Draft: June 13, 2022
In Toronto of Old (1873) – the city’s first serious work of local history – Henry Scadding recorded no fewer than 15 early commercial signs. John Ross Robertson’s six-volume Landmarks of Toronto (1894-1914) increased this number. Robertson commissioned artists to create sketches and watercolours of Toronto scenes – artwork used extensively by Edwin Guillet in the first volume of his Pioneer Inns and Taverns (1954) to depict local trade signs. While not eyewitness accounts, these illustrations have long shaped our sense of 19th century Toronto.
Scadding, Robertson, and Guillet focused on swinging inn and tavern signs – inspired, it seems, by Jacob Harwood and John Camden Hotten’s The History of Signboards, first published in England in 1866. Here, I offer a systematic review of Toronto eyewitness sources, both visual and textual, revealing broader experimentation in sign types and materials during the Victorian era that culminated with the appearance of electricity. The account ends in 1900, consistent with the conclusions reached by Charles Wagner (in The Story of Signs, 1954) and Martin Treu (in Signs, Streets, and Storefronts, 2012), who view that year as the beginning of the “modern” sign period and its increased reliance on illumination, large-scale displays, and new production technologies.
Toronto’s first documented business sign is decidedly pre-modern. A small rectangle of wood carrying the word “COOPER” – for William Cooper, proprietor – appears over the entrance to the Toronto Coffee House in the earliest known (1803) streetscape painting of York. With little architectural differentiation between scattered commercial and residential buildings in the government village, signs were crucial in identifying essential community-gathering venues like Cooper’s.
By the time Thomas Young sketched King Street in 1835, Toronto’s growth spurt had created a continuous street wall along the town’s main thoroughfare. Painted signboards carrying the name of the proprietor or the business were typically affixed flush to the fascia above the storefront and ran the full width of the shop. Repeated along the street, a unified sign band took shape. But such coherence would not last long.
As John Gillespie recorded in 1844, boards also appeared above both the second storey and the cornice line. The false-front effect of parapet signs increased the apparent bulk of the host building. These signs became more flamboyant over time. When photographed by Notman & Fraser in 1872, the Toronto Safe Works had a smaller curved board mounted atop a larger rectangular one, both adorned by spiky finials.
Some signboards were mounted at an angle to increase their readability by pedestrians. In Toronto in the Camera (1868), Octavius Thompson captured this in “GRAHAM’S / TEMPLE OF / FASHIONS,” a three-storey advert obscuring some of the architectural ornament on St. Lawrence Hall, then Toronto’s most elegant public building.
Durable lead paint was soon applied directly to building surfaces to create signs. Painted brick and fascia board signs were widespread. The earliest known photographs of Toronto (1856-57) capture “PIANOFORTE / MANUFACTORY.” and “COACH / MANUFACTORY” on two sidewalls; their dark letters are set on whitewashed bands for maximum readability. The Toronto Safe Works later repeated this linear effect, then added 13 lines of stacked text for emphasis, effectively turning the entire building into a business graphic. Lettering on clapboard siding and mansard-roof slates was rare, notable exceptions being Freeland’s soap and candle factory on the harbour (about 1832) and the Dominion Brewery on Queen East (by 1889).
The antiquarian appeal of inn and trade signs perhaps came from their mix of text and pictures. Curious narratives emerged. Robertson described the Rescue Inn signboard (c.1850) on Front Street as follows: “The subject was the rescue of her infant by a mother from the nest of some enormous eagles in a rocky pass at the head of some apparently inaccessible mountains. How the woman had climbed the mountains was a mystery, and how she was going to descend them was even more mysterious still. But the sign served one good purpose, at any rate, and that, as far as the proprietor was concerned, was the chief one, it drew attention to the house and custom to its proprietor.”
In other cases, tavern signs could be text-heavy, adding a legend to create a primitive advertising jingle. In 1914, W.H. Pearson recalled that the sign for the Halfway House, located midway between the Toronto garrison and City Hall on Front Street, bore this legend:
Within this hive we’re all alive—
Good liquor makes us funny;
If you be dry, step in and try
The flavour of our honey.
Tavern signs, typically one-board thick, were mounted in two ways: attached to and projecting perpendicular to the building from iron supports; or freestanding, either atop one pole or held gallows-style between two posts. The freestanding approach was common in outlying areas – a precursor to 20th-century service station signs. The earliest known survival (c.1830) is now inside Montgomery’s Inn at Dundas West and Islington Avenue.
Trade signs could be flat, but more often became oversized three-dimensional sculptures that Claes Oldenburg would have appreciated. The period 1850-75 saw giant padlocks, boots, cross-cut saws, and other objects placed above store entrances. In order for people to find these stores, City directories gave both the business name and “at the sign of the [insert object]” information. Always part of Robert Walker’s dry-goods advertisements, the Golden Lion was the best-known trade sign in Victorian Toronto and an alternate business name. His King East building actually featured two lions – one rampant, one reclining.
Text-based commercial signs projecting over the sidewalk started to appear by the late 1850s. Unlike swinging tavern signs, these were initially mounted tight to the façade on a triangular iron frame, creating a wedge-shaped profile often high up between the second and third storeys. Signs suspended lower from poles and brackets and almost reaching the curb became popular in the late 1880s.
City Council’s first sign bylaw (1857) aimed to control the encroachment of private structures on public space. Flush-mounted signs weren’t an issue, but sign posts, hanging or swinging signs, and awnings extending over sidewalks or streets would require City approval.
Who created specific signs is largely unknown, but a clear pattern is obvious: most 19th-century sign-makers were generalists. Paul Kane would become famous for painting Indigenous life in North America, but he was listed as a “Coach, Sign, and House painter” in Toronto’s first directory (1833). Following British tradition, a local sign painter might also be a grainer, glazier, glass-stainer, or paper-hanger, or identify as a fresco and banner painter or an interior decorator. Long-established sign-painting firms like George Booth & Son (founded 1853) branched out in the 1890s into illuminated-lamp and wire-screen signs. Some specialization emerged at that time for plate glass and porcelain enamelled signs.
Signs were predominantly but not exclusively wood in Victorian Toronto. A few gas-lit glass signs, mounted as lamps suspended from building frontages or set atop cast-iron sidewalk poles, appeared following the introduction of coal gas in 1841. Glass signs could be gilded, painted, or etched; shop windows saw a boom in such signs in the 1890s with the arrival of patented metallic “Brilliant Sign Letters.” Lettering also adorned fabric awnings and roller blinds. Stock letters in wood, enamelled metal, or ceramic could be cemented to fascia boards or brick walls. Often, several sign types would be featured on a single building.
Aspiring for permanency, the most durable signs were carved in stone as part of a building’s overall design. In 19th-century Toronto, most lettering was in relief, with simple type-forms projecting from the façade above the first storey. The 1876 sign on Toronto Street for “CONSUMERS’ GAS COMPANY OF TORONTO / CHAMBERS” was typical, though only the last three words now exist. Older, more ornate, and still fully intact is “ST. LAWRENCE HALL.” under the building’s central pediment (1850) on King East.
Executed by local sculptors Holbrook & Mollington, Toronto’s finest Victorian carved ornament is on Old City Hall (1899). Tangled in the sandstone bands of foliage on the east, west, and south sides are the words “CITY HALL,” “COURT HOUSE,” and “MUNICIPAL BUILDINGS.” “TORONTO” was apparently too self-evident to warrant inclusion.
Lettering incised in stone was much rarer, though some recently restored examples survive. The square-cut “MASSEY MUSIC HALL” (1894) features a curvy art nouveau type-form selected by Lillian Massey, daughter of the hall’s benefactor. “THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE” – the legend above Victoria College’s entrance (1892) – is V-cut. Overwhelmed by the building’s Richardsonian Romanesque mass, this technique was executed far better 25 years later at the Neo-Classical Union Station.
Unlike fully integrated carved lettering, wire screen signs floated in front of (and occasionally above) the host building. Detroit-based Barnum Wire & Iron Works developed a metal and mesh signage system in the 1870s which could be fixed to building frontages and rooftops. By 1876, a huge roof sign for R.A. Hoskins & Co. was mounted with guy wires perpendicular to Front Street East. It’s tempting to assign this work – arguably the prototype for later Toronto billboards – to E.T. Barnum. By 1883, he had a Canadian factory (in Windsor) and agent (in Toronto). That year, his firm’s “wire sign assortment” won first prize at the Toronto Industrial Fair.
Façade-mounted wire screen signs of all sizes flourished in the 1890s. Their porosity meant that windows and architectural ornament remained visible, while their affixed letters could be replaced easily. These advantages were seized in one of Toronto’s largest installations repeated along both Victoria and Adelaide East streets. The “FREEHOLD” lettering in place by 1898 above the sixth storey of the Freehold Loan Building was swapped out for “HOME LIFE” in 1901.
Until 1899, wire screen signs were only indirectly illuminated by street lamps and bright moonlight. That Christmas, large incandescent light bulbs forming the letters “R. SIMPSON LTD.” guided evening shoppers to Simpson’s department store on Yonge Street. It was part of a downtown-wide illumination project on October 27, 1900 greeting soldiers returning from the South African War. The light-bulb sign at the Queen Street City Hall – “WELCOME HOME” plus a modified royal cypher – is the earliest known photo documentation of a nighttime sign in Toronto.
Toronto’s previous light-bulb signs were much more modest. Nothing approached the huge, multicoloured, flashing “spectaculars” that appeared in New York City in the early 1890s. A few examples of boxy, sidewalk-spanning “block” signs – manufactured thick to accommodate internal wiring – first appeared in the late 1880s. Among the earliest was “DINEEN’S,” for the hat shop at Yonge and Queen. A continuous line of small light bulbs ran along the edges of the sign’s front and back; the business name on each panel side was rendered in painted or porcelain enamel. A similarly illuminated pole-mounted sign stood outside the Grand Opera House by 1890, replacing an older gas-lit glass lamp.
In terms of rising popularity, paper far outstripped electricity in late-century Toronto street advertising. “Bill stickers” had been listed in city directories since 1850, though the first postering business was not incorporated until 1894. Small text-heavy handbills gave way to multi-sheet pictorial posters. With many fence boards papered over by the mid-1890s, moral reformers soon raised alarms about poster graphics and messages.
Save for bills displayed outside theatres, these posters represented third-party advertising. Toronto’s commercial signs had been traditionally “first-party,” promoting the building occupant and its on-site products or services. Third-party painted-brick signs begin to appear on sidewalls in the late 1880s. The look of the city would be radically transformed in the early 20th-century by the combined attack of paint and (especially) paper, the latter enabled by massive, single-purpose billboards controlled by firms like E.L. Ruddy Co.
The increased prevalence of third-party signs would extend to projecting and roof-mounted electrical signs (tellingly regulated through a 1910 by-law). Neon would surge in popularity, then be supplanted by back-lit acrylic boxes. But while reduced in prominence, Toronto’s painted sidewalls, wooden signboards, and three-dimensional trade signs would not disappear entirely.
Before Neon, Before Plastic: Toronto’s Business Signs to 1900 by Wayne Reeves
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kurtkraler
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kurtkraler
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Re: Before Neon, Before Plastic: Toronto’s Business Signs to 1900 by Wayne Reeves
Revised by Wayne Reeves, August 10, 2022
If digital and sheet-vinyl represent 21st-century outdoor sign-making in Toronto, then neon and plastic typify the 20th century. Before that –
the focus here – came other materials and approaches. Over the course of the 19th century, wood, paint, and gas were augmented by metal, paper, and electricity. Text was joined by the pictorial and the sculptural. Measured restraint gave way to flamboyant abundance.
Some attention has already been paid to signs in Georgian and Victorian Toronto. In the city’s first serious work of local history, Toronto of Old (1873), Henry Scadding described no fewer than 15 early commercial signs. John Ross Robertson increased this number in his six-volume Landmarks of Toronto (1894-1914). Robertson commissioned artists to create sketches and watercolours of Toronto scenes, artwork used extensively by Edwin Guillet in the first volume of his Pioneer Inns and Taverns (1954) to depict old trade signs. While not eyewitness accounts, these illustrations have long shaped our visual sense of early Toronto.
Scadding, Robertson, and Guillet focused on swinging inn and tavern signs, seemingly inspired by Jacob Harwood and John Camden Hotten’s The History of Signboards, which was first published in England in 1866. Here, I offer a systematic review of Toronto eyewitness sources, both visual and textual, revealing broader experimentation in sign types and materials during the Victorian era that culminated with the appearance of electricity. The account ends in 1900, consistent with the conclusions reached by Charles Wagner (in The Story of Signs, 1954) and Martin Treu (in Signs, Streets, and Storefronts, 2012), who view that year as the beginning of the “modern” sign period and its increased reliance on illumination, large-scale displays, and new production technologies.
Toronto’s first documented business sign is decidedly pre-modern. A small rectangle of wood carrying the word “COOPER” – for William Cooper, proprietor – appears over the entrance to the Toronto Coffee House in the earliest known streetscape painting of York from 1803. With little architectural differentiation between scattered commercial and residential buildings in the government village, signs were crucial in identifying essential community-gathering venues like Cooper’s.
By the time Thomas Young sketched King Street in 1835, Toronto’s growth spurt had created a continuous street wall along the town’s main thoroughfare. Painted signboards carrying the name of the proprietor or the business were typically affixed flush to the fascia above the storefront and ran the full width of the shop. Repeated along the street, a unified sign band took shape. But such coherence would not last long.
As John Gillespie recorded in 1844, boards also appeared above both the second storey and the cornice line. The false-front effect of parapet signs increased the apparent bulk of the host building. These signs became more flamboyant over time. When photographed by Notman & Fraser in 1872, the Toronto Safe Works had a smaller curved board mounted atop a larger rectangular one, both adorned by spiky finials.
Some signboards were mounted at an angle to increase their readability by pedestrians. In Toronto in the Camera (1868), Octavius Thompson captured this in “GRAHAM’S / TEMPLE OF / FASHIONS,” a three-storey advert obscuring some of the architectural ornament on St. Lawrence Hall, then Toronto’s most elegant public building.
Durable lead paint was soon applied directly to building surfaces to create signs. Painted brick and fascia board signs were widespread. The earliest known photographs of Toronto (1856-57) capture “PIANOFORTE / MANUFACTORY.” and “COACH / MANUFACTORY” on two sidewalls; their dark letters are set on whitewashed bands for maximum readability. The Toronto Safe Works later repeated this linear effect, then added 13 lines of stacked text for emphasis, effectively turning the entire building into a business graphic. Lettering on clapboard siding and mansard-roof slates was rare, with notable exceptions being Freeland’s soap and candle factory on the harbour (about 1832) and the Dominion Brewery on Queen East (by 1889).
The antiquarian appeal of inn and trade signs perhaps came from their mix of text and pictures. Curious narratives emerged. Robertson described the Rescue Inn signboard (c.1850) on Front Street as follows: “The subject was the rescue of her infant by a mother from the nest of some enormous eagles in a rocky pass at the head of some apparently inaccessible mountains. How the woman had climbed the mountains was a mystery, and how she was going to descend them was even more mysterious still. But the sign served one good purpose, at any rate, and that, as far as the proprietor was concerned, was the chief one, it drew attention to the house and custom to its proprietor.”
In other cases, tavern signs could be text-heavy, adding a legend to create a primitive advertising jingle. In 1914, W.H. Pearson recalled that the sign for the Halfway House, located midway between the Toronto garrison and City Hall on Front Street, bore this legend:
Within this hive we’re all alive—
Good liquor makes us funny;
If you be dry, step in and try
The flavour of our honey.
Tavern signs, typically one-board thick, were mounted in two ways: attached to and projecting perpendicular to the building from iron supports; or freestanding, either atop one pole or held gallows-style between two posts. The freestanding approach was common in outlying areas – a precursor to 20th-century service station signs. The earliest known survival (c.1830) is now inside Montgomery’s Inn at Dundas West and Islington Avenue.
Trade signs could be flat, but more often became oversized three-dimensional sculptures that Claes Oldenburg would have appreciated. The period 1850-75 saw giant padlocks, boots, cross-cut saws, and other objects placed above store entrances. So people could find these stores, city directories gave both the business name and “at the sign of the [insert object]” information. Always part of Robert Walker’s dry-goods advertisements, the Golden Lion was his alternate business name and the best-known trade sign in Victorian Toronto. His King East building actually featured two lions – one rampant, one reclining.
Text-based commercial signs projecting over the sidewalk started to appear by the late 1850s. Unlike swinging tavern signs, these were initially mounted tight to the façade on a triangular iron frame, creating a wedge-shaped profile often high up between the second and third storeys. Signs suspended lower from poles and brackets and almost reaching the curb became popular in the late 1880s.
City Council’s first sign bylaw (1857) aimed to control the encroachment of private structures on public space. Flush-mounted signs weren’t an issue, but sign posts, hanging or swinging signs, and awnings extending over sidewalks or streets now required City approval.
Who created specific signs is largely unknown, but a clear pattern is obvious: most 19th-century sign-makers were generalists. Paul Kane would become famous for painting Indigenous life in North America, but he was listed as a “Coach, Sign, and House painter” in Toronto’s first directory (1833). Following British tradition, a local sign painter might also be a grainer, glazier, glass-stainer, or paper-hanger, or identify as a fresco and banner painter or an interior decorator. Long-established sign-painting firms like George Booth & Son (founded 1853) branched out in the 1890s into illuminated-lamp and wire-screen signs. Some specialization emerged at that time for plate glass and porcelain enamelled signs.
Signs were predominantly but not exclusively wood in Victorian Toronto. A few gas-lit glass signs, mounted as lamps suspended from building frontages or set atop cast-iron sidewalk poles, appeared following the introduction of coal gas in 1841. Glass signs could be gilded, painted, or etched; shop windows saw a boom in such signs in the 1890s with the arrival of patented metallic “Brilliant Sign Letters.” Lettering also adorned fabric awnings and roller blinds. Stock letters in wood, enamelled metal, or ceramic could be cemented to fascia boards or brick walls. Often, several sign types would be featured on a single building.
Aspiring for permanency, the most durable signs were carved in stone as part of a building’s overall design. In 19th-century Toronto, most lettering was in relief, with simple type-forms projecting from the façade above the first storey. The 1876 sign on Toronto Street for “CONSUMERS’ GAS COMPANY OF TORONTO / CHAMBERS” was typical, though only the last three words now exist. Older, more ornate, and still fully intact is “ST. LAWRENCE HALL.” under the building’s central pediment (1850) on King East.
Executed by local sculptors Holbrook & Mollington, Toronto’s finest Victorian carved ornament is on Old City Hall (1899). Tangled in the sandstone bands of foliage on the east, west, and south sides are the words “CITY HALL,” “COURT HOUSE,” and “MUNICIPAL BUILDINGS.” “TORONTO” was apparently too self-evident to warrant inclusion.
Lettering incised in stone was much rarer, though some recently restored examples survive. The square-cut “MASSEY MUSIC HALL” (1894) features a curvy art nouveau type-form selected by Lillian Massey, daughter of the hall’s benefactor. “THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE” – the legend above Victoria College’s entrance (1892) – is V-cut. Overwhelmed by the building’s Richardsonian Romanesque mass, this technique was executed far better 25 years later at the neo-classical Union Station.
Unlike fully integrated carved lettering, wire screen signs floated in front of (and occasionally above) the host building. Detroit-based Barnum Wire & Iron Works developed a metal and mesh signage system in the 1870s which could be fixed to building frontages and rooftops. By 1876, a huge roof sign for R.A. Hoskins & Co. was mounted with guy wires perpendicular to Front Street East. It’s tempting to assign this work – arguably the prototype for later Toronto billboards – to E.T. Barnum. By 1883, he had a Canadian factory (in Windsor) and agent (in Toronto). That year, his firm’s “wire sign assortment” won first prize at the Toronto Industrial Fair.
Façade-mounted wire screen signs of all sizes flourished in the 1890s. Their porosity meant that windows and architectural ornament remained visible, while their affixed letters could be replaced easily. These advantages were seized in one of Toronto’s largest installations repeated along both Victoria and Adelaide East streets. The “FREEHOLD” lettering in place by 1898 above the sixth storey of the Freehold Loan Building was swapped out for “HOME LIFE” in 1901.
Until 1899, wire screen and other outdoor signs were only indirectly illuminated by street lamps and bright moonlight. That Christmas, large incandescent light bulbs forming the letters “R. SIMPSON LTD.” guided evening shoppers to Simpson’s department store on Yonge Street. The sign – seen in daytime in the 1900 edition of Fifty Glimpses of Toronto and Vicinity – was part of a downtown-wide illumination project on October 27 of that year which greeted soldiers returning from the South African War. The “WELCOME HOME” light-bulb sign at the Queen Street City Hall is the earliest known nighttime photo of an illuminated Toronto sign.
Toronto’s previous light-bulb signs were much more modest. Nothing approached the multicoloured electric “spectaculars” that flashed in New York City in the early 1890s. A few Toronto examples of boxy, sidewalk-spanning “block” signs – manufactured thick to accommodate internal wiring – first appeared in the late 1880s. Among the earliest was “DINEEN’S,” for the hat shop at Yonge and Queen. A continuous line of small light bulbs ran along the edges of the sign’s front and back; the business name on each panel side was rendered in painted or porcelain enamel. A similarly illuminated pole-mounted sign stood outside the Grand Opera House by 1890, replacing an older gas-lit glass lamp sign.
In terms of rising popularity, paper far outstripped electricity in late-century Toronto street advertising. “Bill stickers” had been listed in city directories since 1850, though the first postering business was not incorporated until 1894. Small text-heavy handbills gave way to multi-sheet pictorial posters. With many fence boards papered over by the mid-1890s, moral reformers soon raised alarms about poster graphics and messages, particularly lurid depictions of women.
Save for bills displayed outside theatres, these posters represented third-party advertising. Toronto’s commercial signs had been traditionally “first-party,” promoting the building occupant and its on-site products or services. Third-party painted-brick signs begin to appear on sidewalls in the late 1880s. The look of the city would be radically transformed in the early 20th-century by the combined attack of paint and (especially) paper, the latter enabled by massive, single-purpose billboards controlled by firms like E.L. Ruddy Co.
The increased prevalence of third-party signs would extend to projecting and roof-mounted electrical signs (tellingly both featured in a Saturday Night photo spread and regulated through a city by-law in 1910). Neon would surge in popularity in the 1920s, then be supplanted after 1960 by back-lit acrylic boxes. But while reduced in prominence, painted sidewalls, wooden signboards, and three-dimensional trade signs would not disappear entirely from the Toronto landscape.
The city’s long first century saw a shift from a low volume of simple sign forms to a profusion of signs and sign types. Once largely confined to building facades (and often obscuring them), private signs increasingly entered the public realm above sidewalks. Joined in the late 1800s by utility poles and wires, signs were part of Toronto’s growing streetscape complexity. Fans of Georgian orderliness might bemoan it as urban clutter. Late-Victorian city boosters might welcome it as evidence of local entrepreneurship and prosperity.
PHOTOS W/ CAPTIONS IN WORD DOC
If digital and sheet-vinyl represent 21st-century outdoor sign-making in Toronto, then neon and plastic typify the 20th century. Before that –
the focus here – came other materials and approaches. Over the course of the 19th century, wood, paint, and gas were augmented by metal, paper, and electricity. Text was joined by the pictorial and the sculptural. Measured restraint gave way to flamboyant abundance.
Some attention has already been paid to signs in Georgian and Victorian Toronto. In the city’s first serious work of local history, Toronto of Old (1873), Henry Scadding described no fewer than 15 early commercial signs. John Ross Robertson increased this number in his six-volume Landmarks of Toronto (1894-1914). Robertson commissioned artists to create sketches and watercolours of Toronto scenes, artwork used extensively by Edwin Guillet in the first volume of his Pioneer Inns and Taverns (1954) to depict old trade signs. While not eyewitness accounts, these illustrations have long shaped our visual sense of early Toronto.
Scadding, Robertson, and Guillet focused on swinging inn and tavern signs, seemingly inspired by Jacob Harwood and John Camden Hotten’s The History of Signboards, which was first published in England in 1866. Here, I offer a systematic review of Toronto eyewitness sources, both visual and textual, revealing broader experimentation in sign types and materials during the Victorian era that culminated with the appearance of electricity. The account ends in 1900, consistent with the conclusions reached by Charles Wagner (in The Story of Signs, 1954) and Martin Treu (in Signs, Streets, and Storefronts, 2012), who view that year as the beginning of the “modern” sign period and its increased reliance on illumination, large-scale displays, and new production technologies.
Toronto’s first documented business sign is decidedly pre-modern. A small rectangle of wood carrying the word “COOPER” – for William Cooper, proprietor – appears over the entrance to the Toronto Coffee House in the earliest known streetscape painting of York from 1803. With little architectural differentiation between scattered commercial and residential buildings in the government village, signs were crucial in identifying essential community-gathering venues like Cooper’s.
By the time Thomas Young sketched King Street in 1835, Toronto’s growth spurt had created a continuous street wall along the town’s main thoroughfare. Painted signboards carrying the name of the proprietor or the business were typically affixed flush to the fascia above the storefront and ran the full width of the shop. Repeated along the street, a unified sign band took shape. But such coherence would not last long.
As John Gillespie recorded in 1844, boards also appeared above both the second storey and the cornice line. The false-front effect of parapet signs increased the apparent bulk of the host building. These signs became more flamboyant over time. When photographed by Notman & Fraser in 1872, the Toronto Safe Works had a smaller curved board mounted atop a larger rectangular one, both adorned by spiky finials.
Some signboards were mounted at an angle to increase their readability by pedestrians. In Toronto in the Camera (1868), Octavius Thompson captured this in “GRAHAM’S / TEMPLE OF / FASHIONS,” a three-storey advert obscuring some of the architectural ornament on St. Lawrence Hall, then Toronto’s most elegant public building.
Durable lead paint was soon applied directly to building surfaces to create signs. Painted brick and fascia board signs were widespread. The earliest known photographs of Toronto (1856-57) capture “PIANOFORTE / MANUFACTORY.” and “COACH / MANUFACTORY” on two sidewalls; their dark letters are set on whitewashed bands for maximum readability. The Toronto Safe Works later repeated this linear effect, then added 13 lines of stacked text for emphasis, effectively turning the entire building into a business graphic. Lettering on clapboard siding and mansard-roof slates was rare, with notable exceptions being Freeland’s soap and candle factory on the harbour (about 1832) and the Dominion Brewery on Queen East (by 1889).
The antiquarian appeal of inn and trade signs perhaps came from their mix of text and pictures. Curious narratives emerged. Robertson described the Rescue Inn signboard (c.1850) on Front Street as follows: “The subject was the rescue of her infant by a mother from the nest of some enormous eagles in a rocky pass at the head of some apparently inaccessible mountains. How the woman had climbed the mountains was a mystery, and how she was going to descend them was even more mysterious still. But the sign served one good purpose, at any rate, and that, as far as the proprietor was concerned, was the chief one, it drew attention to the house and custom to its proprietor.”
In other cases, tavern signs could be text-heavy, adding a legend to create a primitive advertising jingle. In 1914, W.H. Pearson recalled that the sign for the Halfway House, located midway between the Toronto garrison and City Hall on Front Street, bore this legend:
Within this hive we’re all alive—
Good liquor makes us funny;
If you be dry, step in and try
The flavour of our honey.
Tavern signs, typically one-board thick, were mounted in two ways: attached to and projecting perpendicular to the building from iron supports; or freestanding, either atop one pole or held gallows-style between two posts. The freestanding approach was common in outlying areas – a precursor to 20th-century service station signs. The earliest known survival (c.1830) is now inside Montgomery’s Inn at Dundas West and Islington Avenue.
Trade signs could be flat, but more often became oversized three-dimensional sculptures that Claes Oldenburg would have appreciated. The period 1850-75 saw giant padlocks, boots, cross-cut saws, and other objects placed above store entrances. So people could find these stores, city directories gave both the business name and “at the sign of the [insert object]” information. Always part of Robert Walker’s dry-goods advertisements, the Golden Lion was his alternate business name and the best-known trade sign in Victorian Toronto. His King East building actually featured two lions – one rampant, one reclining.
Text-based commercial signs projecting over the sidewalk started to appear by the late 1850s. Unlike swinging tavern signs, these were initially mounted tight to the façade on a triangular iron frame, creating a wedge-shaped profile often high up between the second and third storeys. Signs suspended lower from poles and brackets and almost reaching the curb became popular in the late 1880s.
City Council’s first sign bylaw (1857) aimed to control the encroachment of private structures on public space. Flush-mounted signs weren’t an issue, but sign posts, hanging or swinging signs, and awnings extending over sidewalks or streets now required City approval.
Who created specific signs is largely unknown, but a clear pattern is obvious: most 19th-century sign-makers were generalists. Paul Kane would become famous for painting Indigenous life in North America, but he was listed as a “Coach, Sign, and House painter” in Toronto’s first directory (1833). Following British tradition, a local sign painter might also be a grainer, glazier, glass-stainer, or paper-hanger, or identify as a fresco and banner painter or an interior decorator. Long-established sign-painting firms like George Booth & Son (founded 1853) branched out in the 1890s into illuminated-lamp and wire-screen signs. Some specialization emerged at that time for plate glass and porcelain enamelled signs.
Signs were predominantly but not exclusively wood in Victorian Toronto. A few gas-lit glass signs, mounted as lamps suspended from building frontages or set atop cast-iron sidewalk poles, appeared following the introduction of coal gas in 1841. Glass signs could be gilded, painted, or etched; shop windows saw a boom in such signs in the 1890s with the arrival of patented metallic “Brilliant Sign Letters.” Lettering also adorned fabric awnings and roller blinds. Stock letters in wood, enamelled metal, or ceramic could be cemented to fascia boards or brick walls. Often, several sign types would be featured on a single building.
Aspiring for permanency, the most durable signs were carved in stone as part of a building’s overall design. In 19th-century Toronto, most lettering was in relief, with simple type-forms projecting from the façade above the first storey. The 1876 sign on Toronto Street for “CONSUMERS’ GAS COMPANY OF TORONTO / CHAMBERS” was typical, though only the last three words now exist. Older, more ornate, and still fully intact is “ST. LAWRENCE HALL.” under the building’s central pediment (1850) on King East.
Executed by local sculptors Holbrook & Mollington, Toronto’s finest Victorian carved ornament is on Old City Hall (1899). Tangled in the sandstone bands of foliage on the east, west, and south sides are the words “CITY HALL,” “COURT HOUSE,” and “MUNICIPAL BUILDINGS.” “TORONTO” was apparently too self-evident to warrant inclusion.
Lettering incised in stone was much rarer, though some recently restored examples survive. The square-cut “MASSEY MUSIC HALL” (1894) features a curvy art nouveau type-form selected by Lillian Massey, daughter of the hall’s benefactor. “THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE” – the legend above Victoria College’s entrance (1892) – is V-cut. Overwhelmed by the building’s Richardsonian Romanesque mass, this technique was executed far better 25 years later at the neo-classical Union Station.
Unlike fully integrated carved lettering, wire screen signs floated in front of (and occasionally above) the host building. Detroit-based Barnum Wire & Iron Works developed a metal and mesh signage system in the 1870s which could be fixed to building frontages and rooftops. By 1876, a huge roof sign for R.A. Hoskins & Co. was mounted with guy wires perpendicular to Front Street East. It’s tempting to assign this work – arguably the prototype for later Toronto billboards – to E.T. Barnum. By 1883, he had a Canadian factory (in Windsor) and agent (in Toronto). That year, his firm’s “wire sign assortment” won first prize at the Toronto Industrial Fair.
Façade-mounted wire screen signs of all sizes flourished in the 1890s. Their porosity meant that windows and architectural ornament remained visible, while their affixed letters could be replaced easily. These advantages were seized in one of Toronto’s largest installations repeated along both Victoria and Adelaide East streets. The “FREEHOLD” lettering in place by 1898 above the sixth storey of the Freehold Loan Building was swapped out for “HOME LIFE” in 1901.
Until 1899, wire screen and other outdoor signs were only indirectly illuminated by street lamps and bright moonlight. That Christmas, large incandescent light bulbs forming the letters “R. SIMPSON LTD.” guided evening shoppers to Simpson’s department store on Yonge Street. The sign – seen in daytime in the 1900 edition of Fifty Glimpses of Toronto and Vicinity – was part of a downtown-wide illumination project on October 27 of that year which greeted soldiers returning from the South African War. The “WELCOME HOME” light-bulb sign at the Queen Street City Hall is the earliest known nighttime photo of an illuminated Toronto sign.
Toronto’s previous light-bulb signs were much more modest. Nothing approached the multicoloured electric “spectaculars” that flashed in New York City in the early 1890s. A few Toronto examples of boxy, sidewalk-spanning “block” signs – manufactured thick to accommodate internal wiring – first appeared in the late 1880s. Among the earliest was “DINEEN’S,” for the hat shop at Yonge and Queen. A continuous line of small light bulbs ran along the edges of the sign’s front and back; the business name on each panel side was rendered in painted or porcelain enamel. A similarly illuminated pole-mounted sign stood outside the Grand Opera House by 1890, replacing an older gas-lit glass lamp sign.
In terms of rising popularity, paper far outstripped electricity in late-century Toronto street advertising. “Bill stickers” had been listed in city directories since 1850, though the first postering business was not incorporated until 1894. Small text-heavy handbills gave way to multi-sheet pictorial posters. With many fence boards papered over by the mid-1890s, moral reformers soon raised alarms about poster graphics and messages, particularly lurid depictions of women.
Save for bills displayed outside theatres, these posters represented third-party advertising. Toronto’s commercial signs had been traditionally “first-party,” promoting the building occupant and its on-site products or services. Third-party painted-brick signs begin to appear on sidewalls in the late 1880s. The look of the city would be radically transformed in the early 20th-century by the combined attack of paint and (especially) paper, the latter enabled by massive, single-purpose billboards controlled by firms like E.L. Ruddy Co.
The increased prevalence of third-party signs would extend to projecting and roof-mounted electrical signs (tellingly both featured in a Saturday Night photo spread and regulated through a city by-law in 1910). Neon would surge in popularity in the 1920s, then be supplanted after 1960 by back-lit acrylic boxes. But while reduced in prominence, painted sidewalls, wooden signboards, and three-dimensional trade signs would not disappear entirely from the Toronto landscape.
The city’s long first century saw a shift from a low volume of simple sign forms to a profusion of signs and sign types. Once largely confined to building facades (and often obscuring them), private signs increasingly entered the public realm above sidewalks. Joined in the late 1800s by utility poles and wires, signs were part of Toronto’s growing streetscape complexity. Fans of Georgian orderliness might bemoan it as urban clutter. Late-Victorian city boosters might welcome it as evidence of local entrepreneurship and prosperity.
PHOTOS W/ CAPTIONS IN WORD DOC