Inside the Museum — Spadina House
By John Goddard
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About this ebook
John Goddard
John Goddard is an author, magazine writer, and former Toronto Star reporter. His books include Inside the Museums: Toronto’s Heritage Sites and Their Most Prized Objects and Rock and Roll Toronto, with pop critic Richard Crouse. John lives in Toronto.
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Inside the Museum — Spadina House - John Goddard
Copyright
Preface and
Acknowledgements
Photo by John Goddard
Thousands of subway riders glimpse it absently every day. A portrait of William Lyon Mackenzie peers from the platform mural at Queen Station, his face as round and orange as a wheel of cheese, his expression as knotted as when he first encountered Upper Canada’s stifling elite. Mackenzie served as Toronto’s first mayor and led the star-crossed Rebellion of Upper Canada. He was the grandfather of William Lyon Mackenzie King — Canada’s tenth prime minister, whose own orange-pink visage graces the Canadian fifty-dollar bill — and died three blocks from his subway-wall portrait, at a house that the city preserves as a museum.
One day I decided to visit the house. Like many people, I knew of Toronto’s heritage museums, and had been meaning to get around to seeing them. Mackenzie House, as it is called, proved a revelation. I discovered something called a Rebellion Box,
one of hundreds of small wooden boxes tenderly carved for mothers and sweethearts by accused rebels awaiting trial in Toronto’s cold, damp jail. Upstairs, I saw the bedroom where Isabel Grace Mackenzie, nicknamed Bell,
slept during her adolescence and young adulthood, before becoming Mrs. Isabel King and mother to a future prime minister. In a back room, I briefly operated an 1845 Washington rolling flatbed press, of the kind Mackenzie used late in his career to foment against official self-interest and hypocrisy.
I also learned something else. The city’s heritage museums are interconnected. The builder of what is now the Spadina House Museum once worked as a teenage apprentice in Mackenzie’s print shop. The home of David Gibson, one of Mackenzie’s fellow rebels, survives as the Gibson House Museum on Yonge Street, at North York Centre. The builder of Colborne Lodge in High Park led a military detail against Mackenzie, Gibson, and the rebel uprising.
Beyond the Mackenzie link, I saw that the city’s heritage-house museums complement each other in many ways. The properties include a townhouse, a stately home, a country inn, an industrial site, a schoolhouse, and a military fort. Ken Purvis, coordinator at Montgomery’s Inn, pointed out that the museums, if taken together, begin to form a coherent community, like a lost colonial village reunited.
They also form a single museum institution. In Toronto, people talk of the need for a city history museum, rarely recognizing that the Economic Development and Culture Division already runs a sprawling heritage-museum network. Under a single administration, the division incorporates eight museums in fifty-five buildings and outbuildings on ten sites. It holds 150,000 artifacts in those buildings and two warehouses, and occupies offices at Metro Hall, at the corner of King and John Streets. Full-time staff members sometimes switch places within the museum institution. Part-time personnel sometimes hold jobs at two or three venues at once.
Occasionally the network is threatened. In 2011, as a budgetary measure, Mayor Rob Ford proposed to close four of the