Housed in Toronto's old St. George's Hall - where it moved in 1920 - the Arts and Letters club was founded in 1908 by journalist Augustus Bridle as a private club that invited (and embraced ) artists from many discplines: musicians, architects, actors, and a few more in between.
The majestic St. George?s Hall at 14 Elm Street resembles a baronial castle. Built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, similar to Toronto?s Old City Hall, its massive stone base, turrets, and the Roman arch above the entrance hearken back to the days of Mediaeval knights.
Referenced in Terry Murray's Faces on Places for its stone carvings of St. George slaying the dragons, the Arts and Letters Club building is a fascinating stop for anyone looking to study the old architecture found in the great city of Toronto.
Faces on Places takes us up into the the sky to the fascinating world of creatures and icons that watch over Toronto and its inhabitants. Terry Murray invites readers to delve into the little-know and often overlooked grotesque world of gargoyles and cherubs and caricuatures that adorn some of Toronto's most prominent buildings.
In Becoming Modern in Toronto, Keith Walden shows how the Toronto Industrial Exhibition, from its founding in 1879 to 1903 (when it was renamed the Canadian National Exhibition), influenced the shaping and ordering of the emerging urban culture. Unlike other studies of its kind, it fully integrates experiences on and off the fairground by viewing the fair as a microcosm of developing structures in the city and surrounding rural areas.
Twenty-five fascinating images that offer a 360º panorama of the Toronto's downtown in 1856-57 mark the beginning of the use of photographs to document Toronto's growth, its achievements, its great civic works, and its citizenry. Since 1856, the City of Toronto has been commissioning photographs to document and to promote it.
This book, published to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the city's incorporation, brings together more than 100 of these images, selected by city archivists from their collection of hundreds of thousands.
