This site is an offshoot of the immensely popular ‘Toronto Then and Now’ thread, started by Mustapha, found on the urbantoronto.ca online forum. There is a keen delight to be found in comparing images of a historical Toronto with images of the present. These photographs show us how Toronto has tangibly changed — sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. Viewing them gives rise to a personal reflection on the transience of the people, buildings, and architecture that surround us. Sic transit gloria mundi!
Each post will generally feature: a curt textual description, a pair of photographs — one from the past, and one from the ‘present’ (circa 2010 and onwards) — as well as a link to the original forum post.
The original thread is now some 700+ pages in length, with over 11,000 posts — a testament to its popularity, and to the tenacity of its contributors. Unfortunately, that makes for rather unwieldy browsing if you're looking for a particular building, historical landmark, or area of the city — there was no way to quickly find something, unless you are intimately familiar with the thread and remember what page it was on.
This project is an attempt to create a useful, simple to access database of these photographs, searchable by keyword.
This site is intended to supplement the forum thread, which contains considerable insight, commentary, and humour well worth wading through. I highly recommend that you check out the thread — and post new content there if you’ve got something to contribute!
All photos are copyright their respective owners.
The historical photos are generally taken from the online scanned photos database of the Toronto Archives. Technically speaking, explicit permission should be obtained before reproducing each individual photo instance from the archives, but the ones taken before Dec 31, 1948 are generally in the public domain.
The ‘now’ photographs belong to the urbantoronto contributors, who have put a great deal of effort into taking them. These contributors should be thanked profusely for their valuable time. Mustapha in particular started the thread, kept it going, and graciously gave permission to reuse his images for this blog. If you are one of the thread contributors, and you see a photograph of yours that you do not wish to have used, please contact me and I will remove the corresponding post. In general I will attempt to contact photo contributors prior to usage so as not to tread on anyone’s toes. If I’ve somehow overlooked you I sincerely apologize.
The medium term goal will be to populate this site slowly but steadily, until it eventually catches up with the content in the thread. I originally had the idea for this site when I wanted to see if there were any old photos of the (now demolished) Berg Machinery warehouse building at Front and Bathurst. I tried searching the urbantoronto thread, but soon realized I would need to manually page through the entire thing. I figured I might as well do some cataloguing along the way... and hopefully save a future browser some time.
Enjoy!
