March 11th, 2010
The Toronto Museum Project goes online
By Marcus Bowman // 8 Comments
Toronto has edged a little closer to the goal of creating a civic museum with the recent launch of the Toronto Museum Project online.The fantastic new website includes detailed images of 150 objects in the municipal collection. The project is innovative in the way it lets people interact with the collection online. A diverse group of 100 Torontonians were invited to view the objects and share personal stories, inspired as a result. These stories are all included in the website and highlight the importance of showcasing history to our collective civic conscience. Mayor Miller called it "An inventive new way for Torontonians to engage objects, stories and ideas, and to reflect on what they mean for the city's past, present and future."
The online project also includes 100 exciting ideas for exhibits at a future Toronto Museum. A look through the ideas is an interesting read. One exhibit proposal is about the ancient highways used by natives in the region and would include authentic hollowed out canoes, another, tentatively named 'Home Brew' focuses on the history of alcohol production in city. A more populist exhibit proposal dedicates itself to the city's armchair athletes and includes items ranging from old team photos and jerseys to World Series memorabilia.
Input seems to be the focus of the whole project and each exhibit provides opportunity for feedback. The project has given prominent space for readers to create their own exhibit ideas, and justify why such ideas would important in a city museum.
According to the Mayor, the city currently has over 150,000 objects in its historical collection. This of course brings up the long-standing issue of where the city can find an appropriate place to display them. While many viewed the Canada Malting Company Silos on the waterfront as a front-runner, that site has come into question because of structural issues with the silos and the possibility of Old City Hall opening up. Having outgrown their current premises, Court Services plans to move to a new building on University Ave leaving Old City Hall open for new uses.
The project was a collaboration between the Ecentricarts, York University's Augmented Reality Lab, Brookview Middle School and the Toronto Star. Not only does the project build productively towards better displaying the city's historical collection, it also creates momentum for a museum by clearly demonstrating some of the amazing opportunities available.
As the online project shows Toronto has the physical collection and collective imagination to put together what could be an incredible civic museum; lets hope the momentum doesn't stop here.
Photo credit: Toronto Archives [see the full size image]
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Finally the project has been resurrected!
The Toronto Museum should be built on the east side of Bathurst Street at Fort York Blvd.. You would have Fort York on the east side and the museum on the west side of Bathurst Street.
First we fix our transit system, our roads, our schools, our community centres, our public housing, etc. Then we can spend money on useless, low priority projects like this.
Our city has so much history how can you not? There might not be enough money to build but showcasing some of the many historical artifacts we have online is an excellent idea.
The beauty of having thousands of employees is that you can do more than one thing at one, Andrew. Having an urban culture with a sense of history and ambitions can really enhance the experience of living in the city and motivate citizens not to be indifferent about the transit system, public housing, and other such issues.
Chicago has a great museum dedicated to it's history, it would be nice if Toronto had one like it.
The TTC is looking into building a transit museum.
Unfortunately the current recommended location isn't connected to the streetcar network, so any streetcar on display would have to be static displays.
A wonderful idea and an excellent way to build momentum for this project. I honestly hope we'll finally see Toronto get it's own museum in my lifetime.
Comment by Kris(tine)
March 11, 2010 | 2:49 pm