In the long history of Toronto streets, change has never come easily.

Downtown, where the streets are narrow relics of a Victorian age, there is little middle ground, only middle fingers.

The flipped bird on King St.’s restaurant row is the latest symbol of irritation, a stand-in for the frustration certain business owners feel toward city hall, and a transit pilot they say isn’t working for them.

Toronto was a city of walkers when it was incorporated in 1834, and that remained the main form of transportation (supported by transit) until the growth of its suburbs after the Second World War, says Phillip Gordon Mackintosh. The geography professor at Brock University researched Toronto’s streets for his book Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935. Torontonians paid for concrete sidewalks long before they agreed to finance asphalt roads, because most people simply didn’t use them, he notes.

Toronto has greeted change on its streets with excitement, anxiety, finger pointing, politicking, gloomy predictions and ideological bickering for most of its history. Even in the 1860s, when Toronto had close to 45,000 citizens and the roads were covered with filth and roaming animals, we argued about the “itinerant Toronto hog.”

A group of business owners who oppose a pilot project that limits vehicle traffic along King Street have launched a social media campaign calling for a stop to the pilot project by using the hashtag #ReverseKingCarBan. (Toronto Star/Anne Marie Jackson)

“Have we no ‘health inspector?’ What are our ‘police’ doing?” one citizen wrote to the Globe in 1862, complaining about the pig nuisance. Another defended the pigs, because they were performing a valuable trash-disposal service. When a tenacious gutter pig bit the skirt of a woman walking on King St., the Globe demanded that the pig nuisance be an election issue.

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“The affair was witnessed by many persons, who were incensed that a lady should be subjected to such a gross indignity, on the most public street in the city, in the forenoon,” the report noted. There was no ice sculpture or press conference, but the sentiment was the same: this street isn’t working.

As the city modernized in the late 19th century, and the patchwork of macadam, cedar block and asphalt streets took shape, the tension came from technological advances at the turn of the century, the gradual speeding up of the city with electric streetcars, bicycles and cars. Thousands of small decisions changed the balance of power in Toronto’s streets, leading to the declining status of not only the urban pig, but the urban pedestrian.

Electric Streetcar

By 1892, Toronto was an industrializing city with around 180,000 people, second only to Montreal in population. The city added 95,000 citizens between the 1881 and 1891 census — mostly immigrants from Britain, transplants from the countryside, and people who lived in newly annexed communities like Parkdale, Yorkville and Riverdale.

By 1892, the old town buzzed in anticipation of its first rapid transit network. Since 1861, horses had pulled the streetcars, but the company that took over the 30-year franchise in 1891 had promised to go electric. “The people are as enamored of electric cars as a small boy of his first rocking horse,” the Globe wrote that March. Historian Goldwin Smith wrote to the mayor that the horses who had pulled the streetcars “to be almost dying as they stumble along with enormously overloaded cars.”

The Toronto Railway Co. had a not-very-secret dress rehearsal a few days before the launch. A crowd gathered to watch company officials glide up Church St., powered by the scientific genius coursing through the “splendidly hung” wires. The crowd witnessed their first hop-on, an enthusiastic supporter — described as an “inebriate,” by the Telegram, and a “gentleman who was somewhat under the weather and not more than half sober,” by the Globe.

“Congrashulate you. It’s a fine ’xperiment,” he offered.

The first misgivings came from the soon-to-be displaced technology. As boys sprinted alongside the dark-chocolate-coloured streetcar, a horse reared in agitation. The Telegram reported that most horses looked at the streetcar with a mixture of satisfaction and contempt.

On launch day, Aug. 15, “gloomy predictions” began to spread with a false rumour that the streetcar had already killed.

There were conflicting reports about what happened to Charles Zedwick of Rochester, N.Y. Zedwick was in a passing horse streetcar, and either leaned out for a closer look at the new electric car on the opposite rail — or tried to hop into it. He lost his balance, fell in front of the electric car, injured his shoulder and scalp, but recovered in hospital.

The next days brought reports of a spooked horse, a collision between a horsecar and an electric car, vows from “old ladies” never to ride the fearsome vehicles. The Toronto Telegram — which had headlined an earlier article “It is the trolley forever” — now called it a dangerous animal.

“It was a mistake, almost a crime, to admit the poles and overhead wires and swift running cars into the heart of the city,” they wrote two days after the official launch, as the newspaper imagined the undertaker with “a smile of pensive and expectant joy.”

The paper called for prudence, because the vehicle “makes the little ones its favourite victims. It has crushed out scores of young lives all over this continent. Let Toronto pray for immunity from a massacre of the innocents.”

Before this, being run over by a steam locomotive at a train crossing had been “the nastiest way of dying” on Toronto’s streets, notes the city’s chief curator Wayne Reeves — and the city began agitating for grade-separated crossings in the 1890s. The streetcar, built into the traffic of the city, posed another danger.

“Just as well for pilots of trolley cars to remember that their victims have to stay longer in the cemetery than they will have to stay in the car if safety were not sacrificed to speed,” the Telegram wrote.

Just two weeks after launch, on Sept. 2, Miss Heron, 61, was killed as she ran to catch the new electric streetcar at the corner of Church and Isabella Sts. According to the inquest, the driver, in his third day on the job, yelled, rang the gong and slammed his brakes, but Miss Heron “evidently became confused in the excitement of the moment.”

She ran in front of the streetcar, which was travelling at three miles an hour (5 km/h). She had contributed to her own death, the inquest ruled, but the driver also made a mistake, contravening Rule 19 of company policy: “Rather than run over a human being reverse your motor.”

After Heron’s death, an employee of the Grand Trunk Railway wrote to the Globe. The electric cars were here to stay, Walter Mepham said, and “like every new form of propulsion,” there would be death and casualties. He was right. Before the end of the year a cyclist and a law student would also die. Mepham called for Torontonians to adapt to the “altered conditions” of their city, but he also suggested the streetcar company provide red lights for their cars at night, when they approached “with the stealth of a sleuth hound.”

Toronto was now a streetcar city. Across the continent, the technology had compressed space and time, and Toronto Railway Co. soon retired its horses.

People could live in the suburbs and commute downtown, but the speed of the city didn’t change dramatically, says Mackintosh. By the 1900s, he notes, the Toronto Street Railway Co. had a reputation — memorialized in city council minutes — as a “dreadful company” with overcrowded cars and underserved citizens.

It was a reputation that the next technology was ready to capitalize on.

Enter the bicycle

“I’m a terror on wheels/ I rip, and/ I strip/ The tar out of the pavements/ I scoot, and/ I swoop/ Upon innocent pedestrians,/ As the hen hawk upon the spring chicken./ I whiz, and/ I whirr/ And behind leave a stir,/ As the cyclone leaves heaps of wreckage./ I slam, and/ I bang,/ And my rattle I clang,/ And people I handle like baggage./ I’m rough,/ I’m tough,/ And generally hot stuff,/ I’m the lightning express of cyclists./ I’ve brimstone to burn,/ Aside I ne’er turn,/ I’m the scorcher with wings on my wheels.”

The poem — “Hot Stuff” — appeared in the Daily Star in summer 1896, when the newspaper estimated there were 15,000 to 20,000 cyclists in a city of around 200,000 people.

By the 1890s, the “safety bicycle” was easy to ride, mass-produced, and starting to come down from the very expensive price of $100 to $200. By the late 1890s, working people could rent bikes or buy them used. It was a revolution in personal transportation. In his book, Mackintosh notes that bicycle companies played off the misery of overcrowded streetcars —“Why not ride a Massey-Harris and have comfort?” the company asked in 1898, with an ad that showed a streetcar packed to bursting with dignified men hanging on to the straps, while two women, seated, read bicycle literature.

The bicycle was a liberator for many — but it added tension and speed to Toronto’s streets.

On June 17, 1897, James Coates, cycling in the morning rush at King and Yonge, swerved to avoid running into two girls, but ran into a fellow named Alex Dunlop instead, tearing his trousers. Coates apologized, but it wasn’t accepted: “Dunlop struck him in the face, and then in the neck,” the Star reported.

The local papers noted that “scorchers” — the derisive term for cyclists with no regard for others — had run into children, adults and enough lawyers to make it a well-worn joke around town. The newspapers featured accounts of lawbreakers, both men and women, hauled into court and charged with “fast riding” and “coasting.” Some Torontonians wanted rules against cyclists on crowded streets. Bylaws were introduced and licensing was tried but difficult to enforce.

It’s notable that the term “hit and run” was born with the bicycle, Mackintosh says. Before this, the notion of a “typical Torontonian” running down another and escaping with great speed was unheard of.

The phrase would sadly come into greater use with the next technological advance.

The car

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Sir John Eaton, son of the department store magnate Timothy Eaton, loved “motoring” in Toronto’s first gasoline-powered car, a “one lung” Winton, as the Globe called it. “Dispense with a horse,” the ad for the $1,000 car said, and Eaton was happy to oblige, importing the American-made car that looked like a Victorian buggy in 1898. He was so enthusiastic that he drove through the winter, bundled up in a greatcoat for a juddering spin around the block in the open-air vehicle.

Cars were out of reach for most people; their appearance drew crowds, cries of “Get a horse!” and challenges from iceboats on Toronto Bay. The first theft of a “natty automobile” in 1901 was solved in a few hours, and commemorated in the Star as evidence that the city was “aggressively up to date.”

At Queen’s Park, legislators came up with rules for the new technology, and farmers and fruit growers pushed back. In 1908, a delegation of rural-minded individuals wanted highways to be free of the “devil wagons” on the weekends — at least until church was finished. And they wanted drivers to be mindful of nervous horses and women. The reeve of Innisfil said motorists were not sympathetic: “Even so-called ladies in the cars mocked at country women being thrown in the ditch,” the Globe reported, noting that the reeve blamed the rising price of butter on the car, because the frightful automobile kept country women off the roads.

“The motorcar is not a toy,” countered the president of the motor league. “It is being used by business and professional men.”

Ontario didn’t cede to many of the farmers’ wishes; the politicians saw the rise of the car as inevitable.

You can see it creep in the year-end police reports. In 1907, police, mostly on foot, had no power to control the “increasingly careless” motorists. By 1912, the police had a traffic squad and asked to send a few constables to England for more training. They acquired motorcycles and replaced the horse-ambulance with motorized versions.

By 1920, police lamented that criminals had embraced high-powered cars, both as a getaway tool and an object of thievery. Car theft made up more than half of the $2 million of stolen goods that year. Congestion was also a menace on the narrow streets. The city coped by making certain streets one-way and adding semaphores at main intersections. But by 1921, police chief Samuel Dickson wondered about an all-out ban on parking downtown — the only relief for the “intolerable conditions which now prevail.”

“Can you imagine?” says Michael Sale, a retired Toronto police inspector with a passion for policing history. “Those emotions were repeated every decade for the next five or 10 decades. Nothing has changed. Parking and congestion were always a problem.”

The first pedestrian to die from an automobile, according to the Star, was Lenton Williams. In June 1905, the machinist in the print shop at Eaton’s ran to catch a streetcar but was run over by a car going at “moderate speed” on College St., according to the inquest. The driver said he honked and braked, and he wasn’t found at fault, but the Star warned drivers to “not grow too confident and careless.”

In 1907, the Globe criticized the “criminal speed” of a “a few irresponsible owners.” “Does the Automobile Club wonder that the sport is raising for itself more enemies continually?”

The streets were becoming more regulated for both drivers and walkers. In 1910, when the city was debating whether it should compel drivers to stop for streetcars loading and unloading passengers, T.A. Russell of the Ontario Motor League opposed the change, saying it “would result in blocking traffic on the streets.” The city referred it back to committee for more study.

“I learned what the term ‘externality’ means when economists use it,” Mackintosh says. “It’s an ugly term, but it really does mean the things that we are willing to put up with as the cost of doing business, and so they were willing to put up with the deaths.”

During the First World War, Toronto police statistics show about 20 pedestrians were killed by cars each year. In 1919, the toll shot up to 41, and by 1920, police began assigning blame. Forty-three pedestrians were killed that year: 24 were at fault, 10 motorists were to blame, and 9 situations were unclear.

Toronto had around 500,000 people by then. Since its incorporation the city had grown from 20 square kilometres to 100. It continued to swallow towns on the fringes – Rosedale (1905), Dovercourt (1910), Deer Park (1908) like the insatiable blob of sci-fi movie fame, or as the city directory noted, “by means of judicious annexation.” Motor vehicles multiplied: registration numbers showed 23,000 cars in pre-war Ontario. By 1920, there were 155,000; in 1930, almost 500,000.

Animosity between pedestrians and drivers quickly developed, historian Stephen Davies writes in a 1989 article for Urban History Review. Early sympathies with pedestrians soon gave way to “re-education” of the city’s walkers, which didn’t do much to ease the death count.

In 1923, the Ontario Motor League estimated pedestrians were at fault in 70 to 90 per cent of injuries, Davies notes. By 1927, the city’s bureau of municipal research, an arm’s-length organization, warned the “civil war of motor accidents” showed no signs of stopping and called for better city planning.

It was clear Toronto wanted cars. It was right there in another set of statistics that Davies found: the intersection of Dundas and Bloor, during one day in 1914, saw 349 cars. Around 10 years later, close to 8,000 motor vehicles passed in a single day. The era of the horse would soon be over, and the city bureaucrats noted that the roads of the future should be designed for the car.

The car had promised personal liberation, but the regulations that came with it ushered in an “escalating level of restriction on personal conduct,” Davies writes.

Mackintosh notes that 1920s Toronto shares a problem with the modern city in the midst of a condo boom: too many people on the sidewalks surrounding “automobilized roadways.” Toronto is seeing levels of pedestrian and cyclist injury “that we haven’t seen since cars began their usurpation of once-fully-pedestrian streets in the late 1910s,” he notes.

A photo that he found when he was researching his book speaks to the profound shift that took place long ago. It’s 1929, and there is a crowd gathered around a priest, blessing a car.

“Be propitious O Lord God, to our prayers, and bless these vehicles with Thy holy right hand,” Rev. Stephen Auad says, holding an aspergillum of holy water in his right hand. “Command Thy angels to keep free from harm, and protect all those who travel in them.”

It was the Feast of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, and although there were a few bicycles in the lineup, the Globe noticed it was mostly cars — luxurious and shiny new ones, and rusted old jalopies — that lined up for blocks around Mount Carmel Church.

“Kids are mowed down day after day, and yet the priest is blessing the car,” Mackintosh says. “That’s how you create a world of cars by slowly shifting the discourse away from people . . . I don’t know what lesson you can learn other than you are secondary.”

Looking down the road

In the past century, the car went from novelty to necessity. Streets were widened, the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway cut through the city, the Bloor and Yonge subway lines snaked below. The Spadina Expressway was not built, neither was the downtown relief line; bike lanes sliced off a portion of the streets for cyclists, but some of those lanes were taken back. At every step, citizens debated the Toronto they wanted, while the car’s dominance was entrenched, not just in law, but in the social construction of the city.

“At some point we make choices about this, even if we don’t remember the exact moment when we did it,” says Université du Québec à Montréal history professor Daniel Ross. “We’re still making choices, like when we start experimenting with things, like a transit boulevard on King.”

Thousands of kilometres of asphalt are devoted to the car in Toronto, but this 2.6-kilometre stretch of King St. is symbolic of the frustration felt by everybody in a congested city.

Richard White, a historian who has studied post-war planning in Toronto, says there is a wish to reduce car traffic, but nobody knows quite how to do it. The car has its defenders, but when it comes to urban planning professionals in Toronto — where there is a plaque commemorating the killing of the Spadina Expressway — he can’t think of one.

“It’s funny because everyone uses them,” he says. “We’re all so dependent, not just on cars but on trucks, delivering the fancy oysters to the oyster bar — they don’t get there magically.”

When you change the way a street is used it produces anxiety, especially from people who relied on the old balance of uses, Ross says. Toronto, he says, has an entrenched history of giving a platform to small, vocal groups who are very powerful in municipal politics.

Ross says debate is good, but it often devolves into pettiness, an “us and them” battle, centre versus periphery, with unhelpful stereotypes of the urban lefty and the suburban driver.

Transit historian Ed Levy, who has studied the city from the days of the old stagecoaches on Yonge St., says Toronto, with its conservative, Protestant roots, takes change harder than most.

It’s a city that debated Sunday streetcars for the better part of the 1890s, (a British scientist visiting in 1897 found the standstill on a Sunday “as melancholy and suicidal a sort of day as Puritan principles can make it”); banned Sunday tobogganing in municipal parks for decades beginning in 1912; and, for years, closed the window drapes at Eaton’s at the stroke of midnight, so the citizens would not be tempted by the evils of commerce on the Lord’s Day.

The King St. pilot, thrown into this long tradition of civic anxiety, is a “gutsy move,” he says. He imagines the prospects for local businesses will improve with the weather.

Warm days draw pedestrians to the streets, and they also melt ice sculptures.