Notes Building became Hydro Building in 1953, and later became Music
Building. See also TORONTO/C.N.E./MUSIC BUILDING See also
TORONTO/C.N.E./HYDRO BUILDINGRights and Licenses Public Domain
Agricultural Implements Hall, showing Association Offices at right - Demolished
Inscribed by Salmon in dark blue ballpoint pen, vso u.l.: CNE
Woman's Building 1906 Shows inscription in the print, l.l.: Galbraith I
Photograph Co. / Toronto Can.; The copy negative shows inscription (on
mount?) l.r.: WOMAN'S / BUILDING
IMPORTANCE: No
performing arts facility in Toronto’s history quite equals that of the
Grand Opera House. It is recalled in the name of the lane way existing
today. Built: 1874 Demolished: 1927 What exists there now: Scotia Plaza
Why it's missed: A fabulous Second Empire-style
building with an an intriguing history courtesy of one-time owner
Ambrose Small, the millionaire that one day up and vanished, nothing
like it remains in Toronto.
The Grand Opera House was an opera house and concert hall located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Opened in 1874 on Adelaide Street West, west of Yonge Street, the Grand Opera House was Toronto's premier concert hall during the late 19th century. Designed in the Second Empire style with 1750 seats, the hall was the first in the city to feature gaslights that could all be switched on or off simultaneously with one electric switch.
The Grand Opera House's stage hosted some of the era's best-known performers, including actors Maurice Barrymore, Sarah Bernhardt and Sir Henry Irving, soprano Emma Albani, as well as Italian baritones Giuseppe Del Puente and Antonio Galassi. Visiting lecturers included Oscar Wilde. During its initial years, the Grand Opera House was managed by Charlotte Morrison, a former actress, and the guiding force at that time behind Toronto's opera and theatre scenes. Morrison has been described as the "Ed Mirvish of her time".
The Grand Opera House suffered a number of fires, including a major blaze in 1879 that killed a stage-carpenter, as well as his wife and infant daughter. Although the hall was restored and reopened after each fire, it slowly fell into neglect with the arrival of the vaudeville age in the 1900s, which brought with it newer and more modern vaudeville theatres to Toronto, most notably the Loews and Winter Garden Theatres on Yonge Street.
In 1919, the Grand Opera House became embroiled in an infamous and widely reported criminal investigation. On December 2, the Grand Opera House's owner at the time, Ambrose Small, deposited a cheque for a million dollars in a nearby bank, and went missing later that day.
Before his disappearance, Small already had a reputation in Edwardian era Toronto as a gambler, and booked less reputable, more titillating shows to his string of theatres, including the Grand Opera House. The newspapers published every known detail of the police investigation into his disappearance, and soon it was revealed that Small had kept a secret sex room at the Grand Opera House, where he entertained numerous mistresses.
The concert hall never recovered from the fires, the neglect and the scandal, and it was demolished in 1927. The site of the former Grand Opera House is now occupied by the 68-storey Scotia Plaza in Toronto's Financial District. The sole remaining physical legacy of the concert hall is a small lane running south from Adelaide Street West, named "Grand Opera Lane".
Disappearance of Ambrose Small
Ambrose Small
Grand Opera House, 11 Adelaide Street West, 1913. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 41, Item 516.
For several generations, until at least the 1960s, a running joke for
Torontonians was that the foundation excavations for each new building
might finally uncover the long-lost remains of Ambrose J. Small.
A millionaire who made his fortune in the theatre business based out of
the Grand Opera House on Adelaide Street, Small’s baffling
disappearance in late 1919 became one of the country’s most legendary
unsolved mysteries. In life, Small seemed an unimpressive public figure,
but investigations revealed unsavoury elements in his character that
fuelled salacious nationwide newspaper headlines that made him, after
his disappearance, larger than life.
Image from the Toronto Star, January 3, 1920.
Ambrose J. Small was born in Bradford, Ontario, in 1867
His father was a proprietor at the Grand Hotel on Toronto’s Adelaide
Street West. Seeking to instil in his son a tireless work ethic, the
elder Small convinced the owner of the Grand Opera House, located across
the laneway from the hotel, to give his son a job in about 1884.
Demonstrating business acumen, Ambrose Small rose quickly from assistant
treasurer to treasurer.
By 1889, he had fallen out with the Grand Opera House’s manager, Oliver
Barton Sheppard, and moved down the street to manage the Toronto Opera
House. As manager and part-owner, he gained insight into how the
international touring and booking syndicates that brought plays and
vaudeville acts to theatres across North America worked. And so when
Small purchased a number of theatres in cities across Ontario, beginning
with Toronto’s Grand Opera House, these formed the nucleus of a
thirty-four-theatre circuit in which he—not New York
syndicates—controlled the bookings and touring shows.
Astutely sensing the sorts of shows that would appeal to the public,
Small specialized in staging scintillating plays that imagined the
sexual lives of single women. At the time of his disappearance, the
Grand was showing Revelations of a Wife, a tawdry melodrama. His other productions explored similarly racy themes with titles like Bertha the Sewing-Machine Girl or School for Scandal. Such near-burlesque entertainments raised eyebrows among puritan Toronto’s elite, but they also certainly filled seats.
Ambrose married Theresa Kormann on November 6, 1904, in York (Toronto). To the public eye, the couple were upright citizens, among the elite of
Toronto society. He was a member of exclusive organizations like the
Empire Club, Canadian Club, and the Yacht Club. Likewise, she was a
member of the Women’s Canadian Club, the Toronto Ladies’ Club, the
Musical Club of Toronto, the Women’s Art Association of Toronto, as well
as an officer in the I.O.D.E. She, a Catholic, was a philanthropist who
gave regularly to Catholic charities, such as the St. Vincent de Paul
children’s orphanage. Her husband, a Protestant, sometimes accompanied
her to make presentations, even though he had at least once grumblingly
professed that he had no use for either Catholics or children.
Disappearance
Seeing declining returns on touring shows but increased costs of
productions, the Smalls grew restless with the theatre business after
the First World War. On a brief business trip to Montreal in the fall of
1919, Small negotiated a deal to sell his chain of theatres to the
Trans-Canada Theatres Limited for $1.7 million. On December 2, 1919, the
purchasers visited to Toronto to finalize the deal. In a meeting, Small
accepted a million-dollar cheque (with the balance to be paid in
instalments over the years). The transaction concluded, Small sent his
wife to deposit the cheque at the Dominion Bank’s main branch at King
and Yonge while he ran errands—buying her a Cadillac, a fur, and
jewellery. They lunched together before Small returned to his office at
the Grand Opera House to share a celebratory cigar with his lawyer, E.F.
Flock. Flock stepped out into a snowstorm at about 5:30 p.m. to catch
an evening train, but Small was never seen again (a newsboy’s claim that
Small had bought a paper from him was later refuted as mere hunger for
publicity).
Small had no motive to disappear: the millionaire did not take money with him, nor was there any ransom
note, let alone evidence of kidnapping. At 53, Small owned theatres in
seven Ontario cities and was the controller of 62 other buildings, a
self-made millionaire at the height of his career. Because Ambrose Small
was known to disappear occasionally to womanize and carouse, his
absence was not reported nor was it noted for several weeks. In January
1920, Small's attorney, F. W. M. Flock, along with Teresa Small, now
alarmed by Small's lengthy absence, notified the local police. Teresa
Small offered a $50,000 reward for information about her husband's
disappearance and whereabouts. The reward went unclaimed.
The Aurora Site, also known as the "Old Fort," "Old Indian Fort," "Murphy Farm" or "Hill Fort" site, is a sixteenth-century Huron-Wendat ancestral village located on one of the headwater tributaries of the East Holland River on the north side of the Oak Ridges Moraine in present-day Whitchurch–Stouffville, approximately 30 kilometres north of Toronto.
This Huron ancestral village was located on 3.4 hectares (8.4 acres) of
land and the settlement was fortified with multiple rows of palisades. The community arrived ca. 1550, likely moving en masse from the so-called Mantle Site located nine kilometres to the south-east in what is today urban Stouffville. The Aurora/Old Fort site is located at the south-east corner of Kennedy Road and Vandorf Side Road, east of the hamlet of Vandorf in the town of Whitchurch–Stouffville. The Aurora site was occupied at the same time as the nearby Ratcliff site.
The Rouge River
trail, used by the Huron and then later by the French to travel between
Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe / Georgian Bay, ran through the Aurora
site.
Perhaps the busiest and best documented of these routes
was that which followed the Humber River valley northward ... although
another trail of equal importance and antiquity and used earlier than
the former by the French, extended from the mouth of the Rouge River
northward to the headwaters of the Little Rouge and over the drainage
divide to the East Branch of the Holland River at Holland Landing.
The Aurora/Old Fort site was indiscriminately looted by collectors
throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. An 1885 report
on Whitchurch Township notes that two thousand interments took place on
the site, and that another smaller burial site was found two hundred
yards from the site beside a large pond.
The self-trained archaeologist William Brodie wrote two
archaeological reports on his findings at the Old Fort site (1888; 1901)
dating back to his first visit in 1846. In reference to the Old Fort site, Brodie wrote in 1901:
To say that a ton of archaeological material was collected from the
County of York sites, is a moderate estimate. Some of it is in European
museums, some in the States, and some of it in Laval University,
some of it is still in the hands of amateur collectors, and a little of
it has been secured for the Provincial Museum, but the greater part of
it, once in the keeping of private collectors, is gone, being collected
and lost, as private collections often are.
A complete map of the site was produced in 1930 by the amateur archaeologist Peter Pringle.[7]
The Aurora/Old Fort site was completely excavated in 1947 and 1957 by the University of Toronto. The 1947 dig was the first student excavation by the university, and it was led by John Norman Emerson. Emerson's doctoral work was largely based on the excavations of the Aurora/Old Fort site.
This excavation contributed to the conclusions of archeologists
and anthropologists that the Wendat coalesced as a people in this area,
rather than further east in the St. Lawrence River valley, as was
thought at one time. Findings in the late twentieth century at the Ratcliff Site and in 2005 at the Mantle Site have provided more evidence of sixteenth-century settlements by ancestral Wendat in this region.
In the early 1900's, Sir Henry Pellatt acquired a property in King City
and named it after his wife Mary. Sir Henry was the founder of The
Toronto Electric Light Company in 1883, and also built Casa Loma in
1914.
In the 1940s, when Archbishop McGuigan heard about the work a group of Augustinians were doing in Nova Scotia. He had been interested in opening a spiritual center within the archdiocese, and so he invited the order to start a foundation in King City.
The Augustinians took over an 814 acre estate located on the north-west corner of Keele Street and 15th Sideroad in King City that was originally developed by Sir Henry Pellatt (of Casa Loma fame). The lake on the site, known as Lake Marie, was renamed as Marylake, and the property was dedicated to Our Lady of Grace. The buildings were converted to become a monastery and retreat center. In addition, the Order operated a dairy farm.
On August 15, 1943, 12,000 people attended the dedication of the chapel and blessing of the statue of Our Lady of Grace. On November 11, 1961, the Augustinians were given the care of Sacred Heart Parish in King City. In 1964, a new monastery and shrine were dedicated.
The Marylake Augustinian Monastery
The Marylake Augustinian Monastery, also known as Marylake Monastery, Marylake Shrine, or simply Marylake, is an Augustinian monastery in King City, Ontario, Canada. The campus is nearly 1,000 acres (4.0 km2),
residing on Keele Street, just north of 15th Sideroad (Bloomington).
It
is part of the Province of Saint Joseph, the Canadian province of
Augustinians which operates under the jurisdiction of the Chicago-based
Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel.
Marylake is the chief foundation of the Augustinians in Canada, and is now well known as a spiritual centre for the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto.
Marylake generally refers to the complex which includes the property,
the monastery and shrine, and which operates a retreat centre.The shrine is named the Our Lady of Grace Shrine, whose title is taken from an Augustinian shrine in Lisbon, Portugal. The monastery motto is One mind and one heart unto God.
In 1999, the mendicant order established a school on the property, St. Thomas of Villanova College. It uses the house system, with houses such as St. Augustine, St. Nicholas, St. Rita, and St. Monica.
Mendicant Orders
Mendicant orders are, primarily, certain Christian religious orders that have adopted a lifestyle of poverty, traveling, and living in urban areas for purposes of preaching, evangelization, and ministry, especially to the poor. At their foundation these orders rejected the previously established monastic model. This foresaw living in one stable, isolated community where members worked at a trade and owned property in common,
including land, buildings and other wealth. By contrast, the mendicants
avoided owning property at all, did not work at a trade, and embraced a
poor, often itinerant lifestyle. They depended for their survival on the goodwill of the people to whom they preached.
The term "mendicant" is also used with reference to some non-Christian religions to denote holy persons committed to an ascetic lifestyle, which may include members of religious orders and individual holy persons.
Originally, the property was the farm and summer home of Sir Henry Pellatt, and it was named for his first wife, Mary.
It has been owned by the Augustinians since 1935.
Henry Mill Pellatt
Major-General Sir Henry Mill Pellatt, CVO (January 6, 1859 – March 8, 1939) was a Canadian financier and soldier.
He is notable for his role in bringing hydro-electricity to Toronto, Ontario, for the first time, and also for his large château in Toronto, called Casa Loma,
which was the biggest private residence ever constructed in Canada.
Casa Loma would eventually become a well-known landmark of the city. His
summer home and farm in King City later became Marylake Augustinian Monastery.
Pellatt was also a noted supporter of the Boy Scouts of Canada. His first wife, Mary, was the first Chief Commissioner of the Girl Guides of Canada.
Pellatt was born in Kingston, Canada West (now Ontario), the son of Henry Pellatt (1830–1909), a Glasgow-born stockbroker in Toronto,and Emma Mary Pellatt (née Holland). His great-grandfather was the famous glassmaker Apsley Pellatt.
Pellatt had three sisters and two brothers, Fred Pellatt
(grandfather of Toronto-based freelance writer John Pellatt) and Mill
Pellatt (father of Mary Katherine Pellatt).The latter brother was paymaster of the Toronto Electric Light Company,
a job obtained for him by Pellatt. His sisters were Mary Kate, Marian
Maria and Emily Mountford Pellatt. One of his nieces, Beatrix Hamilton,
was married to Canadian economist and humourist Stephen Leacock.
He was educated at Upper Canada College
before leaving in 1876 to join his father's stock brokerage company,
Pellatt and Osler, as a clerk. In 1882, Pellatt's father and Osler
parted ways, and Pellatt completed his apprenticeship and became a full
member of the stock exchange. In the following year, Pellatt's father set up a partnership with his son under the name Pellatt and Pellatt.
Pellatt married twice, first to Mary Dodgson in Toronto in 1882
and, after Mary's death in 1924, to Catharine Welland Merritt in Toronto
in 1927 (which lasted until her death in 1929). With his first wife, he
had one son, Reginald, who was born in 1885. Colonel Reginald Pellatt (1885–1967) married but had no children.
Much of Pellatt's fortune was made through investments in the railway and hydro-electric industries in Canada, including the Toronto Electric Light Company. He also made significant investment in the Cobalt Lake Mining Company during the Cobalt silver rush of 1903. Later in around 1915, using riches from his Cobalt Lake Mining Company, he invested in the fledging McIntyre Mines in Timmins Ontario. However, legislator Adam Beck
launched a campaign against the great industrialists of Canada,
proclaiming that hydro power "should be as free as air". Through
legislative process and by whipping up anti-rich sentiment, Beck was
able to successfully appropriate Pellatt's life work and take his
electric companies from him. Beck then led a populist revolt to raise
Pellatt's taxes on his castle, Casa Loma, from $600 per year to $12,000.
The strain of losing all of his income, coupled with the large increase
in property taxes for his castle, led him to rely solely on his real
estate investments, which were unsuccessful due to the beginning of World War I.
After the province expropriated his electrical power generating
business, and his aircraft manufacturing business was appropriated by
Beck as part of the war effort during World War I, Pellatt was driven to
near-bankruptcy, which forced him and Lady Pellatt to leave Casa Loma
in 1923. They therefore moved to their farm at Marylake in King City.
Pellatt later built Bailey House in Mimico,
at the bend in Lake Shore near Fleeceline, overlooking the commercial
stretch on Lake Shore (the house later became a Legion Hall and was
demolished to make way for a roadway). He subsequently moved in with his
chauffeur, Thomas Ridgway, and it was in this house that Pellatt died.
After he died on March 8, 1939, thousands of people lined Toronto
streets to witness his funeral procession, and he was buried with full
military honours. He is interred at Forest Lawn Mausoleum, north of Toronto.
The Agricultural School
An agricultural school was established on the grounds in the 1930s by the Basilian fathers, and in 1942 the Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal McGuigan, "invited the Augustinians to establish a shrine and to offer a program of weekend retreats for lay people"
He expressed that it was his own personal dream that it was his hope
that this shrine at the Marylake Center would become not only an
important place of pilgrimage in honor of our Blessed Mother Mary in
this area, but that one day it would officially become the center of
Marian devotion for all Ontario.
The success of this program resulted in the construction of the shrine
in the 1960s, which was dedicated on November 30, 1978 by Cardinal Carter.
The building consists of split fieldstone native to Marylake, based on designs by J. Stuart Cauley.
Marylake held its first mass in 1945. It is the site for a yearly June pilgrimage by 3,000 Danube Swabians for an open-air mass paying "homage to Germans expelled from Eastern Europe".
In October 2012, the Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal Thomas Christopher Collins,
declared Marylake as one of four official archdiocesan sites of sacred
pilgrimage for the Year of Faith. On February 3, 2013, in a Solemn High
Mass, the Very Reverend Bernard Scianna, O.S.A., Ph.D., Prior Provincial
of the Canadian and Midwest Augustinians,
officially blessed and designated the main entrance to the shrine as a
holy door open to all who come to Marylake seeking the special graces of
the Year of Faith.
The Rosary Path at Marylake
The Queen of the Holy Rosary Shrine (Lay Apostolate) gained approval
from the Augustinian Friars to place an environmental sculpture of the
Rosary at Marylake In 2014, ground was broken to build the largest
rosary path in North America. In August 2016, Cardinal Collins blessed
and Opened the rosary path. The Corpus of The Great Crucifix which is at
the beginning of the rosary path was created by the world-renowned
sculptor Timothy Schmaltz. In 2016, Mary's Way of the Cross was added to
the pathway, and in 2017, large (7' X 4') glass panels created by
Stuart Reid were added to the Way of the Cross.
The rosary path at Marylake was conceived by architect Ted
Harasti of Toronto. After receiving a Marian locution on a retreat in
1974, Harasti made it his quest to build the rosary path at the request
of the Blessed Mother Mary.
Pipe organ
The monastery has a pipe organ built from two 1928 Aeolian-Skinner Duo-Art organs, which were obtained in 1960 from the Eaton estate and Seagram estate.Work to combine the two organs began in 1968 and was completed in 1973; it was first played for midnight mass that year.[It has the original leather work, now cracked and torn, and has over 3000 pipes. Marylake plans to repair the organ and transform it to digital operation at a cost of C$100,000.
Filming locations
The 1960s TV series The Forest Rangers used Marylake as a filming location, as it was a good match for lake scenery from Ontario's north.
The Augustinians
The Augustinians, named after Augustine of Hippo (354–430), are members of either of two distinct types of Catholic religious orders, dating back to the first millennium but formally created in the 13th century, and some Anglican religious orders, created in the 19th century, though technically there is no "Order of St. Augustine" in Anglicanism.
Within Anglicanism, the Rule of St. Augustine is followed only by women, who form several different communities of Augustinian nuns in the Anglican Communion.
Within Roman Catholicism, Augustinians may be members of either one of two separate and distinct types of Order:
Several mendicant Orders of friars,
who lived a mixed religious life of contemplation and apostolic
ministry and follow the Rule of St. Augustine, a brief document
providing guidelines for living in a religious community. The largest
and most familiar, originally known as the Hermits of St. Augustine (OESA; Ordo Eremitarum sancti Augustini) and also known as the Austin friars in England, is now simply referred to as the Order of St. Augustine (OSA). Two other Orders, the Order of Augustinian Recollects and the Discalced Augustinians, were once part of the Augustinian Order under a single Prior General. The Recollect friars, founded in 1588 as a reform movement of the Augustinian friars in Spain, became autonomous in 1612 with their first Prior General, Enrique de la Sagrada. The Discalced friars became an independent congregation with their own Prior General in 1592, and were raised to the status of a separate mendicant order in 1610.
Various congregations of clerics known as Canons Regular who also follow the Rule of St. Augustine, embrace the evangelical counsels and lead a semi-monastic life, while remaining committed to pastoral care appropriate to their primary vocation as priests. They generally form one large community which might serve parishes in the vicinity, and are organized into autonomous congregations, which normally are distinct by region.
Charism
In a
religious community, "charism" is the particular contribution that each
religious order, congregation or family and its individual members
embody. The teaching and writing of Augustine, the Augustinian Rule, and the lives and experiences of Augustinians over sixteen centuries help define the ethos (principles) and special charism of the order.
As well as telling his disciples to be "of one mind and heart on the way towards God", Augustine of Hippo taught that
"Nothing conquers except truth and the victory of truth is love" (Victoria veritatis est caritas),
and
the pursuit of truth through learning is key to the Augustinian
ethos,
balanced by the injunction to behave with love towards one
another.
It does not unduly single out the exceptional, especially
favour the gifted, nor exclude the poor or marginalised.
Love is not
earned through human merit, but received and given freely by God's free
gift of grace, totally undeserved yet generously given.
These same
imperatives of affection and fairness have driven the order in its
international missionary outreach.
This balanced pursuit of love and learning has energised the various
branches of the order into building communities founded on mutual
affection and intellectual advancement.
The Augustinian ideal is
inclusive.
Augustine spoke passionately of God's "beauty so ancient and so new", and his fascination with beauty extended to music. He taught that "whoever sings prays twice" (Qui cantat, bis orat) and music is also a key part of the Augustinian ethos.
Contemporary Augustinian musical foundations include the famous Augustinerkirche in Vienna, where orchestral masses by Mozart and Schubert are performed every week, as well as the boys' choir at Sankt Florian in Austria, a school conducted by Augustinian canons, a choir now over 1,000 years old.
Augustinians have also produced a formidable body of scholarly works.
