Too Good to Be True: Toronto in the 1920s

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer, and the editor of Landscape Architectural Review.

In his second book on Toronto, Randall White expresses a dual
thesis—first, that the city “today has finally evolved into
something that it started to become in the 1920s,” and second, that
“[t]he era of [Toronto’s] history that began in the 1920s has now
come to an end.” In either case, it may simply be too early to tell.
White also argues, and illustrates quite convincingly, that the city’s
reputation as “Toronto the Good” has always been a bit overblown.

White immersed himself in the period by studying its daily papers and
by talking with people who had experienced it. To put these perspectives
in context, he also consulted contemporary Might’s city directories,
city maps and government records, election returns, and Statistics
Canada publications, plus a host of later secondary sources. Since the
book was not intended as a scholarly work, White’s general comments
about sources (which are, unfortunately, not always to be found in the
bibliography) have to suffice, as does an index consisting almost
entirely of proper names.

The brief but related pieces that make up the 10 sections of the book
are detailed vignettes of Toronto and its place in the world just before
and during this boom–bust decade. Prominent figures like Sir Henry
Pellatt, Mayor Tommy Church, E.C. Drury, Howard Ferguson, Prime Minister
William Lyon Mackenzie King, Agnes MacPhail, Morley Callaghan, Ernest
Hemingway, and Frederick Banting arrive early in the book and stay late.
So do ordinary people: moving to the city from rural Ontario, as well as
from the West Indies, Eastern Europe, and China; flocking to Sunnyside
Beach, “The Arena,” Eaton’s, and Simpson’s; expressing or
repressing ethnic and religious prejudices; electing and rejecting their
governments.

Selected newspaper display ads (heavy with ink and advertisers’
hyperbole) and fascinating photographs by The Globe’s John H. Boyd
further invoke the spirit of the period. All things considered, this
book, like Eric Hounsome’s Toronto in 1810, is an eyeopener.