260 McRoberts Avenue

In 1932, Canada was suffering some of the worst effects of the Great Depression. The Canadian Encyclopedia summarizes the impact: “Between 1929 and 1933 the country’s Gross National Expenditure [overall public and private spending] fell by 42%. By 1933, 30% of the labour force was out of work, and one in five Canadians had become dependent upon government relief for survival.” In our neighbourhood, families were increasingly desperate.

On May 14, 1932, The Globe reported that York Township grocers had appealed to the local police for protection, as did the York Rangers’ Armory in Mount Dennis. They feared violent looting that was threatened by unemployed residents who were rallying in Silverthorn for an increase in the relief money provided by the township. The York Unemployment Association said its members were facing starvation and if help was not forthcoming, there would be no other choice. The Globe reported that negotiations between the York Reeve and the province had averted the impending violence. Relief would be extended by York Township until May 21, when new provincial relief measures would start to take effect.

Unemployed York residents gather at Silverthorn Memorial Hall near Rogers Road on May 13, 1932 to hear the results of negotiations between the York Unemployment Association and the York Reeve on extending relief payments and avert threatened looting. Photo courtesy City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds, Fonds 1266, Item 26799.

On McRoberts Avenue, just inside the Toronto city limits, Keith and Louisa Brown of Number 260 could count themselves among the fortunate. Keith was still employed, as a presser at the Fashion Dress Company Ltd. on the third floor of the Tower Building at 112 Spadina Avenue. As a garment factory worker, his employment situation was precarious and potentially volatile. Many workers were subject to intimidation and threats as labour organizers worked to improve wages and factory conditions. A 1931 dressmakers’ strike at factories that neighboured Keith Brown’s workplace included bouts of violence. Some people were assaulted as they walked off the shop floor or as they marched on the picket line.

In this uncertain and stressful atmosphere, Louisa Brown joined hundreds of other Torontonians in committing a crime: She purchased a ticket for the Irish Sweep – the Irish Free State Hospitals’ Sweepstakes that promised grand prizes of amazing riches if you were lucky enough to draw a horse that won one of the big races. The May draw for the Derby that year was the biggest one in the Irish Sweep’s short history. Founded privately in 1930 by a trio of Irish businessmen, ostensibly to aid Irish hospitals and health care, the lottery had grown into a global phenomenon by 1932.

Selling and buying the tickets was illegal in Canada – as it was in most places outside Ireland – but it seemed to be possible to hang on to any winnings without major repercussions. A Maclean’s Magazine article published in 1935 describes Canadian winners who collected their money and used it to good, or ill, effect.

The Irish promoters of the Sweeps were famous for their pageantry when it came to drawing the tickets. In 1932, young women were dressed in satin jockey silks and circled their wheeled boxes around the “Golden Hall of Hope” as the tickets were collected and mixed in a large machine (a newsreel film of the strange event can be viewed here). The winners were then drawn by nurses under the supervision of the Chief of Police, to underline the benefits for the Irish state. Historians of the Sweeps, like Marie Coleman, question how much money actually made it to the medical system, but say that at least some good was achieved. Most of the benefit was to the founders, though, as well as to the promoters and overseas agents, many of whom had connections to the Irish Republican Army.

The fine print covering this 1935 Irish Sweep ticket seems to acknowledge the possible issues related to overseas sales and counterfeiting.

A potential winner would have a ticket drawn and related to a specific horse that would run in the upcoming race. The prize money received would depend on how well the horse did. For the “Record Sweep” of 1932, a Daily Star correspondent stood by, ready to wire the draw results in Dublin back to Canada. The May 31, 1932 Star was able to report that only seven Torontonians (and ten Canadians) had been lucky enough to be among the 644 tickets drawn. A Toronto resident holding the ticket for a horse named Miracle had the best odds of the seven, the Star noted. Most of the local winners were 100-Pound cash prize consolation winners. This would be about $420 Canadian dollars, the Star said.

Among these cash prize winners was Mrs. Keith Brown of 230 McRoberts Avenue. It wasn’t a big prize, but for a family that was probably living on wages of less than $20 a week, it would have provided a cushion at least. It is not known how the Browns decided to use their winnings. Certainly, they did not move right away and Keith Brown continued to work as a presser for the Fashion Dress Company for many more years.

Perhaps they put the money into their house, which they had purchased around 1928. The address was first listed as a vacant property in the Might’s Directory for 1927, so it is likely it was a newly built home and they were the first occupants. The couple had married in 1915 in Toronto, having both been born in the U.K. Keith Brown was from Aberdeen, Scotland, while Louisa Ives was from England. They moved around, renting on Delaware Avenue and Carus Avenue (near Ossington) before buying their house on McRoberts.  In the 1921 Census, they had two small daughters, Margarete (age 5) and Kathleen (age 3), although I could not find any further records about the children.

 

1927 Directory

1928 Directory

The top Toronto winner of the 1932 “Record Sweep” was Allan Perks, when his horse Miracle came in third, netting him $42,000. Maclean’s tracked him down 1935 and reported that the young office clerk had always dreamed of having his own chicken farm. He had used his winnings to take a course and buy a modern poultry farm in Pickering, Ontario, where he was happily living on 100 acres after having provided for both his parents’ retirement and his younger siblings’ education.

As for the Browns, they remained on McRoberts until 1940, when they moved to Dowling Avenue in Parkdale. From there, Keith Brown would at least have had a shorter commute to the factory on Spadina, where he continued to work as a presser until the end of his working days.

A postcard send from the 1913 Horse Show in Toronto. Courtesy Toronto Public Library ARTS-PC-50

2, 4 & 8 McRoberts Avenue

It seems that there has never been a Number 6 on McRoberts Avenue. But one family lived at all the other numbers on the West side of the street that is closest to St. Clair Avenue: 2, 4 and 8. Today, there is just a 4 and an 8. But in July 1907, when little baby Albert Drury came into the world, it was at 2 McRoberts.

The Drurys were a Roman Catholic family, which was quite unusual on McRoberts in those days. Albert was the third son I can find born to Henry and Ada Drury. The year before, the couple’s baby Alfred was born, but the lack of further records for him suggest that he died in infancy. Albert, the first Drury known to be born on McRoberts, had three older sisters – Mary, Edith and Alice – and an older brother named Henry. Alice was the first child born in Canada and she was baptized at St. Helen’s Church near Lansdowne and Dundas in 1905.

The Drurys had moved up to McRoberts around that time, having first lived on Farley Avenue (renamed Richmond Street West in 1910), where they had lived next door to Thomas Drury who I believe was Henry’s brother. Both Henry and Thomas were listed in the Toronto directories as labourers. Conditions in the Victorian workers’ houses on Farley were probably reminiscent of the crowded two-up two-down row housing the family had come from in Bradford, Manchester, in the north of England. They joined the other pioneering families of Prospect Park in the chance to own their own piece of land on McRoberts and build their own house.

A typical progression for the early settlers of McRoberts and surrounding streets described in histories of the area would be to live at first in a makeshift dwelling – a tarpaper shack or a tented foundation – while working to pay off the land. Once the title to the land was clear, a mortgage could be obtained to help finance further construction, or a family could continue to build as they were able to afford materials. Workers like Henry Drury would complete a ten-hour shift, six days a week, and then come home and build their houses by lantern-light, with the whole family pitching in, working into the night.

This 1910 William James photo shows Lansdowne Avenue by the Canada Foundry Buildings. Courtesy City of Toronto Archives.

Like most of the men on McRoberts, Henry Drury had an extraordinarily hard work day. He was a moulder at Canada Foundry, where skilled tradesmen used packed sand to cast molten iron into any number of useful objects. Canada Foundry was not known as an organization that was kind to its workers. On the 1911 Census, the Drurys reported that they had arrived in 1903, and so Henry may have been among the English metal workers recruited that year to come to Canada – unaware that in order to work, they would be expected to cross the picket line of foundry workers fighting for a nine-hour work day. The working conditions and the labour movements of the time are described in a study by Wayne Roberts published in Labour/Le Travail  “Toronto Metal Workers and the Second Industrial Revolution 1889-1914“.

There is a film in the General Electric archives held by the miSci Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady, NY. “The Moulder” was made in 1924, the year after GE bought the Canada Foundry. The operation shown in the film is more mechanized and modern than it would have been at Canada Foundry, but it demonstrates some of the physical conditions of the moulder’s work. It also shows the reduced skill level required for the moulder’s craft that Wayne Roberts argues eroded the value of the worker as efficiency, quality control and automation were introduced.

The Canada Foundry’s relocation to Lansdowne between Dupont and Davenport by 1905 had helped spur development along McRoberts. According to Wayne Roberts’s article, it was the second largest employer in the city at the time, after Massey Harris. However, just as the workers and their families were getting established, economic depression and another big strike at the Foundry hit them hard in 1907. Conditions in the neighbourhood were truly desperate at that time, starvation and hypothermia from a lack of coal for heat were reported regularly. The local churches and aid workers in the area did what they could for the people in the area, who were struggling for survival.

It was into this world that Albert Drury was born. Henry’s employment status at the time is not evident, but he must have done something to keep his family alive and keep their land. The family did not have another baby recorded until 1909, when Ernest was born on February 20 at 2 McRoberts, again with the faithful local doctor Dr. McNamara in attendance. Sadly, Ernest was premature and only survived for three days.

The first change of address recorded for the Drurys was 2 years later, on Feb 25, 1911 when Joseph Bernard Drury was born at 4 McRoberts Avenue. Joseph survived to adulthood, and later that spring, when the 1911 census was taken, he was three months old. In the Census, Mary was 12, Edith was 10, Henry and Alice, born close together, were both 6, and Albert was 3. Ada was 32 and keeping house. One benefit of being at the corner in the early days is that it was close to the local water supply before water and sewer infrastructure was installed. Henry, at the age of 34 was working at the Foundry for 55 hours each week, making $20 a week. The family had also been joined by Ada’s 21 year-old brother, Albert Haslam, who had come over from England the year before and was also working at the Foundry, making $18 a week.

The family’s shift from number 2 to number 4 is a bit puzzling and would require sifting through land records to try to figure out. It is tempting to think that the tidy big house on the corner used to illustrate this blog was their original home. It was photographed at the end of August, 1911 by city photographer James Salmon when assessments were being done for the widening of St. Clair West. The photo is labelled as being on the Northeast corner of McRoberts and St. Clair, but unless the image has been flipped, it is oriented as a house on the Northwest corner would be. Goad’s Atlas of 1910 shows wooden buildings both at that location and next door, with a row of deep empty lots along St Clair. Perhaps the houses were just renumbered and 2 became 4. [A correction: I was wrong about all of this… This is not the Drury’s house – it is on the Northeast corner and it is actually 1478 St. Clair West!]

James Salmon took this picture for the City in August 1911 when assessments were being done for the widening of St Clair West. It is tempting to think this is the Drury’s house at Number 2 [Correction: It is not number 2 – see paragraph above in the post]. Courtesy City of Toronto Archives.

Ten years later, in the 1921 Census, the family was still all together at 4 McRoberts. The war years and the Spanish Influenza behind them, and the boys having been too young to fight overseas, the next generation took up work in the textile industry that had made their birthplace of Bradford in England infamous. Henry was a cap maker at the “Cap Factory” and Mary and Edith were both “Nitters.” The local census enumerator that year was not great at spelling and had terrible handwriting, so although Alice’s work at age 16 looks like Pianist, it is very hard to tell if that is what she was actually doing. The other children were at school, and had been joined by Frances, age 6, making the family four boys and four girls.

Edith was the first of the family to marry, and although she gave her religion as Roman Catholic, she married an Anglican in the Anglican church. She had met Leonard Stanley William Turner, age 20, who was a Sheet Metal Worker who grew up in The Ward. By now, the family had moved next door to 8 McRoberts where they continued to live. The move may have been an economic necessity. On May 20, 1919, the Toronto Daily Star reported that residents of McRoberts had been polled on whether they favoured the extension of the city’s “brick limits” up to Innes Avenue and they were divided on the issue. If a large wooden house needed to be bricked in, it would be quite costly.

It may also have been a move as a result of Henry’s health. In 1924, Henry Drury, age 48, died at Toronto General Hospital of Chronic Pneumonia. Lung disease from silicosis is an occupational hazard for moulders and years of inhaling particles from the sand killed Henry and left Ada a widow at the age of 46. A Card of Thanks was published in the Toronto Star on September 20, 1924: “The family of the late Henry Drury, 8 McRoberts Avenue, wish to thank their many friends and neighbors for their kind sympathetic expressions and beautiful floral tributes extended them in their recent bereavement.”

Ada’s children grew and most married, and like their sister did so outside of the Catholic Church, part of a pattern that was alarming Catholic Church leaders at the time. According to voter’s lists from the 1940s, Mary continued in her textile work as a knitter and stayed home, supporting her mother. Ada passed away in 1958. For years afterward, memorial ads in the Star remembered Ada and the love her children had for her, a testament to the hard work and care she had given to them here on McRoberts Avenue.

151 McRoberts Avenue

This is part 2 of the story of the Del Piero family, covering the years they lived on McRoberts Avenue. Part 1 can be found here.

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When Giacomo Del Piero left Hamilton, Ontario, for Italy in 1930, he was working as a tile setter. In Hamilton, he was also listed as a “terracer”. This skilled work, creating terrazzo floors, tiling, and creating mosaics, was taken up by many northern Italians. A collection of essays, The Friulian Language: Identity, Migration, Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2014 ed. Rose Mucignat) notes famous examples around the world. Closest to home, this work includes the rotunda ceiling at the Royal Ontario Museum created in 1933, and the Thomas Foster Memorial Temple in Uxbridge. University of Toronto Professor Olga Zorzi Pugliese has catalogued so many of these beautiful installations, from public buildings to private homes, and researched the Canadian companies and some of the craftsmen who created them.

The fact that Giacomo Del Piero went to Hamilton to work must had something to do with his connection to his cousin Aurelio, who ran a steamship ticket agency and shop on James Street North. Aurelio Del Piero was well established in Hamilton. He had been in Canada since 1906 and was one of the founders in the 1920s of the Hamilton branch of the Sons of Italy, a benevolent society still active today.

However, when Giacomo came back, alone, from his trip to Italy he didn’t stay in Hamilton. Instead he moved to Toronto, finding a home on Laughton Avenue, south of St. Clair Avenue West. There are a number of Italian households listed in the area west of Caledonia Road in the Might’s Directories of the early 1930s, many of them working in tiling, marble work and terrazzo flooring. Nearby, at 60 Caledonia Road, was the headquarters of one of the city’s leading firms for this type of work: Italian Mosaic and Marble Company of Canada Limited.

A few months after Giacomo’s return, on May 1, 1931, 37-year-old Anna Redivo sailed from Genoa to New York City also aboard the Roma. With her on the passenger list were her three children: Maria Del Piero age 11, Argentino Del Piero age 8 and Alfio Del Piero age 3. The children were all born in Roveredo, but Anna herself was born in Bahia Blanca, Argentina. The Canadian passenger list notes that she is going to join her husband at 125 Laughton Avenue. On May 12, 1931 the family crossed the border into Canada for the first time.

Look familiar? This is the what the Del Piero’s neighbourhood was like when they first moved to Toronto in 1931. Courtesy City of Toronto Archives.

The first few years of the family’s life in Canada were spent on Laughton Avenue. In the 1932 Might’s Directory, Giacomo Del Piero is listed with the first name John, living at 236 Laughton and working as a mechanic at “Italian Mosaic.” This could be one of two companies operating at the time and it is just a guess to know which “Italian Mosaic” employed Giacomo Del Piero, but given the location I’d be willing to bet it was at Egidio DeSpirt’s company on Caledonia.

My best guess is that Giacomo Del Piero’s employer was Italian Mosaic & Marble Company Limited at 60 Caledonia Road. The company was the Toronto branch of a family business still operating in Buffalo, NY today.

Research done by Olga Zorzi Pugliese and Angelo Principe for their article, “The Mosaic Workers of the Thomas Foster Memorial in Uxbridge”  contains details of DeSpirt’s company, which was responsible for work in many significant buildings such as the mosaic floors in the Toronto Old City Hall, the King Edward Hotel, and the provincial Parliament building.

In 1935, the Del Piero family was listed at 151 McRoberts Avenue, formerly the home of S. Clifford Olmstead, manager of one of the gas stations in the Perfection Service Station chain. In this edition of the directory, Giacomo – now regularly listed as John (just as Egidio DeSpirt went by “Giles”) – is described as a Stone Masher. The next year, he is a stone mason, the trade he will keep for the rest of his time on McRoberts. It is interesting that this period of transition coincides with the contract that Italian Mosaic and Marble Company had won to complete the elaborate marble work in the Thomas Foster Memorial (their competitors, the other “Italian Mosaic”, did the murals).

Another interesting note from this time is that in the federal government’s Annual Report of the Labour Organizations in Canada in 1936, the President-Secretary of the Bricklayers, Masons and Plasterers’ International Union No 16 (Terrazzo Mechanics) was “A. Redivo” at 151 McRoberts Avenue. Later, editions of the Report show “A. Redivo” of the same address in the Secretary role for the Local. Might’s Directory does not list anybody named Redivo in this time period, on McRoberts or elsewhere. It would need more research, but since married women were not usually listed in Might’s Directory unless they were widows, it is possible that Anna Redivo was the labour leader listed in the government directory.

The turbulent politics of the time must have enveloped the Del Piero household. Just considering a few possibilities is anxiety-producing. There were the government’s anti-Communist actions against labour unions, Italian fascist activities in Canada as well as anti-fascist activities by many labour organizations and within the Italian community itself. In addition, there was systemic racism against Italians. Living on a very British street like McRoberts where the local members of the British Imperial Association were regularly reported in the newspapers claiming problems caused by “foreigners” for just about any situation, must have had some dark days.

In Hamilton, Aurelio Del Piero had become involved with the Italian fascist movement and had loaned money for the construction of the Casa D’Italia, which housed fascist organization offices as well as providing space for the Sons of Italy (which was not outlawed as a fascist organization by the Canadian government) and other cultural groups. Research by the Columbus Centre on the arrests of Canadians during World War II includes the imprisonment of Aurelio Del Piero from 1940 to 1941.

In Toronto, the family continued through the war years in their home on McRoberts. In 1938, Maria Del Piero, now 19 years old and known as Mary, had started working for a men’s clothing company at 142 Front Street West called Cook’s Clothing. Warren K. Cook, the owner, was apparently supportive of the labour movement and garment worker’s rights and Mary Del Piero continued to work for his company throughout the war, progressing steadily in her career. Giacomo Del Piero continued to be listed as a Stone Mason.

Argentino and then Alfie came of age just as the Del Piero family decided to leave McRoberts. In 1947, they all moved to Vaughan Road in Fairbank. 1948 is the first year that a new company is listed in Might’s Directory: Del Piero and Son, Contractors. Mary had also risen to the job of Examiner at Cook Clothing. The new residents of 151 McRoberts were another building contractor, Gordon W. Kritzer and his wife, as well as his wife’s sister and her husband, Rev. Charles S. Laidman, a Congregational minister from Binbrook, who had come back to Canada after serving at the historic church in Chicago’s posh Oak Park suburb.