When Street Cars Ran on Sleighs: Schooner Days CLXXI (171)

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WILL you take a trip along the waterfront with me this nice bright Saturday of January 19th, 1890?

You can't? Not born yet? Huh! I've been born ten years already. But if you aren't born you can't play. This is what you'll miss:

First of all the best joke of the day: "Did you ever see the cars on sleighs?"

That's as smart as anything Amos will ask Andy forty-five years later. And the answer. (We are a quarter of a century before the expression "comeback" will be invented.) "You bet your boots." Because the cars are on sleighs this very day. By next March, perhaps. Sir Frank Smith will have had the horse brooms over the lines often enough to get the rails clear again, but just now they're out of sight.

That's another contemporary wisecrack, forty years ahead of the word. "Out of sight" means beyond comparison; super-excellent; as applied to street car equipment of the time it is heavy sarcasm.

Yes, those miserable old T-rails are out of sight, under three feet of accumulated snow and ice, and the street cars go bumping above them on pairs of heavy wooden bobs, shod with broadfaced steel runners. The car bodies have been shifted from the summer trucks, and unless the January thaw is an extra long one they won't be back till spring. Then the dismantled sleighs will be stored in the upper story of the barns at Frederick street, above the blacksmith shop.

Here's a King street car—two horses—green and white sides and a white distinguishing signal lamp in front. The lamp burns coal oil, and makes the car less cold and more stuffy by night than it is now. There is no stove. The driver keeps himself warm by stamping and flogging himself with his arms, on the open platform in front. The conductor is supposed to freeze with the smoking passengers on the open platform behind. But he spends as much time as possible within, shouting fares and street names, to the passengers huddled on the red plush seats down each side, their feet buried for warmth in the peastraw on the floor.

For five cents we can ride "to the end of the car line" if you like. That is Strachan avenue. No use going that far, for Sam McBride only drives the bus from there to the eastern gate of the Exhibition Grounds in summer time. (Fare five cents.)

West of the old three-towered Union Depot, at Simcoe street, the waterfront is cut off by a wilderness of railway tracks which have obliterated the Esplanade. Grim joke on the early town planners who laid out a beautiful open space for recreation purposes, between the wharves and the escarpment of Front street. Two bridges give access to this lost continent in the west, one at Bathurst street and one at Brock. Elsewhere, level crossings.

There is a wharf at the west end of the Exhibition, the foot of Dufferin street, the most westerly in the city, but there's nothing to be seen there now but snowdrifts six feet deep around the wooden piling.

The ex-steam yacht Dan and the ferries Mayflower and Primrose will run there eight months hence, but in the winter it is deserted. There is not even a road to it, nor need for one.

No, our 1890 waterfront begins at the Queen's Wharf. So at Bathurst and King let's get off and walk down. There are no Bathurst cars.

That old willow tree behind the Rogers-Majestic plant in 1935 was there in 1890. Most of the Queen's Wharf is east of it. There's the C.P.R. elevator, and inside the pier on which it stands is a basin, and between that and the high bank of Front street, with its Parliament Buildings and palatial residences on the north side, is Doty's engine works. East of these are the Northern docks, piled with lumber twenty feet above the snowdrifts.

At the Queen's Wharf lie the steam barges Orion and W. B. Hall, big wooden boys with masts and sails. The Orion even has topmasts, and black mastheads.

The Niagara steamers patronize the Northern docks for winter shelter. This is years before the Chippewa and Cayuga are hatched. The newest in the fleet, the Cibola, was built at Deseronto, three years ago. Her sister is the old blockade runner "Letter B" or Chicora. Between them, like a pair of discreet aunts, they shepherd the little Niagara ferry Ongiara. All three are primly painted black and white, with red boot-tops.

Snugged among the lumber piles lie little old two-masted schooners that still (or at any rate they did last summer, 1889) keep up the export trade in lumber to Wilson, N.Y.

There's the Marcia A. Hall, that Paddy McSherry has taken over from Maurice Fitzgerald.

And the apple-bowed slab-sided Snowbird. She will keep going for fifteen years yet before she sinks in the ice of the Bay off Ward's Island, but she is already fabulously old; used to be the Minnie Proctor, and, before that, they say, the Mayflower, and the Flying Yankee. She is so old that her centreboard box is on one side of the keelson, sign that this "modern" invention (in use on the lakes by 1837) was an added entry in her equipment. "Old" Andy Beard sails her with "Young" Andy as mate, having recently acquired her from a trio of patriarchs who may have been Shem, Ham and Japhet; three old lads who had sailed her since Noah was a boy.

These lumber docks are called Northern after the railway. Among them is a Northern elevator, doing a dwindling business in grain. Then we come to "Brock street." Busy place in summer time, with a fleet of ferries for Hanlan's Point and other Island landings, but now devoted to snowdrifts.

Only sign of schooner life here is the charred hull of the Annie Mulvey, burned in the Esplanade fire five years ago. Harry Hodson has whitewashed her over and built a boathouse on her—one of three arks for his menagerie of hundreds of "Boats and Canoes For Hire" as his sign proclaims. His building shop is one of the few places alive on the western waterfront this first winter of the gay nineties. Piles of fresh shavings show that Harry and his helpmate, Herbert Hall, are busy on still more pleasure craft for next summer, and many's the iceboat party that throngs around the red-hot stove with its mile of pipes taking the chill off the cold workshop.

Iceboats swarm on the bay in hundreds, with their triangles of white or sooty sail, their piles of buffalo robes, and their 25 cent fares, for thirty miles in thirty minutes.

Sometimes the rides are shorter and longer, if you get me. A becalmed iceboat is slower than a stopped clock; and one which spills, going a mile a minute, may shoot you ashore, and no harm done, if you happen to be dumped on smooth ice. Then again, one which goes through a crack may land you in the Morgue —if Mait Aykroyd is sufficiently prompt in "dragging for the body."

Thus the papers of the day lugubriously conclude all their drowning reports. Maitland Aykroyd, boat-builder, and George Williams, Esplanade constable. are the standbys of the police reporters of the time.

There is a swath of clear hard ice a mile and a half wide for two miles all along this ancient waterfront, and it's thirty inches thick and clear as glass, except where it fringes the steaming pools of the seven sewer mouths which eruct their disgusting contents into the harbor of 1890. But we are back in the age of innocence of germs, and dozens of frostbitten dock-wallopers are at work out on this shining expanse, cutting blue-white cubes of bay water to chill next summer's "Ice-Cold Lemonade Here." The freezing is supposed to "purify" the water. A myth, as the typhoid figures prove.

Whether freezing kills the germs or not, it's too cold to go on against this wind. I'm going to duck into the waterworks—not into the well, the engine room—for a thaw out. We've hardly seen any of the schooners yet, for we've only waded half a mile through the drifts. Come 'round next Saturday, and let's finish the tramp. I'll meet you here at the waterworks, showplace of Toronto forty-five years ago.

ICEBOAT RACING ON THE BAY—A spirited drawing by C. J. Gibbons, kindly lent by Capt. James Quinn, last owner of the Snowbird.