Ghost of a flea

Your Home, Our City

Your Home, Our City: 100 Years of Public Control Over Private Space is a current exhibition at the City of Toronto Archives. The exhibit is a history of regulatory engagements with housing and neighbourhoods in Toronto. This may sound yawn-inducing to non-policy wonks but is actually a story of the history of this city. The fire of 1904, slum housing and health reform and the building of the Yonge subway followed by a transformation.

One photo taken by city officials of 1913 investigating slum housing haunts me (not online I am sorry to say). Children pose for their picture in a small room with jury-rigged pipes running from a stove to a basin. Cheap paper covers a work table. A girl of about 8 is surrounded by her four brothers. Her slightly older brother is a bit of thicko, one is an infant sprawled on a chair and another is so small she holds him in her arms. Her younger brother - about 5 - is smiling because he is having his picture taken. It is the look on the girl's face which has got stuck in my head. She is clearly responsible for looking after her brothers and seems to be the only one who has worked out who the men in suits are and why they are after taking pictures. This is not a family portrait but a science project for the city and it is not going to change her poverty or her prospects in the slightest.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at June 28, 2003 10:59 AM