Spadina: A Story of Old Toronto

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

This book is a reprint of a work first published in 1975. Austin Seton
Thompson was a direct descendant of James Austin, an Irish immigrant who
started his working career as a printing apprentice to the volatile
William Lyon McKenzie but would go on to become a pillar of the Toronto
banking and financial establishment. In 1866, at the height of a
Canadian depression, Austen purchased a fine country house from the
estate of Dr. William Baldwin, another Irish immigrant who had done very
well for himself in Western Canada. After the purchase, Austin flattened
Baldwin’s already impressive country mansion and erected an even more
opulent edifice. The structure, known since Baldwin’s days as
“Spadina,” survives today as a Toronto landmark and public museum.

On the surface, this book could be called a history of the property and
the houses that were known as Spadina except the book’s scope is much
wider than that. A better name might be “The Lifestyles of Old
Toronto’s Rich and Famous” because the book examines the wheelings
and dealings of Toronto’s upper crust, from the fledgling
administration of Lieutenant Governor Simcoe through to the high
Imperial era of Queen Victoria. Thompson, a lawyer by trade, deftly
explains the intricate business deals that led to many Toronto fortunes.
At the same time, he writes with an elegant, low-key humor that tends to
sneak up on the reader unexpectedly.

Above all else, Thompson writes with a fastidious attention to detail,
which made this book, from its first release 25 ago, an instant
“foundation” work for many other Toronto history books. In the new
edition, a foreword by James Austin Seton Thompson (son of the author)
is included. The text is supported by dozens of original black-and-white
photographs. If you are a Toronto history fan, this is a must-have
volume for your home library.