Four Toronto places, each changing, spoke through people who knew them.
The stories – often stories of immigrants – and art they inspired are now there for all to see.
To get them, the Toronto Ward Museum sent researchers to Agincourt, Parkdale, Regent Park and Victoria Park, the last a collection of communities along the busy avenue between Scarborough and North York.
Assembled for the first time, an exhibit on all four areas is at Toronto Reference Library until Nov. 20.
Brannavy Jeyasundaram, the museum’s co-executive director, thinks Toronto hasn’t seen anything like it.
Block By Block, which began in 2019, sought to preserve and animate oral histories from all four places before they were lost to those communities, she said.
Redevelopment, whether it’s on the Golden Mile or Sheppard Avenue in northwest Scarborough, is bringing the neighbourhoods rapid change. The kinds of stories Block By Block recorded tend to “get muffled” as new people come in, Jeyasundaram said.
The exhibit at the library’s TD Gallery features insights from more than 100 oral histories. Turned into artistic outcomes – videos and a set of posters – they are “a really beautiful collection of deep, youth-led research” with a timeline putting them in context, she said.
It’s hoped the exhibit will get visitors thinking about city-building and how to build a culture that welcomes migrants, said Jeyasundaram.
Block parties invited resident participation in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and returned stories to the neighbourhoods. Other events, including a walking tour of the Golden Mile and North York’s Parma Court, continued this summer.
A visitor to a ‘block party’ organized in Agincourt by the Toronto Ward Museum has fun participating.
Jeyasundaram joined the project in 2020 as a researcher and curator. Being able to connect to people during the pandemic, she said, was a saving grace for her.
The museum, an institution “without walls,” is named for St. John’s Ward, a part of Toronto’s downtown, also home to immigrants, which development mostly erased.
