map-reader, this level of detail underscores just how much the city has changed in the last century.
That such change has happened is not particularly remarkable, but to be able to see how an area like Corktown was laid out prior to the construction of the DVP and its off-ramps, or that Dupont Street ended its westerly jaunt at Shaw or that College and Carlton didn't really connect as an intersection, all of these things are the stuff of pure fascination for those interested in the nature and history of Toronto.
There are multiple versions of Goad's Fire Insurance Plans, which date back to 1880. The examples below come from the 1910 iteration, which has been scanned in its entirety at the National Archives. To scroll through larger versions of each page, follow this link.
Old Union Station and surrounding area
The site of the now-demolished Armouries
The University of Toronto
Part of Corktown
Fort York and surrounding area
Ossington and area
Yonge Street below College
What is now Christie Pits
Around the Dufferin jog (which will finally be eliminated tomorrow)
Kensington Market
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since there are no copies circulating at the library
system. It is a wonderful book and a possible
companion work to it would be Mapping Victorian Toronto.
I'd love to browse through that latter one since
it's also no longer available in the libraries.
See comments on this: http://www.blogto.com/arts/2010/11/toronto_neighbourhoods_mapped_via_word_clouds/
Clearly, nobody who was involved in mapping out the city had any imagination that one day the city might be more than a hundred thousand people. I find that shockingly myopic. That lack of vision has saddled this city with billions of dollars in costs to correct their laziness. The Dufferin jog being only one of dozens of examples.
With cities like New York, London and Paris already well over one million people at the time these maps were produced, it shows just how small-minded and 'provincial' city planners were until the the 1940s. By then it was too late.
After 1890, all the railways shared one downtown passenger station, not six as there were in Chicago. The railways certainly did not always get their way. In 1905, the Grand Trunk wanted to build a new line right through the Beaches.
Public attitudes towards the railways in the 19th century were decidedly mixed. Those who appreciated them remembered what it was like to travel, say, between Montreal and Toronto before 1856, a journey that could occupy five days at certain times of the year.
On the other hand, certain railway companies such as the Grand Trunk were loathed by Torontonians, in much the same way that people who spend three hours every day commuting back and forth to work loathe the TTC.
I was excited to see Atlases put up online by the TPL in their digital archives, but soon discovered that navigating their catalogue was painful, as the database titles don't include plate numbers, nor can you sub-sort results by plate. Meanwhile, the version put up by the Archives suffers from being trapped in a wretched file-format that is essentially unsupported on Linux and OSX.
I decided to put together a simple tool to allow myself to easily locate and view the maps. The result is a rudimentary, but (hopefully) useful and complementary mode of accessing Goad’s Atlas (1884, 1890, 1893, 1899). You should be able to use any major browser, any platform, no extra software required.
Rather than keep the tool to myself, I’d like to share the work with you, and other Toronto heritage enthusiasts at large. I hope some of you will find it of use.
Here’s the introductory post -- enjoy exploring Victorian Toronto!
http://skritch.blogspot.com/2012/04/goads-atlas-of-toronto-online.html