When taking visitors around downtown Toronto on a casual walking tour to show off the city, I always stop at the CBC Broadcasting Centre. It’s a mothership of a building and built in a rather unique and playful postmodern style. Even in the age of the Internet, there’s something rather powerful about being in a place where television and radio comes from, especially a public broadcaster as important to Canada as the CBC.

No visit to the mothership was complete without stopping by the small CBC museum there. Sadly, it, along with the Graham Spry Theatre next door, closed this week with very little warning other than an internal memo to staff, not enough time for me to write about it and give you a chance to catch a last visit.

Or perhaps a first visit: when word of the imminent closure went out on Twitter it was evident many people did not even know there was a CBC museum. That was part of the problem. Museums need promotion and other than a few small signs in the building, there wasn’t much effort put into telling people it existed. It didn’t help that the exhibitions hadn’t been updated in years, though they were charming in a dated way.

Among the museum’s displays were Mr. Dressup’s Tickle Trunk and The Friendly Giant castle set. Vintage microphones, other props and a display of how sounds effects were made back in the old radio days were part of it. Outside of the museum itself there are a few artifacts on view around the Broadcast Centre, like the Mr. Dressup tree house where Casey and Finnegan lived, and another display area hidden away underneath the escalators that led to the underground PATH system. There, by the washrooms, various pieces of television and radio equipment large and small are on view, along with an interesting timeline of technological evolution, though it ends in the 1990s. There’s also a glimpse into the archival storeroom through windows.

All of it suggests a great journalistic and cultural history, but for years now some of the displays were falling apart and television monitors were broken. Even some of the awards the CBC has received in the past are inauspiciously hidden behind the stairs, including Emmy statues for Degrassi Junior High in 1987 and Avonlea in 1993. It was evident the museum wasn’t a priority for a long time. Perhaps in a cash-strapped environment this is understandable, but the CBC’s history and Canada’s are intertwined. Unless you’re a CBC hater, you felt this in the museum, sometimes through pangs of nostalgia, other times when there were connections to momentous events.

When I first started stopping by the museum around 15 years ago there was an exhibit where you could push buttons that corresponded with historic news clips. In the pre-YouTube days this kind of thing was unique. I’d always push the Terry Fox button and watch the clip where, on a stretcher, he announced his Marathon of Hope was over because his cancer had spread. Goosebumps and tears would come every time.

The CBC’s history belongs to all of us. It’s also a Toronto story, though. Prior to the construction of the broadcast centre, CBC operations were spread out in two-dozen different buildings at 18 locations around the city.

Ever wonder how the Radio City condo towers on Jarvis St. near Maitland St. got its name? The CBC had radio studios there in what was the old Havergal girl’s school. Called the “Radio Building” then, a tower onsite also broadcast the CBC signal. Today, the Victorian Havergal building is part of the Canadian National Ballet School attached to Radio City. Metro Morning used to be produced nearby, on the stage of an old theatre at 509 Parliament St. in Cabbagetown, today home to the Canadian Contemporary Dance Theatre. Ninety Sumach St. was once CBC rehearsal space and prop storage and converted to condo lofts in the 1990s.

A close look at the Staples store on Yonge St. at Marborough Ave. reveals gargoyles and arches on the façade, the only sign this was once the grand showroom for the Buffalo luxury carmaker Pierce Arrow. In 1954, the showroom became CBC television studios where the Tommy Hunter Show, Front Page Challenge, and Wayne and Shuster were produced. Sean Connery, long before his Bond days, even performed in a CBC production of Macbeth here.

There’s a kind of makeshift ingenuity to all these sites and, looking back, you can sense the CBC scrambling to grow quickly in Toronto as the country and its role in it grew. It’s a great irony then that the big decline in CBC funding came after the network consolidated its operations in its own building in 1993. Today the broadcast centre has large parts of it leased out to other tenants and some CBC offices are empty.

The CBC says they “fully recognize the cultural value of our collection and the importance of preserving our history as told through our old broadcast equipment, props and costumes” and are making plans to manage the legacy through a partnership with Ingenium, Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation in Ottawa. The museum and theatre space will be turned into a new studio for CBC Kids that the public will be able to see when they walk through the building.

Perhaps the accessible studio will pull a new generation of folks into the CBC. The building is already an interesting public space and a big draw on occasion: look at the crowds that line up in the cold for hours to watch the annual Sounds of the Season broadcast at the beginning of December.

While Ingenium could be a good thing for the care of the collection, it’s a missed opportunity to not have a robust celebration of CBC history, our history, and the efforts of so many of the talented people who work and have worked there, in the place where it’s all made today.

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Historians know people need constant reminders of our past or it will be forgotten, and if the CBC is to have an important role in Canada’s future, we need reminders of why it’s been important to us in the past too.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef