Aurora history comes to life with On This Spot smartphone app

Free smartphone app being offered by Aurora Museum

Yorkregion.com
July 12, 2019
Kim Zarzour

There are ghosts in our midst -- and now a new app that lets you see these spirits of the past up close.

Called “On This Spot,” the free smartphone app is being offered by the Aurora Museum to help history come alive.

When you download it onto your phone, you can view more than 100 historical photos of the town and compare them to photos from the modern day. A camera tool allows you to take a selfie and embed yourself in an archival photo. Two walking tours take you down the streets and backwards in time through fires and cyclones, humble homes and mansions.

“There’s something about then-and-now photos that makes history come alive,” said Michelle Johnson, collections and exhibitions co-ordinator. “It captivates people to be curious.”

Aurora is one of a dozen Canadian communities, along with Nanaimo, Toronto, Parry Sound, Victoria and Ottawa, to adopt the new technology.

Founded in the 1800s, the Town of Aurora (its name means ‘guided by the dawn’) began as a quiet farming community, and there are still remnants of those early days visible today.

On This Spot brings those remnants to life. One photo shows a proud group of locals gathered in front of the new town “skyscraper” -- the three-story Medical Hall opened in 1886 southeast of Yonge and Wellington. Move the slider across the photo and you can see that spot today: an Xclusive Fades hair salon and Vic’s Shoe Repair (which is, in itself, a longtime local landmark).

These days, the town is working toward a revitalized core and corralling burgeoning traffic, but in days past, the big challenges were muddy streets, fires, floods and the evils of alcohol.

A walking tour on the app lets you stroll past disaster sites and learn how the locals of yore coped with catastrophe -- from the great fire of 1887 that devastated the early wooden buildings, to the 1972 Textile Bargain Centre where firefighters put their lives on the line for $8 a day, to the United Church, destroyed in 2014 by a wayward spark from a roofer’s blowtorch.

You can superimpose yourself with the in-app camera into a 19th century class photo, or with soldiers marching off to war, or other historic moments in time.

A map feature leads you on a walking tour east of Yonge along streets north and south of Wellington, where you discover bite-sized snippets of history as told through Aurora’s oldest buildings.

“We see our role as going beyond the walls of this institution,” she said, pointing to the character-filled century school house on Wells Street that is home to the local museum. “We do exhibits here, but we also want to meet people where they are.”