Before the days of Uber Eats or Amazon, Lois Broad, 97, fondly recalled delivery trucks rolling through the Junction — Eaton’s, Simpson’s, even ice for the family’s icebox. She may not have had a fridge growing up in 1930s Toronto, but her memories were fresh.
Thanks to Back Lane Studios, where video-making seniors bring stories to life, Broad’s recollections helped inspire Mapping Our Memories, an interactive project capturing Toronto’s past through the personal histories of older residents.
The project was created by Ellen Moorehouse, 80, a longtime community activist and former Toronto Star editor. After more than a decade volunteering at the Revue Cinema, she opened Back Lane Studios — a nonprofit media and arts space tucked away on Neepawa Avenue in Roncesvalles — in 2015. “The studio in the building which I own became vacant, so I thought I’d give it a try,” she says, sitting at the white meeting table in the centre of Back Lane’s airy space. “I bought a few properties in the days when you could buy something for $10,000 down with a take back mortgage, if you could believe it. So I’ve been really lucky. In a sense using the studio for Mapping Our Memories is my way of giving back.”
With support from an Ontario government grant and the federal New Horizons for Seniors Program, Back Lane Studios offers older adults guidance on how to turn their memories into short documentary videos. Participants learn how to conduct interviews, film with smartphones, incorporate personal and archival photos, and edit using free software — often with help from videographer Cheryl Rondeau. Dozens of films have been completed, many of them screened this past April at the Revue Cinema.
Maureen Chicorli, 72, and her 99-year-old mother, Dorie Dunne, were among those featured. “The showing at the Revue was a huge success,” Chicorli wrote via email. “My Mom and I both wanted to share our humour and history. I’m presently working on a video about James Gardens in the west end. My Mom’s great aunt and uncle owned the estate and my Mom has quite a few stories.”
For Karen Black, a former City of Toronto Museums and Heritage manager, exploring her father’s wartime memories opened new perspectives. “While I knew my Dad had lived and trained on the CNE grounds, I had no idea of the scale of the RCAF training program there and across the country and its significance to the allied victory,” she says. “My father’s stories about jitterbugging at Sunnyside didn’t seem that important, but now I see them as part of a larger national story.”
Moorehouse runs the studio largely on her own, with no full-time employees. Why does she do it? She brushes her hair back and leans forward, animated. “Broad passed away earlier this year and her memories really brought home to me how important it is to get senior’s stories before it’s too late. Our neighbourhoods are changing. We’re losing all of our history — we can’t remember what was in a certain place. The history of our neighbourhoods is so layered. You just look at some buildings, it probably had about five incarnations and now maybe it’s a residence. Every layer has stories.”
The Mapping our Memories project is collecting a lot of those stories and many of them can be viewed on the Back Lane Studios YouTube channel.
At 8 Brock Street in Parkdale — now the DJ Studio — participant Johnming Mark recalls his grandmother’s laundry business there in the 1960s. “She was an incredible lady. She couldn’t speak English and she couldn’t write Chinese. She learned how to survive … My parent’s bedroom used to be the dryer room.”
That little semi-detached house at 23 Batavia Avenue? Participant Joan Belford’s grandparents lived there during the Great Depression when the area was on the outskirts of the city. Her grandfather worked for Otto Heagle of Heintzman pianos and “used to walk to work, basically from Jane and St. Clair to Bathurst and King in order to save the 5 cent street car.” At home, hungry men who rode the rails would sometimes show up at their back door. “Granny always gave them something, regardless of the fact that she didn’t have very much.”
When the interactive map goes live, clicking on pinned Toronto locations will bring up short documentaries describing what life was like in decades past. Moorehouse hopes that once completed, the map can be shared with local historical associations and community groups to help further preserve the city’s layered past.
Despite encouraging so many others to share their stories, Moorehouse hasn’t yet told her own — perhaps due to old reporter instincts.
She grumbles wryly when asked. “I guess at some point. I guess I’ll have to.”
