TT Film - Three Days in Toronto (1959, 1960 and 1962)

Among the huge collection within Richard Glaze's archive of 16mm film from the 60s and the 70s were a number of 400 foot reels from the 1950s. These were taken during trips Richard made to Toronto before he immigrated, and they show scenes that have not been witnessed in over sixty years. As we launch the campaign to digitize the remaining 2/3rds of Richard's archive, we offer for you this feature footage. And I look forward to your support as we bring more of Richard's historic material into the public light.
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[@WayneB27]

Stumbled across this video today and happened to see my dad driving his blue and white 1957 Studebaker Champion on Eglington Avenue East where we used to live. Dad emigrated to Canada from the UK in the mid 1950's.

[@Richard-yt3fs]

My grandfather worked for the ttc over 25 years remember he got a gold card to ride free, he drove the red Gloucester trains and I’d ride up front with him, then it was safe to have the doors open, he taught me the signals many nice memories

[@nivagnoswal]

wonderful visuals of old Toronto...I was born in 1954, so this brings back deep memories for me...

[@brucesturton8521]

I throughly enjoyed this video from beginning to end. A fantastic glimpse of yesteryear. I just love the ttc buses and streetcars and the cars of the 50s and 60s.

[@suec9816]

the good old days. i remember them well. great video.

[@StarHarvestOfficial]

Amazing video. My grandfather will be passing away soon and is fond of old Toronto footage. I can't thank you enough!

[@janetcraft]

My late Father got his first job working for the TTC when he came to Toronto back in 1954 from Belgium. He showed me the subway systems and streetcars when I was young. I was so fascinated by it. I remember when Mom and Dad allowed me to go on my own, (with friends) to go downtown Toronto and my fare was, I do believe - 15 cents for Students. 25 cents for Adults. As I grew older, I found jobs in Toronto and my means of transportation - the subway and streetcars, of course :) Thank you guys for this video. It did bring me back to those days gone by.

[@jaygatz4335]

Back when Toronto was civilized! High rises hadn't taken over and streetcars ruled. I often took the St. Clair car along Mt. Pleasant. The padded seats and incandescent lights made for a more comfortable experience.

[@KevinBoucock]

Born and raised in Niagara falls in 1961 ,thank you very much for the ride back into the past !!

[@donm8363]

Thank you. Amazing footage. I appreciate the old days of our beautiful city Toronto Ontario Canada.

[@alexsmith-ob3lu]

Wow, that is amazing! Thank you for sharing such old footage! Folks are well dressed, cars are elegant, streetcars are practical and very little traffic!

[@andrewclarkson3401]

We are lucky Richard Glaze recorded these for posterity. And what a fantastic job the Transit Toronto team has done preserving these films! It would have been easy to let them sit in boxes and do nothing. I will be contributing to see more like this!

[@henrivanbemmel]

I've never seen the Davisville yards look so clean!! I remember those red subway cars and how the lights would blink off and on at certain places on the track.

[@MrPatrick1414]

Cool seeing the Volkswagen beetle among the typical 1950s cars

[@christopherwelch136]

Wow. No condos.

[@andrewcharles459]

A lot of memories for me in those films. As a youngster there was many a summer day I would just spend a dime and "ride the rocket" to see where it would take me. They were just starting to phase out the red subway trains when I started my joyrides, but I got to ride them often enough. I especially enjoyed them for the frequent momentary blackouts they would experience. Then, a little older, I'd take the Bathurst car to Fort York for army cadets twice a week. I swear I can still smell the Molson brewery on Fleet Street to this day.

[@streetcarjay]

I've never seen TTC Streetcars cross railroad tracks. Thst rare footage is s real gem.

[@lifeofcris5713]

Thank you for this! So nice to see Toronto back then

[@Celluloidwatcher]

Thank you for this great video capturing a different era in Canadian public transportation. Wonderful color film footage of the Toronto streetcar system. Love the look of the freeways back then. BTW, my family and I traveled to Toronto a few times, mainly to see the Canadian National Exhibition and to travel on some of the same freeways back in the late 60's and early 70's. It brings back wonderful memories.

[@evemarie1605]

Kudos to the Halton County Rail Museum for preserving these old streetcars but you cannot possibly get the feeling of riding a crowded old streetcar on a steamy sweaty mid-summer day in downtown Toronto by riding on a nice quite tree-shaded track on the old Guelph radial line:- when you're five years old with your mother and a big old "Witt" comes rumbling and clanking to your stop and swallows you up like a big old whale with a lot of hissing and wheezing and then trundles away to deposit you somewhere far away was both scary and exciting! 🙂

[@hiitsstillme]

Great film clips, and memories. Thank you!!

[@Richard-yt3fs]

Thank you for the amazing video, I rode on 6167 and still have many memories of riding the train and street cars

[@stryders25]

love this stuff thanks

[@user-tl4fi6oy8d]

Great video. The people making the negative comments about how Toronto is going down in flames or dying or whatever don't realize they make these comments because their own end is near; the city will be fine and will go on.

[@monicapushkin3274]

This is absolutely amazing, thank you!! I know all of these places.

[@ghettoandroid]

Riding the TTC looks so chill and even fun back then. Nowadays, you're packed in like sardines, and on occasions have to deal with rowdy teens, and mentally ill people and risk getting stabbed.

[@transittoronto]

I still ride the system for fun (I call it taking a long walk with assistance). You have to pick your times. The system also had a reputation for packing them in back in my day (the eighties -- that's when they initially talked about a Downtown Relief Line to deal with the humungous crowds at Bloor-Yonge), and we had our fair share of rowdy drunks and teens in those days (wasn't nice to share a car with them). We tend to forget the distressing stuff in the past, while being confronted with it in the present. I think the fact is, there's been good and bad things about this city for as long as it has been a city.

[@fares-please]

Great job guys. Loved this video start to finish. Looking forward to more and more than happy to help contribute.

[@KaraMarisa]

How lovely!

[@gangstagrandma]

Thank you!

[@Hawker5796]

So that's what the Gilbert Loop looked like! (@6:37) Cool stuff

[@brittgaming7391]

My mom and her family lived in Toronto for an while before moving to Burlington where she met my dad and she still has her family in Toronto to this day

[@zevc3591]

Thanks for the video, it was very interesting!👍👍

[@psychette8846]

Fun fact. Why don't trolleys have rear bumpers? Kids used to jump on the bumpers and dislodge the electrical power arm for entertainment.

[@seanmackenzie8726]

We as a family, i was very young '64 to '67 living in an area Mostly Italian, some German could not have asked for any better as a Kid living near North York.!!!

[@andrewwalker7893]

Man, those streetcars used to move…of course there were way fewer cars on the road so they were able to hit the accelerator.

[@outdooraddventure]

I remember when they had the electric buses on Bay Street back in the 80s

[@vernpilder4616]

I remember the Peter Witt street cars the rear exit steps were only made from slats of wood which retracted when the doors closed

[@cathymartinmcgoey3855]

Thankyou

[@1dilligaf]

What a great video a little before my time I was born in Scarbrough in 1960. What a great city to be a child in in the 60s and 70s too bad my grandchildren are never gonna know the freedoms we had.

[@Neville60001]

@#1 DILLIGAF, exactly what freedoms do you think that your grandchildren or any other child has 'lost'?🙄

[@evemarie1605]

​@@Neville60001 I think #1 DILLIGAF is referring to the more relaxed feeling of Toronto in that era vis-a-vis today:- it was a gritty industrial city but quite informal without thousands of immigrants pouring in every day without end and causing a huge amount of hectic congestion and giving the place an unpleasant "edginess". This was also before the era of subsidized university education so the city was not over-run with swarms of third-rate university graduates inflicting "wokist" attitudes on everyone and staying busy telling everyone else what not to do. You can still find that old relaxed social milieu in "unfashionable" small cities such as Peterborough, North Bay, Sudbury, Sault Ste Marie, Thunder Bay etc. It was like riding the streetcars in the old days on a summer day with open windows:- the cars were fairly empty at the outer ends of their routes and felt relaxed but going through the center of the city they would often become packed "to the hilt" with a more strained social feeling and not so pleasant:- the best part of going "downtown" in that era was usually coming back but now it's like the whole of Toronto has become one big overcrowded and unpleasant "downtown":- who needs it? 😔

[@stevebalmer1672]

My Dad was a member of the UCRS. They also ran over night charters. Fun times.

[@rfiskillingussoftly6568]

Cool!

[@johnnycrash3270]

Ah 🤗 the good old days before social media

[@transittoronto]

Ironically, it's through social media that we were able to bring this material to you.

[@robmil2012]

Any video of Kingston road and highland creek street cars in Scarborough 😊

[@transittoronto]

Do a search on "Kingston Road" in this channel. Richard Glaze had a number of films of Kingston Road streetcars and some Kingston Road buses from the late 1960s and 1970s.

[@Neville60001]

Why couldn't the Mount Pleasant streetcar be kept all of these decades?

[@transittoronto]

Because it was the 70s, and although the TTC was committed to retaining its streetcars (abandoning its streetcar abandonment policy in 1972), the Metro Roads department was not. They basically vetoed the decision to keep the streetcars. You can read more about this here: transittoronto.ca/streetcar/4114.shtml

[@evemarie1605]

Hi, those old routes did not make economic sense anymore because the city has grown so hugely since they were inaugurated. This is a living working city in a state of constant evolution and it cannot be a big live-in museum where nothing changes:- progress marches on and we must march with it or else we stagnate and die. You might want to keep your old baby clothes in a drawer somewhere but you would look and feel very silly and uncomfortable trying to actually wear them and diapers all your life and cities are the same.

[@Neville60001]

@@evemarie1605, the city still needs lines like these to relieve the pressure on the bus routes and subway lines-in fact, the Mount Pleasant line could've been kept and turned into a light rail line that ran all of the way from St. Clair station to where Mount Pleasant ends in the northeast of the city. Getting rid of this line was short-sighted thinking on the city's and provience's parts.

[@eve-marie6751]

​@@Neville60001 Hi, tell you what:- let's do a big transit census of Toronto and find out how each household travels about and tabulate the results to see who goes where and how and use that to plan public transit scientifically instead of whimsically. However I was actually in my twenties at that time and the farebox told the tale quite clearly:- ridership on that route was declining while the streetcars and tracks were aging and they could not justify continuing this route as a streetcar route although they did convert it to a trolley coach route. The same issues killed the Rogers route at the same time which was also converted to trolley coaches. The old TTC (pre-1954) used to publish little yearbooks ("Wheels of Progress") which actually described how the original Mt Pleasant route triggered a real-estate boom along Mt Pleasant Rd but over 50+ years the affluent residents converted to private cars and stopped using the public transit. Today, due to the preference of young downtown workers to use public transit, you could actually justify running Mt Pleasant buses down Jarvis into downtown to provide a direct no-transfer ride but this type of logic filters into the TTC "mind" only very, very, very slowly so doing a transit census every 5 to 10 years would be a good idea for transit planning. I see others making similar calls to restore ancient streetcar routes such as Dovercourt-McCaul but that's not going to happen:- we can't live in the past.

[@eve-marie6751]

​ @transittoronto Ah yes, the era of Sam Cass, Toronto's very own version of Robert Moses, who objected to pedestrians, sidewalks, buses and streetcars, bicycles, and businesses on his so-called "traffic arterials":- he wanted to convert streets like Bloor and Dundas, etc into freeways without regard to the various functions those streets actually performed:- he was also known as "Cass the Ass (h*le) for very good reasons:- good riddance to him and all those of his ilk! 🙁

[@tdunph4250]

@ 09:25. Heading west, not east but all in all great video!

[@transittoronto]

Oops. Thank you for the correction!

[@eattherich9215]

I wonder if cars got side swiped as the back end of the tram swung out on a tight curve? A few cars getting swiped could have been the reason why a perfectly good transport system was junked. Streets are HORRIBLE now with six lanes of fast moving traffic and no regard for those not in a tin box on wheels.

[@vertiian]

There's a shocking number of VW Beetles

[@patriciabowman31]

this time period is when we here in Montreal used to call Toronto ..... " Toronto the Good ". Toronto was "whole some". Beautiful and it was noticed. Now every city has gone dumpster diving. Not that it's a bad thing to dumpster dive but we need to heal our cities. Just saying.