Toronto’s lost architectural history returns to downtown with new Campbell House Museum exhibit

Organizers hope the year-long event will spark a conversation about Toronto’s heritage and how to preserve the pieces of it that are still standing.

Thestar.com
May 10, 2018
May Warren

Looking out the window of Campbell House in the heart of downtown Toronto, Liz Driver has a panoramic view of some of the city’s best-known skyscrapers.

But, as the curator and director of a nearly 200-year-old building surrounded by gleaming glass and concrete, Driver often thinks about what was lost to make room for these modern marvels.

This month, a new exhibit transports fragments of the city’s lost buildings to the garden of Campbell House, bringing them to a downtown audience for the first time.

Driver hopes Lost & Found, a free exhibition that starts May 17 and runs for a year, will get people to “reflect on the new and the old” and encourage a “conversation” with the setting.

Many of the stone slabs were brought to Scarborough’s Guild Inn by conservationists Spencer and Rosa Clark when the original buildings were demolished in the 1960s and 1970s. Some have been on display there at some point. But others have been sitting in storage for decades, and a few have never been seen, Driver said.

“It’s really a commentary on the fact that Campbell House itself was salvaged. It used to stand on the other side of Yonge, and it was almost lost, and the Advocates’ Society saved it. They put the whole thing on a truck and brought it over here,” she said.

“And so now we’re going to bring fragments of other lost buildings.”

The exhibit will include six groupings of stones from structures dating back to early 1900s through the 1930s, including an art deco panel from the old Toronto Star building, and fragments of the old Bank of Montreal, Imperial Oil and Bank of Toronto buildings,“for people to walk their dogs around, push their kids, take photographs,” Driver said.

The pieces of history were salvaged by the Clarks, who created an artists’ colony near the Scarborough Bluffs.

“What we wanted to do was use the pieces as sort of a lens through which to look at the period of time when they were built, and the period of time in which they were demolished, and why those things happened,” said Leora Bebko, one of three grad students in U of T’s museum studies program curating the exhibit.

She explained she hopes visitors will, “think about ways in which, looking forward, we can maybe learn from, not past mistakes, but things we’ve lost in the past, and try and look toward how we can save some of the historic buildings that are maybe in danger now.”

Grad student and curator Tanya McCullough hopes the pieces of old buildings, now located so close to the new ones, will get visitors to “start to think of the juxtaposition between the old and the new, what we’ve lost and what the future looks like.”

Exhibits like Lost & Found are part of the evolving mission of Campbell House Museum, Driver said, to “give life to the words, freedom of expression.” The museum has been a spot for Nuit Blanche exhibits for the past four years, and regularly hosts art shows and other exhibits inside.

The house, which now sits at the northwest corner of Queen Street West and University Avenue, is not just the oldest remaining from the Town of York. It was also home to Chief Justice William Campbell, who “played a leading role in freedom of expression.”

Campbell oversaw a trial where William Lyon Mackenzie, the first Mayor of Toronto, sued members of the Family Compact, a group of powerful men in Upper Canada, for destroying his printing presses, said Driver.

The house is owned by the city, while the museum is operated by the Sir William Campbell foundation, and the grounds are leased from Great-West Life Assurance Co.

The exhibit comes as the city’s Economic Development Committee endorsed a resolution from Councillor Joe Cressy, Thursday, to review the museum in the interest of keeping it a public space, as the foundation looks to scale back it’s role.

“The bottom line is that it’s a jewel in the heart of downtown,” Cressy said.

“It’s now time for us to think about the next 50 years, or the next century.”