place

Sunlight Park

1886 establishments in Ontario1913 disestablishments in OntarioDefunct Canadian football venuesDefunct baseball venues in CanadaDefunct sports venues in Toronto
Demolished buildings and structures in TorontoLacrosse venuesSports venues completed in 1886Toronto Maple Leafs (International League)
TorontoSunlightPark1890GoadMapExcerpt
TorontoSunlightPark1890GoadMapExcerpt

Sunlight Park was the first baseball stadium in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The all wood structure was built in 1886 at a cost of $7,000 by the International League baseball team the Toronto Baseball Club (renamed the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1902). It was initially known as the Toronto Baseball Grounds. It stood south of Queen Street East, west of Broadview Avenue, north of Eastern Avenue, on the east side of the Smith Estate near the Don River, and had seating for 2,200 spectators, including a 550-seat reserved section. The stadium's grand opening was held on May 22, 1886 for an afternoon game against the "Rochesters" of Rochester, New York. It came to be known as Sunlight Park after the Lever Brothers' Sunlight Soap Works was built south of Eastern Avenue. The stadium hosted the city’s first professional baseball championship in 1887. The team and league folded in 1890. The Torontos, called the Canucks of the Eastern League, played in the park until 1896 when new owners moved the team to their new Hanlan's Point Stadium. The park was used for local baseball, football, and lacrosse leagues until well into the 20th century (1913), when encroaching industrial uses predominated. Today the site is a block of condo lofts, a car dealership car-park and the Don Valley Parkway on ramp, Eastern Avenue diversion. The street Sunlight Park Road bears witness to the past, being the remnant Eastern Avenue bridge approach cut by the parkway. The site is bounded by the Don Valley Parkway and the industrial buildings of the former Lever Brothers.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Sunlight Park (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Sunlight Park
Baseball Place, Toronto

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Latitude Longitude
N 43.657777777778 ° E -79.351944444444 °
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Baseball Place 30
M4M 2G1 Toronto
Ontario, Canada
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Broadview Hotel (Toronto)
Broadview Hotel (Toronto)

The Broadview Hotel is a 58 room boutique hotel in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is located at the intersection of Broadview Avenue and Queen Street East in Toronto's Riverside neighbourhood. Built in 1893, the building was originally a hall with retail and office space and later converted into a hotel. Until 2014, the establishment was occupied by the New Broadview House Hotel, a hotel and boarding house housing low-income persons with a strip club named Jilly's on its ground level. It was closed and converted to an up-scale establishment with several restaurants and a roof patio.The Richardsonian Romanesque style structure was built for Archibald Dingman and designed by Robert Ogilvie as a commercial hub and public hall known as Dingman's Hall. Its design includes arched windows and a tower characteristic of Romanesque Revival. The southeast vertical edge of the building is rounded using curved, elongated bricks. The building's gray lintels above the windows were likely carved from Credit Valley sandstone, popularly used during Toronto's Victorian era. The east and south exterior walls feature 21 terra cotta relief sculptures each with a unique image, often including a human face. The building had the Canadian Bank of Commerce as a tenant on the ground floor and doctors' and lawyers' offices on the middle floors. Atop the building were two public halls which acted as a venue for concerts and assemblies.In 1907, the building was sold to Thomas J. Edwards who hired architect George Wallace Gouinlock to transform Dingman's Hall into The Broadview Hotel, which let rooms for $1.50 or more a night. It was known as the Lincoln Hotel for a time in the 1930s before reverting to its original name in the 1940s. By the 1970s, it was the Broadview House, a boarding house renting rooms by the week, with a strip club (later known as Jilly's) on the main floor.On May 13, 2014, Streetcar Developments and Dream Unlimited announced their purchase of the Hotel, announcing they would close the hotel and redevelop it into a 58-room boutique hotel with a ground floor restaurant and a rooftop bar. The redevelopment is part of an ongoing gentrification of the neighbourhood.The developers began the process of moving 45 long-term tenants and closed Jilly's that July. The tenants, many of whom received disability or social assistance, were rehoused through a partnership between Streetcar, Dream Unlimited, the City of Toronto government, and WoodGreen Community Services. The developers paid first and last months' rent and paid WoodGreen to hire two staff persons to assist the tenants in finding new homes, Sleep Country contributed mattresses, and The Furniture Barn contributed furnishings In late 2016, the exterior of the building had completed renovations. Black cornices that were removed in prior years were recreated based on period photos. The renovation was awarded a Lieutenant Governor's Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation. A major addition during the renovation was the addition of a glassed-in rooftop restaurant on the building's north side. While the bulk of the building is four stories high, the rooftop restaurant and the hotel tower are on higher levels.As part of the redevelopment, the owners renamed the hotel from the "New Broadview Hotel" to "The Broadview Hotel". Some of the guest rooms feature prints of pin-up girls, a reminder of the former Jilly's. The new facility will also have two event spaces, a cafe/bar and two other restaurants. There is also a space displaying memorabilia from Jilly's, such as posters, dancing poles and entertainers' lockers. The building uses extensive lighting to highlight the brickwork.

SEED Alternative School

SEED Alternative School is a small Toronto District School Board alternative high school now located in Toronto's east end. Previous locations include Yonge and College, McCaul St, and Bloor and Spadina, in downtown Toronto. Originally, as a summer program, it was at Dundas St West and Bloor St W (where they cross in Toronto, not in then-Etobicoke). The acronym 'SEED' originally stood for 'Summer of Experience Exploration and Discovery', and when it became year round semestered school it was changed to 'Shared Experience Exploration and Discovery'. Students interested in a particular subject, would gather other students, and together they would find a knowledgeable person to act as a teacher or catalyst, and meet regularly to learn. The groups met at various locations and times, including sometimes evenings and weekends. It was entirely up to the students how many and which subjects they studied, and when and where the groups would meet. A group studying Mass Media, for example, would meet in the evening in the Lowther Avenue home of CBC Radio Broadcasters Betty Tomlinson and Allan Anderson. The Vegan Lifestyles cooking course met and cooked in student homes with parents joining to eat the meals prepared by the students. A Japanese Studies group met at the University of Toronto. A few groups met at SEED's own facilities. SEED was founded by the then Toronto Board of Education as a summer program for high school age students in 1968 during the Pierre Trudeau era, a period that also produced Rochdale College and Theatre Passe Muraille and fostered the growth of Coach House Books and a number of other experimental institutions in Toronto. (SEED was not connected with any of them.) The teachers, or co-ordinators as they were called, in the beginning were Les Birmingham and Murray Shukyn, both of whom came from the elementary school system. While initially a summer only program, the students of the second summer wanted to keep SEED going throughout the year. That fall the students obtained recognition from the University of Toronto, and requested the Board establish it as a high school to obtain core funding (for staff and space) and so that students could obtain high school diplomas. During that fall and winter, students ran SEED without any coordinators, using an office made available free by St Thomas Anglican Church on Huron Street. The Board of Education agreed to make SEED a high school, and in September it was a recognized high school, operating in rented space at what was then the YMHA (at Bloor St W and Spadina) in Toronto. Official enrolment was capped at 100 students, with those 100 eligible to earn high school credits/diplomas. Additional students could also attend but not earn high school credits/diplomas. Grades 9 to 13 were included. Students who had gone to SEED but who were officially under the jurisdiction of a nearby Boards of Education, were included as students. A budget of about $200,000 was approved. Murray Shukyn was the first coordinator. To meet the technical requirement of having a principal, and yet minimize costs, the Superintendent of Secondary Schools A. L. Milloy was appointed Principal, but he was not involved at the school. A small core group of four or five teachers was hired, most of whom were certified to teach in more than one high school subject so that students, if they wished, could still take traditional subjects taught by certified teachers that would qualify for a high school diploma. The students ran the school, often dealing directly with the Board of Education where trustees such as long time trustees Fiona Nelson and Dr. Maurice Lister were supportive. At the time all Ontario high schools, with one exception, followed part B of the Ministry of Education's regulation HS1. Part B outlined the traditional high school program. SEED was only the second school in the province set up under part A. Part A allowed tremendous flexibility. It was now possible to get a high school diploma using many different subjects. The school was influenced by the pedagogical philosophy of A.S. Neill's Summerhill School. It was also known for its catalyst system in which university students, professors, community members and experts-at-large on a variety of fields facilitated classes. Milton van der veen was the catalyst for the SEED newsletter (he is now a volunteer with the charity 'Sleeping Children Around the World'.) Noted late science fiction author Judith Merril ran a weekly science fiction seminar at SEED from 1972–1973. Other notable catalysts included noted social activist June Callwood, CBC Radio broadcaster Allan Anderson, then-architect Colin Vaughan, journalists John Gault and Maggie Siggins, advertising executive Billy Edwards (one of the subjects of Allan King's film A Married Couple), and notable Toronto City Alderman Ying Hope. Several U of T professors, such as Milt Wilson of Trinity College, also taught courses. Notable faculty included poet and visual artist Luciano Iacobelli. The notable impact of SEED, Toronto's first alternative school in the Toronto District School Board system, was that it opened the door to a number of other alternative schools. Among them were Learnxs, Subway Academy One, SOLE, and ACE, which Murray Shukyn, SEED's co-founder and first coordinator, helped to organize. A notable achievement was a short film entitled Life Times Nine made by SEED students that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973.Notable alumni include blogger, journalist, activist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow; former head of the Ontario Securities Commission and V.P. of the Toronto Stock Exchange, lawyer Edward Waitzer; musician and producer Efrim Menuck; Harvard physics professor and Chair of the Physics Department Melissa Franklin, a co-discover of the top quark; Denina Simmons Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Environmental Biology; visual artists Eli Langer and Michael Lewis; author Claudia Casper; gh3 principal and award-winning landscape architect, Diana Gerrard; intersex activist, researcher and professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University, Morgan Holmes; professor of psychology at Conestoga College, Barry Cull; and photographer Michael McLuhan, son of Marshall McLuhan, notable artist Jesse B. Harris.