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Ship of the Month No. 289 GARDEN CITY 4. Over the years, we have featured in these pages the majority of the passen­ ger steamers that traded in the western end of Lake Ontario in the years around the turn of the last century. We recently realized, however, that we had missed one of the famous "Port Dalhousie boats" and we now intend to set that situation to rights. As the decade of the 1890s began, steamer service between Toronto and Port Dalhousie, very popular with the travelling public, was being operated by the Lakeside Navigation Company with its 1888-built propellor LAKESIDE run­ ning in competition with A. W. Hepburn's Niagara Falls Line and its 1876- built, beam-engined sidewheeler EMPRESS OF INDIA. In 1892, however, a brand new vessel appeared on the route, reportedly owned and/or operated by the St. Catharines, Grimsby and Toronto Navigation Company, which appears to have been under the joint management of Capt. N. J. Wigle of the LAKESIDE, and A. W. Hepburn, of Picton, Ontario. This new vessel was GARDEN CITY, named in honour of the City of St. Catha­ rines. She was built in Toronto at the Bathurst Street yard of the John Doty Engine Works, and she was designed and constructed by noted Toronto naval architect W. E. Redway who had produced, amongst other vessels, the famous Toronto Island double-ended ferry steamers MAYFLOWER and PRIMROSE of 1890. GARDEN CITY (C. 100035), enrolled at Toronto, had a steel hull and wooden su­ perstructure. She was 177. 9 feet in length between perpendiculars, 26. 0 feet in the beam of hull (we never have seen a record of her extreme beam over the guards) and 10. 0 feet in depth. Her tonnage was calculated as 637 Gross and 401 Net. She was a sidewheeler equipped with feathering wheels powered by an inclined compound engine which had cylinders of 28 and 54 inches dia­ meter and a stroke of 48 inches, and which produced 800 Indicated Horsepower at 50 revolutions per minute. Steam at 120 p. s. i. was created by two coal- fired firebox boilers, each of which was 9'0" in diameter and 14'0" in length. There were four furnaces in total, with 94 square feet of grate sur­ face and 2, 998 square feet of heating surface. The John Doty Engine Works built the engine and the boilers specifically for GARDEN CITY in 1892. The press of the day hailed GARDEN CITY as being "likely to prove one of the handsomest and most commodious steamboats plying Lake Ontario". Her main deck was enclosed to just abaft the paddleboxes, from which point she had an open promenade to the fantail around the after cabin, protected by a closed wooden taffrail. There were gangways both forward and aft of the wheels. The promenade deck above was mostly open with only a relatively small cabin, and the rails were of post and wire mesh construction except forward, where there was fairly long closed bulwark. Canvas awnings often were raised over the sides of the promenade deck aft of the wheels. GARDEN CITY's decks were of Douglas pine from British Columbia, "imported expressly by the builders". The pilothouse was located forward on the hurricane deck, and it had five large windows in its curved front, with the roof overhanging to form a sun­ shade. The deck itself had a curved front which flared out into bridgewings. It was not there originally, but a small texas cabin was added immediately abaft the pilothouse only a few years after the steamer entered service. The hurricane deck also featured a prominent clerestory which admitted light to the cabin below. The steamer's single mast rose immediately abaft the pilot­ house, and not far behind that was the tall and well-raked smokestack. There were two ventilator cowls fitted near the base of the funnel, and two more were set well back down the deck. The lifeboats were not carried on the hur­ ricane deck, although a workboat was placed there. The four lifeboats were placed two on each side, one forward and one aft of the paddlebox, all worked by luffing post-type davits. The "Marine Review" of February 11, 1892, indicated that the Doty firm al­ ready had begun construction of the GARDEN CITY, and that she was to cost $75, 000 and have accommodation for 600 passengers. She was expected to be