The newsstand was once a fixture a busy intersections in Toronto. Loudly branded with the names of the major dailies — Daily Star, Toronto Telegram, The Globe and Mail
— the shack-like structures came complete with barking attendants
hocking the headlines of the day. There's a certain nostalgia caught up
in the image of these huts, be it on account of the vintage advertising
and graphics they're adorned with or merely the inevitable realization
one has that they were replaced by coin-fed metal boxes, which are
themselves likely to be erased from the streetscape in the coming
decades. Less an occasion for mourning, it would be fair to say that
these photos capture the passage of time with a peculiar force, one that
belies their benign imagery.
The photos below date between the 1920s and '40s, though the corner
newsstand would last quite a while longer. The arrival of subway
entrances/exits reduced the available space at many Yonge Street
intersections in the mid 1950s, but the newsstand remained a fixture for
at least another decade. There was a newsstand on the southeast corner
of Yonge and Dundas until at least 1970 (it's harder to tell at Yonge and Queen
from the photos I've consulted), but as the decade pushed on, the
remaining holdouts bit the dust, and with them our street corners lost a
bit of character and gained a bit of space.
Here's what newsstands used to look like in Toronto.
Yonge and Dundas, 1922
Yonge and Queen, 1922
King and Bay, 1931
Bathurst and College, 1937
Bathurst and College, alternate angle
Broadview and Queen, 1937
Gerrard and Jones, 1937
St. Andrew and Spadina, 1938
Yonge and Queen 1940s
Yonge and Queen, 1940s
Please share this
No comments:
Post a Comment