The archeological dig in a parking lot bordering Armoury St. in downtown Toronto, which began in 2015, was one of the largest such urban projects in Canada. A new book looks at some of the hundreds of thousands of artifacts uncovered and the light they shed on life in the former immigrant neighbourhood known as St. John’s Ward or just The Ward. Here are two slices of life from The Ward Uncovered: The Archaeology of Everyday Life.

THE POLITICS OF MINSTREL SHOWS, by Karolyn Smardz Frost

Blackface performers are “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.”

– Frederick Douglass

One of the most fascinating artifacts recovered at the Armoury Street Dig is a porcelain figurine about nine centimetres high.

The piece is much worn but depicts a white actor in blackface makeup, playing a mandolin. It is also broken, so there is no maker’s mark evident, but was probably of German manufacture and intended for North American, British, Australian and New Zealand markets. The object is evocative of the minstrel shows that were so popular in the English-speaking world starting in the early 19th century. Its discovery in the soils of Lot 10, at 35 Centre St., highlights how pervasive the intensely racist minstrel tradition was in Canadian entertainment.

Minstrel shows were born out of racial prejudice. In the 1820s, European-American actors began putting lampblack or burnt cork on their faces and presented themselves as “blackface” performers at circuses and other venues. Thomas Dartmouth (”Daddy”) Rice, considered “the father of American minstrelsy,” is believed to have been inspired by an African American with a disability who he observed in Louisville, Ky., in the early 1830s. The man was sweeping out a stable while singing and dancing with a halting, shuffling step. From this, Rice developed his signature “Jump Jim Crow” song-and-dance routine.

The invention of blackface minstrelsy initiated two profoundly discriminatory aspects of American popular culture: the minstrel tradition that turned racist perceptions of Black Americans into figures of fun for the amusement of white audiences; and the identification of the term Jim Crow with African America. So pervasive was the latter that Jim Crow became the common term for racial segregation, culminating in the draconian Jim Crow laws enacted in the last decades of the 19th century. These laws, and their attendant customs, demanded a separation of African Americans from European Americans in nearly every walk of life.

The minstrel tradition combined sentimentality and comedy, ridiculing African Americans and romanticizing plantation slavery. It caricatured both enslaved and free Black people in a series of stock characters that grew more exaggerated over time. Early on, minstrel productions also developed a formulaic structure incorporating song, dance, musical recital, often slapstick comedy, and parodies of well-known theatrical and literary works. Instruments included the bones (a pair of animal bones or wood sticks), banjos, fiddle and tambourine.

By 1843, the Christy Minstrels of Buffalo, N.Y., had devised a standard three-act format consisting of the prologue; the second act, a hodgepodge of comic routines and skits known as the “olio”; and the afterword, which usually comprised a one-act musical. This formula influenced minstrel shows for decades. The group’s signature song was “Old Folks at Home,” by Stephen Foster, who also authored such classic works of the era as “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races.”

The Virginia Minstrels, established soon after in New York’s Bowery, were the first such act recorded as caricaturing life on the plantation, turning the cruelty and oppression of agricultural slavery into a comedic medium that undervalued African-American suffering and contradicted abolitionist campaigns to raise awareness about the horrors of the slave condition.

Nor was the appeal of the blackface performance limited to the U.S. Soon after the invention of blackface, travelling players brought the minstrel tradition to Canada, Great Britain and Europe, as well as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, where it proved an enduring form of public amusement. Songs written for minstrel performance, both professional and amateur, were widely published, some of them in Toronto.

Not surprisingly, Toronto’s respectable, hard-working and politically aware African-Canadian population, largely comprised of African-American expatriates, protested such performances. The majority lived in the future St. John’s Ward (known as The Ward by the 1880s). As early as 1840, concerned African Torontonians petitioned city council to stop licensing travelling minstrel shows and circuses — including blackface burlesques — to mount shows within the city limits.

In a series of impassioned appeals to city council, the community representatives complained that the stock characters, and the itinerant groups of actors who played them, were endeavouring “to make the Coloured man appear ridiculous and contemptible in the eyes of their audience” and “contaminating the wholesome air of Our City with Yanky [sic] amusement of comic songs known by the name of Jim Crow and Aunt Dinah.”

The first such petition was signed by dozens of the city’s Black male residents. It was presented on July 20, 1840, by Wilson Ruffin Abbott, a tobacconist and real estate investor destined to become the wealthiest African-Canadian resident of the 19th-century city:

“The subscribers of this humble petition represents to his Worship the Mayor and the Corporation, that they have remarked with sorrow that the American Actors who from time to time visit this City, invariably select for performance plays and characters which by turning into ridicule and holding up to contempt the coloured population cause them much heart-burning and lead occasionally to violence ... They therefore respectfully entreat His Worship and all those to whom the right pertains to forbid in future the performance of plays likely to produce a breach of the public peace.”

The 1840 petition fell on deaf ears, so there were annual presentations to Toronto city council over the next three years. However, it was only after a letter, dated April 21, 1843, pointed out that the City of Kingston had already ceased to license these “demeaning” and “insulting” performances that Toronto’s municipal officials followed suit. Apparently preserving the public peace was a factor, since, as Abbott’s fourth petition stated, “certain acts and songs such as Jim Crow and what they call other Negro characters performed by them has heretofore been productive of many broils and suits between the white and coloured inhabitants of this City.”

Toronto’s prohibition against minstrel shows was short-lived. Even venerable literary works, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s iconic antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first performed as a play in Toronto in 1853, were recreated as burlesque satires in the minstrel tradition. Minstrelsy turned Stowe’s paternalistic abolitionism on its head and, in the words of Ryerson University visual studies scholar Dr. Cheryl Thompson, “served to reaffirm widely held beliefs about the inferiority of Blacks and the docility of slaves on the Southern plantation.”

A final Toronto petition, dated Aug. 15, 1856, and “praying the Council to prohibit the exhibition of a circus in the city during the current year was presented to Councillor Cameron and read ... passed,” noted on page 568 of the Minutes of City Council for that date.

Newspapers of the day advertised minstrel performances at St. Lawrence Hall, the Amphitheatre, the Royal Lyceum Theatre and other more formal venues, often playing to standing-room-only audiences. Less professional performances were staged in the upper rooms of the city’s hotels, taverns and saloons, at the fairgrounds, racetracks, or in the open air by travelling players. Toronto even produced its own very famous blackface actor, theatre director and composer, Colin “Cool” Burgess, who gained an international reputation and whose songs have entered the North American folk repertoire.

Amateur productions employing blackface makeup, minstrel-style clothing, musical performance and song were popular well into the mid-20th century. There were even handbooks published for groups wishing to present their own minstrel shows, as fundraisers by service and professional organizations, school presentations, or variety show entertainments. A photo of the McCormick Playground Minstrels (1916) survives in the collections of the City of Toronto Archives. The Toronto Reference Library has programs for minstrel shows mounted by the Cantanks of the 1st Canadian Army Tank Brigade, which they performed while stationed in England in 1918, as well as the Toronto Canoe Club Minstrels (1919).

On at least one occasion, a minstrel show was written specifically to denigrate successful and well-regarded members of Toronto’s own Black community. In 1909, the Toronto Press Club put on Uncle Tom’s Taxi-Cabin. Produced in blackface with the enthusiastic support of Telegram newspaper publisher John Ross Robertson, ordinarily a strong advocate of the city’s African-Canadian community, the show poked fun both at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, a well-known, formerly enslaved Toronto couple whom Robertson had personally interviewed in 1888.

Arriving in the city from Kentucky in 1834, the Blackburns had started the city’s first, highly successful, taxi business. With the profits, they supported abolitionism and built a series of homes in St. John’s Ward to provide inexpensive housing for incoming refugees from American slavery. Thornton Blackburn had attained a position of sufficient wealth and respect to be listed as a “Gentleman” in the city’s tax records, and the couple were among the largest African-Canadian landowners in The Ward at the time of their deaths in the 1890s. Many members of the Toronto community, white and Black, would have remembered the Blackburns. Yet this cruel spoof performed at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on June 18 and 19, 1909, attracted large audiences.

The original owner of the porcelain minstrel figure brought to light on Lot 10 in the Armoury Street Dig will never be identified. But this single artifact reveals the racial stereotyping and discrimination that Toronto’s early African American immigrants suffered, even after they had reached their new homes on Centre St. And today, however much Canada’s oft-touted multiculturalism policies seek to legislate away prejudice and inequality, descendants of the freedom-seekers continue their long struggle against the ever-present, insidious fact of racism.

A PRESCRIPTION FOR LIVING, By Arlene Chan

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At his storefront on Dundas St., Tom Lock filled prescriptions and stocked his shelves with pharmaceuticals, personal care items, gift packages and birthday cards. The enticing aroma of roasting peanuts by the cashier made them hard to resist. Folks lingered, waiting for medications, wandering the aisles and chatting with Tom. In the 1950s and 1960s, his pharmacy was a Chinatown landmark.

Among the many household objects found in the nearby Armoury Street Dig, the archeological team retrieved dozens of the day-to-day objects that would have been sold by druggists: medications, toothbrushes, syringes. While the excavated artifacts would have predated Lock’s business, they illustrate that residents of this working-class, immigrant neighbourhood were consumers of the same products that would have been found in any household.

As Toronto’s first pharmacist of Chinese descent, George Thomas (Tom) Lock must have had a prescription for an extraordinary life. Perhaps he was destined to be one of a kind with the auspicious arrival of his mother to Toronto in 1909, seven years before his birth. At 20 years old, she appeared on the Toronto Daily Star’s front page with the headline “Chinese Woman Comes to Toronto” — one of the first to settle in the city.

This was the era of the bachelor society, when the majority of the 1,099 Chinese in Toronto were men, many of them married but separated from their wives and children. The impacts of Canada’s head taxes (1885-1923) and exclusionary legislation (1923-47) were severe, deliberately deterring, then halting, Chinese immigration and preventing family life. The Locks were one of only 13 Chinese families in the Chinatown area.

The youngest of four children, Lock had a unique childhood: hanging out at the YMCA on College St., playing badminton at the Bay Street Mission on Elm St., shooting hoops at the Chinese Young Men’s Christian Institute on University Ave., and joining the all-Chinese 128th Boy Scout Troop. These pastimes cemented his friendships with the other boys in Chinatown.

Having Jewish friends who, like him, were often bullied and pushed around as outsiders expanded his horizons. He learned Yiddish, carried out his friends’ household duties during their Sabbath, and gained street smarts. At Ogden Public School, where there were but a handful of Chinese students, he could hold his own.

The Lock children had their share of responsibilities, especially after the untimely death of their father during the Depression years. Working at the family laundry honed Lock’s expertise in sewing, cleaning, ironing, and mending cuffs and collars. Cooking was another chore, and his mother regularly sent him to Elizabeth St. to buy a live chicken. There were two Jewish poultry stores, owned by the competing Wasserman brothers. Lock was often caught in the middle for a sale, a brother yanking on each arm. These were not the only times he was pulled in two directions.

When Canada joined Britain and France in the war against Germany, the Chinese across Canada were strongly divided. Should they volunteer to fight for a country that treated them so poorly? On the other hand, the war opened a door for them to prove their patriotism and ultimately gain the right to vote. To this end, enthusiasts lined up to enlist. Lock’s older brother Earl and his cousin and kung fu master Jimmy Lore were among the many to be turned away by recruiters who deemed them unsuitable because of their ethnicity. Lock’s recruiter had a different opinion, and he enlisted without incident.

A turning point for the Chinese in Canada was the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Canada’s declaration of war against Japan. Canada and China were now allies against a common enemy. In 1944, conscription was expanded to include Chinese Canadians, who became regarded as assets in the Pacific war arena, where they could easily blend in behind enemy lines.

Lock went above and beyond the call of duty. Once again he volunteered, this time for a covert mission to sabotage, infiltrate and spy behind enemy lines. Operation Oblivion was the code name, with a casualty rate projected at 80 per cent. Toughened on the streets during his youth, he was well-positioned for this elite guerrilla unit of Chinese Canadians. Intensive training, with a suicide capsule among the supplies, included jungle survival, demolition with explosives, parachute landing and medic assistance.

Lock returned home safely after the war to the welcoming arms of his family at Union Station; however, he had one more battle to win. During his commando training in Australia, Lock had met and married Joan Lim On. They were now a stateless couple. Lock couldn’t settle in Australia because of its White Australia policy, and his wife was not allowed into Canada due to the Chinese Immigration Act. A special Order in Council eventually granted her entry as a war bride, one of a handful of Chinese immigrants who entered Canada during the 24 years of exclusion.

Armed with impressive credentials and reference letters from two Nobel laureates, Dr. Frank Macfarlane Burnet and Toronto’s Dr. Charles Best, a co-discoverer of insulin, she was immediately hired as a microbiologist at the Hospital for Sick Children. With financial aid from the Veterans Rehabilitation Act, Lock enrolled at the University of Toronto, where he and his friend Sam Chin were the first Chinese graduates from the School of Pharmacy.

The life-and-death precision of his wartime training had laid the groundwork for his chosen profession. Tom Lock Drug Store opened in 1954 at 136 Dundas St. W. in the heart of Chinatown. Lock became Toronto’s first pharmacist of Chinese descent, and proprietor of the first Chinese-owned pharmacy in Canada east of the Rockies.

He was even able to somewhat realize his pre-war aspirations of becoming an interior decorator or fashion designer with the store’s startling colours of yellow, coral and turquoise, rather than the typical black-and-white interiors. What also distinguished Lock’s drugstore was signage in English and Chinese, the small inventory of Chinese goods such as abacuses, tea and herbal remedies, and services surpassing those of other pharmacies. Bachelor-society men, aging and still alone, relied on his bilingual fluency for filling out government forms, translating letters and doctors’ instructions, and getting advice for aches and pains. Lock was the kind of person to lend a hand and serve his community.

Photo developing was a popular service, one that Lock particularly enjoyed providing in-house — he had a keen interest in photography. The customers were themselves a snapshot of the neighbourhood in the 1950s and 1960s: old-timer and new immigrants, travellers arriving at the Bay St. bus terminal, lesbians and gays who frequented the nearby Continental and Ford hotels, and prostitutes.

Across the street at the Kwang Tung Hotel, rooms were rented by the hour, and Lock kept an ample supply of condoms and aphrodisiacs to meet demand. His long workdays, from 10:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m., had their slower moments. Lock would step outside and chat with passersby in English and Chinese, all the while keeping an eye on what was transpiring in the neighbourhood. His vantage point was ideal for watching the hotel, timing the sex-trade workers with their clientele, and noting, “That didn’t take long.” He was known for his observant quips about life in Chinatown; he called them his “CDRs,” his complete detailed reports of the neighbourhood.

Another topic of Lock’s CDRs was gambling, a prevalent pastime of the bachelor-society men in many establishments along Dundas and Elizabeth Sts. Lock witnessed frequent police raids, one resulting in furniture being tossed onto the sidewalk and smashed with axes. In the basement of his store, a steel door led to a gambling house in the adjacent building. The distinctive clatter of mah-jong tiles broke the silence whenever Lock made the trek downstairs to retrieve pop bottles from storage.

Fondly remembered as an outgoing personality with his own brand of humour and “Lock-talk” expressions, he served his community at the drugstore for 22 years. Lock lived life to the fullest for 88 years until his passing in 2003, leaving the legacy of a lasting impact on others. His first-hand experience, especially with the aging Chinese men living on the streets and in rundown rooming houses, strengthened his resolve to do more.

He was a founding member and long-serving board director of the Mon Sheong Foundation, the first Chinese charitable organization in Canada. In 1975, the Mon Sheong Home for the Aged opened near Chinatown with 65 beds as the first residential facility in Ontario for Chinese senior citizens. This association coexisted with other institutions, such as the Chinese Canadian Institute and the Chinese United Church, located down the street from Lock’s pharmacy.

Lock’s contribution lives on at the Mon Sheong Foundation, which has expanded its facilities to 457 beds in the Greater Toronto Area. And Chinese Canadians such as Lock, who enlisted in the armed forces during the Second World War, played a pivotal role in bringing about fundamental changes for the Chinese in Canada: gaining the right to vote, obtaining full citizenship and seeing the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act. Lock’s prescription for life served him well to the benefit of his fellow Canadians.