Toronto of the 1870's was a booming Victorian city nearing a population of 80,000, alive with the smells of mud, livestock, and industry. The recent establishment of railways connected the city to regional markets, fueling rapid growth and helping spawn a host of profitable businesses. Wealthy entrepreneurs desired fine homes, often built on or near the sites of their livelihoods. Many Torontonians will recognize the above picturesque old house on Augusta just north of Queen St West. Built for Edward Leadlay in 1876, the villa's watchtower overlooked a complex of buildings that comprised Leadlay's business based on sheep by-products. The house was purchased by the Felician Sisters in 1937 and remains a convent to this day. Beautifully maintained and carefully restored, it turns out this old Victorian lady has a long lost twin sister. "Rivervilla", northeast corner of Queen & River, photo: Toronto Public Library, B. Napier Simpson Collection On the opposite side of town, beside the Don Valley, "Rivervilla" was built for Thomas Davies in 1878 on the northeast corner of Queen and River street. The house was situated in front of Davies' bustling Don Brewery, which he operated with his brothers (his son Robert stayed in the beer making business and later opened the Dominion Brewery on Queen East near Sumach). A photo from 1910 shows the house without its tower. Presumably the building had been re-purposed and more mundane additions were built on the front. The lot was flattened in 1974 and is now the site of the Toronto Humane Society building. Curiously, though identical in all but the smallest details, Rivervilla was an exact mirror duplicate of the Leadlay house. The architect is unknown, as are the whims and reasons for this act of architectural mirror-play. On a whim of my own I measured a map to see if the center line between these mirror houses landed anywhere meaningful, such as Yonge street. Close but not quite... does Victoria Street count?

Workers replacing Old City Hall's roof pose by a gargoyle overlooking Terauly St (now Bay), 1920. In the 1890's, long trains loaded down with beige sandstone chugged from New Brunswick to Toronto. E.J. Lennox's magnificent Old City Hall, once the second largest city hall in North America (after Philadelphia), enriched with flamboyant romanesque details, finally opened for civic business in September 1899 after ten years of construction. What reverence Torontonians had for the building was not shared by the harsh Canadian climate. The freeze-thaw cycle had an appetite for delicate sandstone gargoyles and finials, culminating in 1938 with a 500-pound chunk of gargoyle from the clock tower crashing through the roof of the building. A year later the weathered beasts were all removed along with other ornaments as a safety precaution. Old City Hall was becoming soot-blackened and weather-worn. Grassroots community uproar spared the building (just barely) from a 1960's plan which would have left only the clock tower standing like an obelisk in a sea of austere concrete. Since that reprieve, epic restorations have been carried out. A team of 30 metal workers recently spent five years replacing the copper roof, and decades of grit has been scrubbed off to reveal pristine red and beige sandstone. New gargoyles have been cast in durable lightweight bronze, restoring the tower's original proportions and gazing out over a city much changed in their absence. Old city hall clock tower in 1923, clad in wooden scaffolding.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Spacing illustrator and contributor Mathew Borrett has joined our blog team and will post occasionally about interesting finds in the City of Toronto Archives and the stories behind the images. Shaw Street over the humble Sully Crescent, looking west in 1901. (map) Like most cities, Toronto is a lot flatter than it used to be. The shapes of many early neighbourhoods were defined by ravines and meandering creek beds. Seen as obstacles to development, they were aggressively filled in and their waters relegated to dark pipes underground. The buried Garrison Creek is a prominent Toronto example. A few sections remain only partly filled -- Bickford Park, the bowl in Trinity Bellwoods, the dip on Ossington between College and Harbord. By the time of the Garrison's internment, it had become little more than an open sewer and convenient dumping site for the population exploding around it. Taddle Creek, Walmsey Brook, and many others suffered similar fates. Now these waterways are storm drains and sewers, absorbed into the city's infrastructure. A section of Garrison Creek used to wind northeast across College at Shaw street. In the late 1800s a modest collection of houses sprouted here on Sully Crescent. A long wooden stair connected the end of the crescent with Shaw Street above. The present-day Dominion grocery store (now Metro) on College and Fred Hamilton Park now occupy the filled land. How many shoppers, as they cross the parking lot to pick up a few groceries, realize that a neighbourhood once stirred far below their feet?