Casa Loma: Millionaires, Medievalism, and Modernity in Toronto’s Gilded Age 9780228015673

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CASA LOMA

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History martha langford and sandra paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on nonCanadian themes will also be considered.

Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney

For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870–1930 David Monteyne

Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney

Women at the Helm How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada Diana Nemiroff

I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Kristina Huneault The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China Anthony W. Lee Tear Gas Epiphanies Protest, Culture, Museums Kirsty Robertson What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear Through Post-Atomic Eyes Edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian Jean Paul Riopelle et le mouvement automatiste François-Marc Gagnon Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Donald Winkler I Can Only Paint The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton Irene Gammel Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980 Edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw

Voluntary Detours Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta Lianne McTavish Photogenic Montreal Activisms and Archives in a Post-industrial City Edited by Martha Langford and Johanne Sloan Wendat Women’s Arts Annette W. de Stecher Unsettling Canadian Art History Edited by Erin Morton Out of School Information Art and the Toronto School of Communication Adam Lauder Jackson’s Wars A.Y. Jackson, the Birth of the Group of Seven, and the Great War Douglas Hunter Out of the Studio The Photographic Innovations of Charles and John Smeaton at Home and Abroad John Osborne and Peter Smeaton Casa Loma Millionaires, Medievalism, and Modernity in Toronto’s Gilded Age Edited by Matthew M. Reeve and Michael Windover

Edited by M AT T H E W M . R E E V E A N D M I C H A E L W I N D O V E R

CA SA LOMA

Millionaires, Medievalism, and Modernity in Toronto’s Gilded Age

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 isbn 978-0-2280-1456-0 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-1567-3 (epdf) Legal deposit third quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the Willet G. Miller Endowment Fund at Queen’s University and from Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Office of the Vice-President Research and International at Carleton University.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Casa Loma : millionaires, medievalism, and modernity in Toronto’s gilded age / edited by Matthew M. Reeve and Michael Windover. Other titles: Casa Loma (2023) Names: Reeve, Matthew M., editor. | Windover, Michael, editor. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220491968 | Canadiana (ebook) 2022049200x | isbn 9780228014560 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228015673 (epdf) Subjects: lcsh: Casa Loma (Toronto, Ont.)—History. | lcsh: Architecture, Domestic—Ontario—Toronto—History. | lcsh: Mansions—Ontario— Toronto—History. | lcsh: Historic buildings—Ontario—Toronto. | lcsh: Toronto (Ont.)—Buildings, structures, etc.—History. Classification: lcc fc3097.8.c37 c37 2023 | ddc 728.809713/541—dc23

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in Minion 11/14

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Architectural Plans ix Introduction: Casa Loma, Henry Pellatt, and the City of Toronto 3 Matthew M. Reeve and Michael Windover

1 Houses on the Ridge: Casa Loma’s Neighbours and the Elite Architecture of Davenport Ridge 32 Sean Blank and David Winterton

2 Casa Loma’s Architect: E.J. Lennox’s Architectural Practice and Its Legacy in Toronto 66 Sharon Vattay

3 The Design and Construction of Casa Loma, 1905–1913 93 Sharon Vattay

4 The Casa Loma Collections and the Sale of 1924 116 Matthew M. Reeve

contents

5 Performing Place: Ornamentalism at Casa Loma 134 Michael Windover

6 A Modern Castle: Medievalism, Chivalry, and Empire at Casa Loma 169 Matthew M. Reeve

7 “Pellatt’s Folly”: Casa Loma, 1920–1930 201 Joan Coutu

8 “Toronto’s White Elephant” and “Canada’s Famous Castle”: Casa Loma, 1930–1970 230 Joan Coutu

9 Casa Loma, 1970 to the Present 268 Marcela Torres vi

Figures 285 Bibliography 293 Contributors 309 Index 311

9 Acknowledgments

The origins of this book stretch back to the mid to late 1990s when I was a student at the University of Toronto, living within the shadow of Casa Loma. It was for me and many Torontonians a loved or hated landmark, a spectacular oddity in modern Toronto. Although my work focused on different parts of the history of architecture, Casa Loma never left my mind. It was a dominant landmark of my hometown and a key part of my own mind map of the city, along with the cn Tower, the Carlu, Trinity College, and Kensington Market. When I moved back to the city after graduate school and saw “the house on the hill” regularly again, it seemed to demand a richer and more grounded story than the clichéd boom-and-bust narrative that peppered newspapers and magazines. Because the history of Casa Loma stretches over a century and crosses the boundaries of architectural history, art history, military history, urban history, and so forth, I began by assembling a team of architects, curators, and art historians who could address aspects of its history that were far beyond my own competence. We met first in 2017 at Casa Loma to talk about what a book on the house might look like, and I then chaired a session entitled “The World of Casa Loma” at the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada in 2018 in St John’s, Newfoundland. From the beginning, this project has been a collaboration, and I am deeply indebted to

ack n ow l e d g m e n ts

the remarkable contributors to this volume for their passion, hard work, attention to detail, and patience over a long process of assembling the book (which notably coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic). I am particularly indebted to Professor Michael Windover, who kindly agreed to coedit and assemble the final book and to respond to the queries of our external reviewers. His careful work allowed the book to be much more elegantly presented than it might have been and to appear as quickly as possible after the pandemic. He deserves my fullest thanks. From its origins, funding for this project was provided by a generous Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In the course of research and writing, the authors incurred a long list of debts to institutions and individuals. We are grateful to the Archives of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Ontario, City of Toronto Archives, Liberty Entertainment Group, the Queen’s Own Rifles Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and Waddingtons in Toronto. era Architects provided staff time and expertise to prepare original mapping and to reconstruct the floor plans of the Davenport Ridge Estates. We were pleased to meet some of the descendants of Henry Pellatt, the patron of Casa Loma, and also of E.J. Lennox, its architect, and we thank them for sharing their knowledge, anecdotes, and family papers with us. Among many colleagues and friends who contributed in various ways, we are pleased to thank Neil Brochu, Kathryn Brush, Peter Coffman, Joan Crosbie, Pierre du Prey, Brian Foss, Charles Hazell, Cameron Macdonell, Alla Myzelev, Carol Payne, Dennis Reid, Christine Rivas, David Roberts, John Sewell, and Malcolm Thurlby. We are also grateful for generous contributions from Queen’s University and Carleton University, which allowed this book to be both affordable and lavishly illustrated. Finally, we thank Jonathan Crago, the editor-in-chief of McGill-Queen’s University Press, for his enduring interest in the project.

viii mat thew m. reeve Queen’s University

Plan 1 Basement Plan, Mansion for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, September 1909. Casa Loma.

Plan 2 First Floor Plan, Mansion for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, September 1909. Casa Loma.

Plan 3 Second Floor Plan, Mansion for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, September 1909. Casa Loma.

Plan 4 Third Floor Plan, Mansion for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, January 1913. Casa Loma.

Plan 5 Sections, Mansion for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, May 1910. Casa Loma.

Plan 6 East Elevation, Mansion for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, May 1910. Casa Loma.

Plan 7 West Elevation, Mansion for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, May 1910. Casa Loma.

Plan 8 North Elevation, Mansion for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, May 1910. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 417, series 2224, file 39.

Plan 9 South Elevation, Mansion for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, May 1910. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 417, series 2224, file 39.

CASA LOMA

INTRODUCTION Casa Loma, Sir Henry Pellatt, and the City of Toronto matthew m. reeve and michael windover

Set atop Davenport Ridge, looming over the city of Toronto, Casa Loma has always been a spectacle. From its beginnings as an extraordinarily large house situated in a designed landscape of medievalizing stables, large greenhouses, and workers’ accommodations, to a short-lived elite hotel in the roaring twenties, to a popular tourist attraction and setting for films and television productions,1 the site has continually fascinated Torontonians and visitors from further afield. The picturesque “House on the Hill” (as its name, Casa Loma, translates) seems to haunt the city. It appeared to contradict the chaste image of Toronto the Good when it was built in the early twentieth century, and it has retained this contradictory character in one way or another ever since. And yet, there it sits, a relic of the Gilded Age and a signifier of the wealth and flamboyance of its patron, the financier, industrialist, and real-estate tycoon Sir Henry Pellatt (1859–1939). Perhaps most troubling for some is the fact that this loathed and loved landmark reveals important aspects of the city of Toronto and its experience of modernity. A 1915 photograph looking north up Spadina Road (fig. 0.1) juxtaposes the distant, almost spectral Casa Loma with seemingly mundane elements of urban everyday life. The commercial and industrial are signalled by the presence of the billboard on the left and the R. Laidlaw sign on the right, efficient transportation by the rail bridge over the Spadina Road subway bisecting the photograph, and

Figure 0.1 Opposite Spadina Road, Dupont Road Subway looking north, 23 March 1915.

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modern utilities by the electric streetlamp attached to the post on the right. The image reminds us that while the medievalist castle appears to stand apart from modern urbanity, it was very much the product of this world. In fact, it was built with the wealth that Pellatt accumulated through his involvement in Toronto’s burgeoning financial sector downtown as well as the infrastructure (including, notably, electricity) and real-estate development. While its prodigious size, made all the more impressive by its situation on Davenport Ridge, sets it apart from other houses of the city’s plutocrats, it nonetheless represented general trends in elite regimes of taste. Pellatt hired one of the highest-profile architects in the city at the time, E.J. Lennox (1854–1933), to design all of the buildings on his urban estate in a manner aesthetically in keeping with others interested in alluding to “Britishness” in Toronto and across the country and empire. The castle’s I-shaped plan resulted from a functional approach to design (fig. 0.2). Visitors entered from a portecochère at the centre of the building’s north side, then travelled either west to the more informal billiards and smoking rooms or south to the Great Hall (fig. 0.3), which was connected enfilade to the drawing room to the west and library and then dining room to the east (fig. 0.4); or they could follow the groin-vaulted corridor (fig. 0.5) eastward to Pellatt’s intimate office or toward the glow of the Palm Room (fig. 0.6). Beneath the wood panelling and fashionable period décor, Lennox employed the latest in concrete construction and plumbing, and illuminating the fine plasterwork, woodwork, and vast collection of artwork and antiques were hundreds of electric lights. An elevator was also included to assist the ailing Lady Pellatt (1857–1924). In these respects, the house emblemized Edwardian Toronto: progressive technologies, Old World associations, and an incredible accumulation of wealth in the hands of business leaders, industrialists, and financiers. But Casa Loma was never fully realized. Before the Great Hall, the guest suites (meant to host aristocracy) on the second and third floor, and the indoor swimming pool and bowling alley in the basement were completed (plan 1), Pellatt would be forced to sell the house, its furnishings, and art collection in a highly public sale in 1924. In this, Casa Loma is not atypical of many Gilded Age mansions to which it can be compared. Also typical of this category of elite home, it is now neither in elite hands nor a home. It is a tourist attraction that welcomes tens of thousands of visitors a year, the site of a sleek restaurant patronized by hip hop artists and fashionistas (fig. 9.4), and a venue for weddings and corporate events.

Figure 0.2 Ground floor plan, Casa Loma.

Figure 0.3 Right Great Hall with view towards balcony off Sir Henry Pellatt’s bedroom, ca. 2001 Figure 0.4 Opposite Dining room, Casa Loma, ca. 1914.

6 Thus, Casa Loma is deservedly understood as a major landmark of Toronto, a vestige of the city’s colourful and turbulent past, and of course a sign of how this heritage has been appreciated by the city and its bureaucracy as its protectors. Despite this, and despite a wealth of recent literature on the historical art, architecture, and artifacts of Toronto, Casa Loma has received little scholarly attention.2 As products of North America’s Gilded Age, both the house and its patron have been easily (and, to some extent, not unfairly) explained via a narrative of

Introduction

boom and bust. As a result, Casa Loma and Pellatt have been obfuscated by the two-dimensional clichés and moralizing narratives that define the period generally. Where the house has featured within the historiography of Canadian architecture, its reception has been mixed at best. The house’s sheer size, lavishness, and extravagance have ruffled many feathers and affronted the sensibilities of its critics. For Eric Arthur, University of Toronto professor of architecture, “Casa Loma is something hard to live down”; it has been described as the building Torontonians love to hate.3 Its stylistic hybridity or perhaps indeterminacy – being a building that refers freely to a grand tradition of European architecture from the Middle Ages

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Figure 0.5 Ground floor corridor, Casa Loma, view west, ca. 1914.

onward rather than adhering to any single style or idiom – has likewise not met with acclaim. One critic in the centennial year of Canadian Confederation (1967) flippantly called Casa Loma “a mixture of 17th century Scotch Baronial and 20th Century Fox,”4 a sentiment echoed by many other critics. More damagingly, it has not, with a few notable exceptions, garnered serious critique as a work of architecture in and of itself.5 Harold Kalman’s magisterial two-volume A History of Canadian Architecture describes it in a single sentence as a “mammoth” and briskly proceeds to explore Lennox’s power station in depth.6 Often considered the most un-Canadian building in Canada – a logical

Introduction

Figure 0.6 Palm Room conservatory, Casa Loma, 8 September 2020.

impossibility, but one that is very telling – Casa Loma has also been explained or rather sidelined as an American building of the Gilded Age transplanted onto Canadian soil, a vulgar, Americanized pile imposing itself upon Toronto the Good. In its sheer scale and overt opulence, Casa Loma posed a challenge to the Protestant sensibilities of English Canadians who advocated adherence to a mode of aesthetic moderation.7 But these attitudes are one reason why Casa Loma remains a vital subject. The house and Henry Pellatt seem to bear many of our anxieties as a nation about ourselves and about how we define ourselves as a neighbour to the United States and a former colony of the British Empire. The connection to empire is particularly important in a consideration of Casa Loma, as we will see, but just as it has not figured in studies of elite North American domestic architecture of the early twentieth century, so too has it been largely ignored in accounts of the architectural history of the British Empire.8 What is Casa Loma’s place in the history of architecture? What does it tell us about the experience of modernity in Toronto through the twentieth century? These are the central questions of this book. Before introducing the essays in this

9

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volume (all of which address these questions from different perspectives), we should introduce Pellatt as the central protagonist of our story and Toronto as its setting.

h e n ry pe l l at t

10

Henry Mill Pellatt (fig. 0.7) was born on 6 January 1859 in Kingston, Canada West, the eldest son of Henry Pellatt and Emma Mary Holland. Hailing from London, England, Pellatt Sr was a banker with the Bank of British North America and the Bank of Upper Canada before he relocated the family to Toronto when young Henry was still a boy.9 There, Pellatt Sr started the firm Pellatt and Osler and joined the Stock Exchange Association in 1871. Pellatt Jr would eventually follow in his father’s footsteps. As a youth, however, athletics rather than commerce or education dominated his life. He won a long list of running races and ultimately the Dominion Mile in 1878. These years also witnessed the origins of soldiering as one of his passions. In 1876, he enlisted in the Second Battalion of the Queen’s Own Rifles (qor) and became proficient in shooting. The qor has been called “a socially oriented cauldron of militia politics,” serving not only as a functional militia but also as an elite club through which young men in Toronto could advance outside the regiment through associations with fellow members.10 Although soldiering was a lifelong passion for Pellatt, he would never see battle. Seemingly neither a scholar nor an avid reader, he spent just three months at Upper Canada College before leaving to apprentice at his father’s firm. When Osler left the partnership in 1882, Pellatt Jr took his place, creating Pellatt and Pellatt, and the junior Pellatt took control of the firm when his father retired in 1892. A rising star in Toronto’s financial and social world, Pellatt attended events such as Oscar Wilde’s lectures on aesthetics in Toronto in 1882 and hosted Wilde after his lectures.11 In May of that year, he married Mary Dodgson (fig. 0.8), and they would honeymoon in Europe and soon move to a house on fashionable Sherbourne Street. Variously considered brilliant, audacious, opportunistic, or unscrupulous, Pellatt had good instincts both as an investor and as a social climber. He became secretary of the Toronto Electric Light Company (telc) in 1883 and eventually president of the company, which secured the contract to lay under-

Figure 0.7 Left Sir Edmund Wyly Grier, Brigadier General Sir Henry M. Pellatt, CVO – Eighth Commanding Officer, 1901–1912 and Honorary Colonel, 1929–1939. Oil on canvas, 43” x 30”. Figure 0.8 Above The Pellatts in the logia of Casa Loma, looking onto its grounds.

ground wiring for Toronto. He also moved quickly into property development, insurance, and mining. His rise as a leading industrialist saw him placed on many of Toronto’s corporate boards, including the directorship of Dominion Telegraph (1895), the Toronto Railway, the Hamilton Electric Light and Power, and the Crow’s Nest Pass Railway. Pellatt’s role within the Queen’s Own Rifles likewise expanded in these years. He was efficient in climbing the militia’s ranks, becoming provisional lieutenant in 1879, lieutenant in the following year, captain in 1883, brevet major in 1893, and major in 1895. In 1897 he went to London with the qor for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee and led the colonial guard of honour at St Paul’s Cathedral. He would not, however, be among the qor who volunteered for the South African War, although his brother, Frederick Mill Pellatt, served there in 1901–02. In March 1901, Henry Pellatt became the qor’s commanding officer and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. In October of that year, he would also be responsible for assembling and presenting eleven thousand soldiers to the Duke of Cornwall on

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Toronto’s exhibition grounds. In 1905, Pellatt was made an honorary aide-de-camp to Governor General Lord Grey and subsequently granted a knighthood, an honour he had been manoeuvring toward for some time. Achieving a knighthood was manifestly a profound honour for him – what he understood to be a well-earned apotheosis – as was testified by the countless notes of congratulations that he kept for his entire life.12 The first decade of the twentieth century would see Pellatt at his most energetic and enterprising. Significantly for our purposes, the decade would see him purchase lands atop Toronto’s Davenport Ridge and begin construction on Casa Loma (as well as on his country estate at Marylake, King City). Pellatt’s major coup at that time was his role in bringing hydroelectric power to Toronto from Niagara Falls. As one later biographer commented, “To him must go credit for pioneering Canada’s use of the water thundering over Niagara Falls and bringing electric lamps to the gas-lit streets of Toronto and to homes which had largely known only kerosene and candles.”13 Pellatt formed the Electrical Development Company of Ontario in late 1902 and signed an agreement to provide power to the province in January 1903. This feat was made possible by the Croatian-born scientist Nikola Tesla, who developed the alternating current for Westinghouse, thus enabling current to be transmitted over long distances. Harnessing power from Niagara Falls amounted to one of the more significant engineering projects of the period, and it was worthy of a significant architectural statement. In 1903 Pellatt hired Lennox to design the Niagara Power Station (begun May 1906). Shortly thereafter, in January 1905, Pellatt also engaged Lennox to prepare designs for “a mansion on Wells Hill,” the house that would soon be called Casa Loma. Pellatt’s and Lennox’s first work at Casa Loma – the cottages, garden buildings, and extraordinary stable block in particular, discussed by Sharon Vattay in chapter 3 – was complete by 1906 (figs. 0.9 and 0.10). This may seem a tentative, even lukewarm, beginning for the estate, but the scale and grandeur of the stables indicate that it represented a sizable toehold for a still-developing plan. Indeed, picture postcards of the stables and grounds circulated before the main building was complete (fig. 3.2). Plans for the house were made public, and one newspaper reported in 1905, “Manifestly social conditions are changing in Canada and the plutocrat is with us at last.”14 Lennox prepared a number of drawings of the house over the next years, but the project to build Casa Loma was delayed until 1909. By

Introduction

December of that year, having clearly signed off on Lennox’s final designs for the house, Pellatt applied for a building permit from the city. The design and construction of Casa Loma were concurrent with the rise and prominence of Pellatt in Toronto and abroad. One of two signal events of 1910 was the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the qor in Toronto. With the dual aim of celebrating his family and the regiment, on 18 June, Pellatt threw a lavish garden party, largely self-financed, at the Industrial Exhibition Grounds (now called the Canadian National Exhibition, or cne). Carlie Oreskovich has recounted that “eight men attired in red English Beefeater uniforms took up their positions as

Figure 0.9 Lady Pellatt, Sir Henry, their son, Reginald, and his wife, Marjorie, are served by a maid outside the hunting lodge, ca. 1911.

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guards to Sir Henry and Lady Mary Pellatt who stood under a striped marquee to receive the first arrivals … 4000 people had turned out to be personally greeted by Sir Henry and Lady Mary Pellatt and share in the tea and desserts. The beaming host and hostess ‘held court’ amongst palms, chairs, and rugs carefully arranged under the scarlet and white canopy.”15 Typical of both Pellatt and the politics of the qor, the ceremonies emphasized Canada’s connection with empire: four hundred children dressed in red, white, and blue were arranged to form a Union Jack. The dark side of empire was also on display: hired for the event were numerous First Nations Mohawk actors or “red men” from Brantford, who performed a “war dance,” re-enacted the death of Tecumseh, and “crowned” Pellatt with a headdress, naming him “Chief Tawyunansara” (fig. 0.11).16 That same year, Pellatt financed the transportation of the entire six-hundredman regiment (including its horses) to Aldershot in England for military training

Figure 0.10 Opposite Members of the Ontario Horticultural Association pose in front of Casa Loma stables, ca. 1906–1914. Figure 0.11 Left Sir Henry Pellatt in Queen’s Own Rifles uniform and Mohawk clothing, CNE Grandstand, June 1910.

to mark the regiment’s fiftieth anniversary. The military exercises lasted from 13 August to 3 October 1910 and resulted in a personal invitation from the newly crowned George V for Pellatt to visit Balmoral Castle.17 This event was immensely important for Sir Henry. It not only signified recognition of his service to the Canadian militia abroad but also meant a new point of entry into the monarchy via a newly crowned king. Further military orders followed. Pellatt was made a commander of the Royal Victorian Order (cvo) in 1910, a knight of grace by the Order of St John of Jerusalem in England, and from 1911 to 1923, knight principal of the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor. Pellatt and Lennox were actively engaged with Casa Loma between 1909 and 1914, but the tide of fortune was turning upon Pellatt. As a result, his home would never be finished. The recession of 1913 took its toll; the City of Toronto also reassessed Casa Loma at five times its value from $50,000 to $250,000, increasing

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taxes on the property substantially. Pellatt’s fortune was at the time variously estimated as between $3 million and $17 million, and it was speculated that he had spent between $1 million and $3.5 million on the house to that date.18 In the proceedings that followed, it was widely asserted that, although several Canadian millionaires would be able to purchase the house, the sheer cost of its maintenance rendered it unaffordable, and valuations tended to fall well below Pellatt’s costs for it. Pellatt replied that it was a hobby – a pastime – and that it should be taxed accordingly. Such appeals fell for the most part on deaf ears. In Oreskovich’s words, “What had begun as an innocent and fanciful creation, a romantic interlude in the typical architecture of the day, was now being seen as a colossal financial miscalculation.”19 The financial and social realities of the First World War made the house seem even more gaudy and indecorous. To make matters worse, the financial upturn that Pellatt broadly expected after the war did not materialize. He had in fact leveraged himself in various ways in the period between 1910 and 1915 – including substantial debts to the Home Bank of Canada – and many of his investments were tanking, leaving him facing bankruptcy. The years between 1915 and 1924 therefore saw him in a period of decline. Now a man in his sixties, he was no longer able to pursue his somewhat farcical military career, and he was sidelined to the reserves. Furthermore, a series of financial engagements went sour, and his future looked bleak. His public image transformed from that of an avaricious and opportunistic financier to “a benign but blustering buffoon, a man who was not in fact malicious but dangerous – because he was fighting for survival.”20 In a deft move, Pellatt agreed to restructure his holdings in 1923, thus signing his property and stock investments over to the Home Bank. But this was too little, too late: one month later, the Home Bank would close its doors forever. Pellatt’s move was shrewd because it meant that his creditors could not sue him for their losses. In 1924, one chapter of our story (and Pellatt’s) came to an end. In April of that year, Lady Pellatt died, and in June, Sir Henry needed to rid himself of Casa Loma and its contents. The house was already falling into disrepair and had not even been heated the previous winter due to a lack of funds. He staged a four-day auction of the contents of Casa Loma via Jenkins auctioneers in Toronto. The event became a public spectacle, the details of which can still be followed in the newspaper accounts. The sale and the later history of the house are recounted in chapters 4, 7, 8, and 9.

Introduction

Although Pellatt would remarry in 1927, wedding Catherine Welland Merrit, their marriage would be brief; Catherine died in December 1929. The succeeding years saw infighting among the Pellatts over Henry’s handling of his father’s estate, some of which he skimmed to pay his own creditors. The last years of his life were thus tragic, and his friends and close family were few. In the final year of his life, he lived with his chauffeur’s family in a rented house in Mimico, often sleeping in front of the fireplace. Pellatt’s death in 1939 was widely reported in the papers, and then as now, it chimed with the narratives of the Gilded Age as a boom and bust. The Evening Telegram reported, “Casa Loma on the hill stands as a monument to the instability of the late Sir Henry’s wealth. It is the permanent expression of an ambition in which he failed. It is a commentary in stone of the mutability of human fortunes.”21 A year earlier, by which time the Kiwanis Club was operating the house, the seventy-eight-year-old Pellatt offered a more conciliatory view (fig. 0.12): “I have had a great deal of pleasure out of this place, far more than any man is entitled to, and certainly a great deal more pleasure out of it than any pain it has cost me. I am happy I built it. It cost me nothing.”22 These two passages tell us much about the various meanings of the house, about its constant framing and reframing as a mansion and a historical building. They offer us two very different versions of the truth. It is a convenient cliché to suggest that Pellatt had seen his downfall coming, or at least that he was aware of a series of fatal flaws in his character that would precipitate it. Yet a document of 1900 suggests just this. Preserved in the Archives of Ontario is a horoscope by the medium W.W. Kenilworth, predicting that “the best years of your life will be from 1911 to 1918 and from 1920 to 1926, during which periods you will have a great many big gains and very few failures, but beyond the year 1926 you should give up everything of a financial nature, as beyond that tie there is no possible chance for gain. The year 1919 will be a very complex year for you and you should be careful of your holdings.”23 It is haunting how accurate at least the first part of this account is and how little of its advice Pellatt heeded. Ultimately, Pellatt’s character remains in many respects elusive. A prominent man in his day and one who took many risks, he was flamboyant and overtly opulent in a city that distained excess. He also sought singular mastery over the many fields in which he engaged. Consequently, he was destined to be rather backhandedly received by his critics. On the one hand, the Toronto-based and the national newspapers teem with articles that ridicule Pellatt and celebrate his fall from wealth

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Figure 0.12 Pellatt revisiting Casa Loma in 1937.

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and status. Many of the chapters in this volume draw upon them. On the other hand, a 1912 essay by journalist and art critic Newton MacTavish in the Canadian Magazine is an encomium on Pellatt as a leading philanthropist, builder, financier, and soldier.24 MacTavish presented Pellatt in the guise of the epic hero. An exceptional man in every respect, MacTavish’s Pellatt was precociously brilliant and insightful and, as such, misunderstood by his contemporaries from whom he hid his true qualities (“his light under a bushel”25) until he was called upon to stand and lead. MacTavish’s point of reference here is, remarkably enough, a Christian parable: “You are the light of the world. A city located on a hill can’t be hidden.”26

Introduction

Such hagiographies or puff pieces were intended to celebrate Pellatt’s role in Canadian society, and MacTavish’s essay specifically appeared on the heels of Pellatt’s successful trip to England with the Queen’s Own Rifles. Pellatt’s own anglophilia and Anglo-Saxonism, his attempt to ally himself and his city with the empire, and his self-fashioning as an Anglo-Canadian aristocrat in a grand medievalist mansion atop Davenport Ridge now strike us as distasteful, un-Canadian, and overtly colonial in a culture that is overtly postcolonial in outlook. While Pellatt’s anglophilia was not universally lauded, it did receive considerable praise during his lifetime. W.R. Lawson’s Canada and the Empire devoted several pages to Pellatt and his trip to Aldershot in 1910, which Lawson promoted as a grandiloquent statement of respect for the empire and a repositioning of Canada as “the seed of a new imperial movement,” and Pellatt as “the keystone of the Imperial arch.” Lawson went further, praising Pellatt’s enterprise as an antidote to “political luke-warmness and discouragement.”27 Pellatt’s anglophilia and commitment to empire had at least two parallel agendas: one was surely personal arrivisme, a horsey form of class-based chivalry; another was a legitimate attempt to position Canada at the centre of a vast empire and to endow Toronto with all the amenities that suited such a position.

building toronto’s g ilded age Casa Loma was built within a vibrant urban architectural culture. If Toronto around 1890 could be described as “a gritty, somewhat higgledy-piggledy place,”28 the city of 1920 was quickly developing into a leading metropolis of North America. In the decade between 1901 and 1911, the city’s population increased from 208,000 to 376,000, and the value of annually issued building permits rocketed from $3.5 million to $24 million.29 By 1899, Toronto’s Architectural Eighteen Club had been established, a parallel of sorts to the Art Workers’ Guild and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in England; with its Beaux Arts sympathies, it sought to emphasize the aesthetic over the bureaucratic aspects of architectural practice. But the Architectural Eighteen Club was preceded by numerous associations, societies, and schools, including the University of Toronto School of Architecture (1890) and the Toronto Guild of Civic Art (1897), that centred on the role of architecture in

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the growing city. These organizations were manifestations of a concerted interest in architecture and the architectural profession, all of which formed and developed through the clubbable world of Toronto’s elite. Shortly thereafter, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (1907), the Arts and Letters Club (1908), the Toronto Civic Improvement Committee (1911), and the University of Toronto Architectural Club (1911) all developed. Formed during the era of the social and artistic manifesto, these associations were intellectual hothouses, serving to generate new initiatives and agendas for the developing city and nation. Significantly, they also allowed art and business to rub elbows. Toronto’s architectural culture around 1900 was oriented principally toward Great Britain and the United States, and particularly toward Chicago (which had housed the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893) and New York City. The bifurcated nature of British and American architectural and cultural influence on Canada has allowed David Winterton to call the architecture of Edwardian Toronto “a New World hybrid.”30 Pellatt’s chosen architect, E.J. Lennox, would be a significant figure in disseminating the Romanesque Revival designs of the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson throughout Canada, notably in his extraordinary City Hall at Queen and Bay Streets, completed in 1899 (see chapter 2). A 1901 stereoscopic view of an arch erected across Bay Street at Richmond Street to celebrate the royal tour of the future King George V nicely encapsulates this mix of influences, with George W. Gouinlock’s Chicago-inspired, twelve-storey Temple Building on the left and Lennox’s City Hall clock tower providing the architectural backdrop to the imperialist pageantry (fig. 0.13). In this image, Toronto announces its strong ties to and unique place within the British Empire on the one hand while proclaiming its commercial connections to the geographically proximate and burgeoning cities of the United States on the other. This duality also articulated anxieties about the very future of Canada in the early twentieth century: Would the country develop to become the dominant player among Britain’s colonies (something Pellatt actively promoted), or would it hitch its wagon to American capitalism as an independent and resource-rich partner with the United States?31 Such ideas naturally inflected writing on architecture. As Winterton points out, an editorial from the British periodical The Builder, reprinted in the Toronto-based Construction in 1912, advocated that all cities in British dominions should cultivate a common imperial character: “An empire can nurse no finer ideal than the cohesion of its dominions and cities erected in one style of architecture recognized

throughout the world as the expression of its own imperial ideals.” But the essay also indicated that Canadian architects were vulnerable to anti-imperial tendencies: “When Great Britain is incapable of setting an example of architectural achievement to her dependencies other nations more virile will slowly but surely take advantage of her relapse … and bring about an imperial disaffection … In Canada today there are but too evident tendencies to an appropriation of American ideals and methods of expression not entirely to be attributed to the natural influence of Cosmopolitanism and opposed to imperialistic ideals.”32 There is of course little doubt where Pellatt’s sympathies lay. Casa Loma was understood by some to be a revival of an imperial movement, a decidedly British emblem of empire in Toronto, although it was one fully apprised of modern technological developments in both Canada and the United States. A dominant question of Canadian architectural discourse in the early years of the twentieth century was, “Could an authentic Canadian culture develop that was nourished as much by the brash energy exploiting the hinterland of the quickly modernizing country as by the cultural and professional ties to Great Britain, and less overtly to the United States?”33 The search for a national expression in the arts already had parallels in painting, notably in the contemporary work of the Group of Seven, and it would

Figure 0.13 View of arch on Bay Street, Toronto, celebrating royal visit of the future King George V. Stereograph, M.H. Zahner, 1901.

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define much of the artistic output of the nation in the years up to the centenary of Confederation in 1967. If anxieties over the city’s ethnic and geographical allegiances were one debate that defined art and architecture in Toronto, the tension between conservative and progressive identity politics was another. From the mid-nineteenth to the midtwentieth century, Toronto was dominated by the Orange Order, the stridently sectarian Protestant fraternity founded in Ulster at the end of the eighteenth century. Originally composed primarily of labourers with a penchant for riotous rebellion, the order gained a foothold in the protean environment of early Toronto in the 1830s, rubbing up against the elitist Family Compact. As the city rapidly grew, so too did the order, nimbly enveloping almost all Protestant denominations in the city – Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, even Lutherans and Italian Protestants – and transcending all levels of society. In addition to the labouring, mercantile, and clerking classes, successful commercial entrepreneurs, industrialists, and professionals proudly called themselves Orangemen. The municipal government was also suffused with and controlled by Orangemen – all of Toronto’s mayors were Orangemen from 1836 until 1955 – and the values of Orangeism came to define the public face of the city. Toronto was known as the Belfast of Canada, and its demeanour was a package of trenchant British imperialism, hard work, clean living, and temperance-loving, public-spirited civic-mindedness. For those who might not have been so fiercely Ulster, these values and patriotic zeal also aligned with, for example, the Methodist propensity for self-abnegation or Anglican high-minded philanthropy.34 Within such straitlaced identity politics, excess was regarded with distrust. On one hand, it epitomized the mystical sensualities of Roman Catholicism, the consensual nemesis of all Protestant sectarianism; on the other, it alluded to a kind of self-indulgent elitism. This mixed perspective provides the context for several critiques of architecture in the burgeoning city. In his classic book The Sense of Power, Carl Berger quoted traditionalists like Col. George Taylor Denison, who looked at the excesses of Toronto’s nouveaux riches with the disdain of a long-landed aristocrat. Denison very likely had the highly visible spectacle of the rising Casa Loma in mind when he opined in 1911, “Parvenus are as plentiful as blackberries and the vulgar ostentation of the common rich is not a pretty sight.”35 A public display of wealth and status such as Casa Loma was chaffing for the disgruntled labourer and small-scale merchant; more significantly, it was distasteful for the higher-placed

Introduction

administrators, professionals, and entrepreneurs who were the prudish arbiters of Toronto the Good. Although Pellatt was as Protestant as any Orangeman, and his staunch imperialism was beyond reproach, his ostentatious lifestyle was disquieting for the mainstream bourgeoisie at municipal, provincial, and often national levels. As such, his extravagant castle was almost unconscionable. The ornate, crenellated confection on the crest of the hill and the life that went on inside it were utterly alien to Toronto. In Michel Foucault’s terms, Casa Loma was a heterotopic space, an alternate reality that profoundly disrupted the stolid city spread out below it.36 Beside such ideological concerns, pragmatic issues shaped Toronto in these years. One significant impetus for urban development was the Great Fire of 1904, which broke out in a factory near the corner of Wellington and Bay Streets. Brief but devastating, it cleared about twenty acres on both sides of Bay Street down to the Esplanade. Essentially gutting the financial core of the city, the fire offered an opportunity to reimagine Toronto’s corporate heart along the lines of Chicago and New York City. Thus, many of the skyscrapers that would define the downtown core were created in the years between 1905 (through the 1913 recession) and the First World War in 1914, among them the Traders Bank Building (1906), the Lumsden Building (1910), the Canadian Pacific Railway Building (1913), and the Dominion Bank Building (1914).37 A 1910 postcard proudly boasts the Traders Bank Building’s status as “The Highest Commercial Building in the British Empire,” again reinforcing Toronto’s place as a progressive North American metropolis within an established global, imperial economy (fig. 0.14). Although it was located on Davenport Ridge in the city’s northern expanse and thus completely untouched by the 1904 fire, Casa Loma enjoyed a place within this grand rebuilding. The elite homes on that ridge bordered the eastern end of the Arts and Crafts suburb Wychwood Park, created by Eden Smith. Following the fire, plans for the city’s redevelopment were quickly produced, influenced by the City Beautiful movement first advanced in Chicago with the World’s Columbian Exposition. The movement intended to use urban political and economic structures to create beautiful, spacious, orderly cities with healthy open spaces and gardens, demolishing or reforming slums or working-class areas and showcasing public buildings that articulated the moral values of the city.38 In 1905, the Toronto Guild of Civic Art put forward a sophisticated planning strategy for the city, Proposed Improvements for the City of Toronto. In 1909, the guild proposed a grander scheme designed by architect W.A. Langton that improved

Figure 0.14 Postcard of Traders Bank Building, Toronto. Warwick Bros. & Rutter, 1910.

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transportation and included a system of public parks, playgrounds, and other amenities to the city’s waterfront.39 Toronto City Council then established a civic improvement committee to examine the proposals, some containing deeply insightful and elegant changes to the city. As a major patron of architecture in the city, Pellatt attended the Association of Architects’ meetings and contributed to discussions of urban planning and beautification. But, typical of city bureaucracy, the council deemed this vision of a City Beautiful too ambitious, too modern, and just too expensive and difficult. Practical concerns weighed more heavily on the minds of Toronto’s bureaucrats, and the City Scientific replaced the City Beautiful. To cite James Lemon, these grand ideals would be “lost in management.”40 Such thinking – conservative and “nimbyist” versus progressive and idealistic – would likewise colour Casa Loma’s history, from the time of Pellatt’s ownership through to the city’s involvement in its past, right up to the present day.

iconicit y of casa loma

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Casa Loma’s history is that of its city during the twentieth century and, to a lesser extent, of its nation. It is one of many buildings that define Toronto’s urban topography and iconography, including the cn Tower, New City Hall, Royal York Hotel, and Sky Dome, to name only a few. In this it occupies a privileged place in the Canadian imagination: it is what the English would call a national treasure, a building that has constructed and continues to reflexively construct its own city. Accordingly, it features centrally in the very iconography of Toronto, from its tourist brochures and other advertising to representations of the house on tea towels, coffee mugs, and other commodified simulacra (see chapter 8), not to mention children’s books and a 2014 commemorative coin issued by the Royal Canadian Mint featuring Robert McCausland’s stunning stained-glass designs for the dome in Casa Loma’s conservatory.41 The iconicity of Casa Loma, fuelled by these kinds of representation, provides important evidence of its life in the culture and society of Toronto. Such representations also influenced the evolution of the site itself, especially in the postPellatt days. As Joan Coutu notes in chapter 8, for example, a radio broadcast from the castle in 1937 helped ignite interest in the then-dilapidated mansion at a crucial moment when its fate as a charity-run tourist site was not yet confirmed. In other words, the virtual life of the building affected its material existence.

The process by which Casa Loma became miniaturized, reproduced, and commodified as part of Toronto’s tourist economy and as quasi-public building for the citizens of Toronto began early. Indeed, its virtual existence in newspaper reports and picture postcards predated the Pellatts’ move into the castle. We can also point to the Cobalt silver statue of Casa Loma made by William Nassau McKendry around 1915 and displayed at the Applied Arts Building in Toronto (fig. 0.15). The citizenry and politicians of Toronto allowed Pellatt and Lennox to build Casa Loma and then, no doubt influenced by the representations of the unique space, if not actual experience with the site, ushered it through its many afterlives as a hotel, tourist attraction, and entertainment centre (fig. 0.16). The iconicity of Casa Loma is in some ways bound to nostalgia and myth. As chapters 5 and 6 further discuss, the Pellatts’ desire to create a romantic space filled with the imported mores of British aristocracy (both literally and figuratively) was itself fuelled by nostalgia. The site’s nostalgic quality was transformed after the unfinished castle was stripped of its furnishings and became forever afterward a kind of relic, a magical space of fantasy projection, where visitors could imagine a life that could have been, yet can never be again (and probably never was). For its visitors, and for the citizens of Toronto in particular, Casa Loma is a site of collective memory.42 Over the years, it has served as a site for dances, a popular place to visit for school groups and children’s activities (e.g., over Christmas), and as an event space for weddings, musical performances, and other such activities. Despite its seeming exclusivity and elite status under the Pellatts’ ownership and then as a hotel, it has become a place of pride for some and a site of public culture. The very

Figure 0.15 Left William Nassau McKendry, Cobalt silver statue of Casa Loma, ca. 1915. Figure 0.16 Right Passengers exiting sightseeing bus at Casa Loma, 1962.

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fact that it was run for most of its life by a local service club (the Toronto West Kiwanis Club, later known as the Kiwanis Club of Casa Loma), and that while it was occupied by the Pellatts it served as a site for other civic-minded activities (see chapters 5 and 8), only underlines its connection to a broader Toronto community. Another example of its embeddedness in Toronto, reaffirming and adding to its iconicity, was the $1.5 million campaign in 1987 to renovate the gardens (fig. 0.17).43 The substantial work on the grounds resulted from engagement with, among others, amateur gardeners from the Garden Club of Toronto. As the Toronto Star reported, a cadre of twenty-four members of the club worked with professionals over five years to rehabilitate the Pellatts’ gardens, which after sixty years of neglect had become “a jungle.” That so many would volunteer time and donate about “a third of the thousands of plants” required points to the significance of Casa Loma in the Toronto community. Local interest in the grounds and gardens goes back to Casa Loma’s inception (recall fig. 0.10), and, in the end, the renovation efforts enhanced the experience of visiting the heritage site. Again, the feedback loop of mediation – whether in the press, through tourist objects, or personal photos – reaffirms interest and investment (of time, money, and material) in the site, prompting more local engagement, and, in essence, marking Casa Loma as a site of desire and collective attachment. As Mark Kingwell reminds us, “‘icon,’ like ‘commodity,’ is not another word for thing but another word for relationship.”44 In exploring Casa Loma, we are investigating ways that its relationships with people, objects, and ideologies made it a Toronto icon.

the scope of this study 26

This book represents the first concerted attempt to explore Casa Loma’s history from about 1905 when Lennox made his earliest drawings for the stables and outbuildings to the present. It aims to provide an architectural and social history of Casa Loma and to set that history within a wider urban and occasionally national and international context. As a nexus point for various arguments about colonial power, adherence to Canada’s British roots, pro- or anti-Americanism, medievalism, and social class, the story of Casa Loma can inform considerations of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity.

Figure 0.17 Jim Foster, “Garden’s Glory to Bloom Again at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 27 June 1988.

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Before introducing the chapters, we should address two significant problems that confront historians who explore the history of the site and its patron. The first relates to Pellatt himself. Much of our knowledge of him comes from newspaper reports, financial and court records, and slanted celebrity gossip on one side and quasi-hagiographical accounts of a great Canadian financier, monarchist, philanthropist, and solider on the other. We have very little evidence from Pellatt’s own archives; no notebooks, diaries, sketches, or other sources we would expect have come to light. Pellatt’s loss of the house and its collection in 1924 also meant the loss of much of its documentary record, and more losses would be incurred in subsequent years.45 It must thus be emphasized that the documentary record for Pellatt and Casa Loma is, at best, partial. Not a literary man like his relative Stephen Leacock, nor an author at all (as far as we know), Pellatt’s intellectual, social, and artistic nature is largely unrecorded, although his career as a soldier and sportsman is well attested. Much the same can be said for the architect Lennox. Lennox’s office files (including some architectural drawings, specifications, cash books, and a library of source materials) have not survived in one complete collection; what exists is spread across private, municipal, and provincial archives. While much has come to light during the course of our work on the house, we have few building accounts, little evidence of the actual sources for Casa Loma, and few primary sources that clarify the complex dynamics between patron and architect. This vacuum of evidence is, in part at least, responsible for allowing Pellatt and Casa Loma to become myths of Toronto and, more broadly, Canada. This book is the result of a collaboration between art historians, architectural historians, architects, and curators. Organized chronologically, the chapters begin by placing Casa Loma both within the ranks of elite homes in Toronto of the early twentieth century and in the architectural practice of its architect, the “builder of Toronto” E.J. Lennox. Sean Blank and David Winterton’s contribution opens the book with a consideration of the development of the Davenport Ridge neighbourhood from about 1890 to 1920. They take us through some of the houses of Toronto’s upwardly mobile business leaders, all the while tracing changes to the city’s real estate. The following chapter, by Sharon Vattay, begins where Blank and Winterton leave off, with the work of E.J. Lennox. Vattay explores the career of this prolific, Toronto-based architect and provides insights both into his practice and design process.

Introduction

These initial chapters set the stage for Vattay’s next chapter, which introduces newly discovered plans for the house and reassesses the archival records to reconstruct the building timeline for the Casa Loma estate. Vattay also examines the thorny issue of authorship between the powerful personalities of Pellatt and Lennox. Matthew Reeve’s chapter on the art and furnishings of Casa Loma aims to reconstruct aspects of the collection and charts a range of ideas expressed by it. Making use of annotated auction catalogues from 1924, Reeve reinterprets the assemblage of artifacts and provides glimpses into the sociocultural processes underpinning the creation of the Pellatts’ collection. Michael Windover’s chapter picks up on the role of artifacts, together with the broader designed environment, in meaning making at Casa Loma and positions them as active agents in the social and ideological performance of ornamentalism. Casa Loma is conceptualized as a series of stage sets for the enactment of an imperial social order, just as that very system was reaching its twilight. Reeve’s next chapter continues to explore the theme of empire. Turning to Pellatt’s interests in medievalism and chivalry, Reeve situates Casa Loma within both medievalist traditions of Anglo-Canadian culture and the trend of early twentieth-century castle building more broadly. The final three chapters examine the life of Casa Loma after it ceased to serve as a private dwelling. Over two chapters, Joan Coutu chronicles the history of Casa Loma from about 1920 to 1930, when the house transitioned out of Pellatt’s hands into the hands of the city, becoming “Pellatt’s Folly,” and then from about 1930 to 1970, when the house became part of Toronto’s heritage industry. Over the course of these chapters, Coutu charts the changing perceptions of Casa Loma and its place in the city. Finally, Marcela Torres, former curator of Casa Loma, explores its more recent management as a heritage site, tourist destination, and event venue in Toronto. As the material and documentary record for the house is far from complete, we can make no claims to having produced a comprehensive account of Casa Loma. In the course of our work, we have brought to light much new evidence that was either lost or altogether unknown and assembled it here for the first time, but there can be little doubt that much remains to be discovered about Casa Loma and its grounds. Yet our work will be done if we have inspired renewed interest in one of Toronto’s greatest landmarks and spectacles by scholars and the general public alike.

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1

2

3 4 5

n otes Casa Loma regularly appears as a setting in films, as in, for instance, Cocktail (1988), X-Men (2000), Chicago (2002), Scott Pilgrim vs the World (2010), and the television series Hannibal (2013–15). See, most recently, Armstrong, Making Toronto Modern; and Myzelev, Architecture, Design and Craft in Toronto. See also Bassnett, Picturing Toronto; Gibson, Inside Toronto; Hill, Artists, Architects and Artisans. Arthur, Toronto; Coffman, “Casa Loma,” 8. West, Toronto, 181. Two important exceptions are Coffman, “Casa Loma,” and Myzelev, Architecture, Design and Craft.

6 Kalman, History of Canadian Architecture, 2:593. 7 Myzelev, Architecture, Design and Craft, 43–65; Keohane, Symptoms of Canada. 8 Although a photograph of Casa Loma appears in Morris and Fermor-Hesketh, eds., Architecture of the British Empire (36), outside of a caption, no mention of it appears in the text. Casa Loma is also overlooked in Bremner, ed., Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire.

9 The fullest account of Pellatt’s life is Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt. For a recent biographical essay, see Roberts, “Pellatt, Sir Henry Mill.”

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Roberts, “Pellatt, Sir Henry Mill.” O’Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada, 109. These notes are preserved in the Archives of Ontario, F253, MU3823, file 69. Griffin, Major General Sir Henry Mill Pellatt, 12. Brantford Expositor, 1905, quoted in Roberts, “Pellatt, Sir Henry Mill.” Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 83. Ibid., 83–5. Mouriopoulos, “‘Serious Piece of Business.’” Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 172. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 197. Evening Telegram (Toronto), 10 March 1939. Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 235. W.W. Kenilworth horoscope, Archives of Ontario, F253, MU3823, file 39. MacTavish, “Henry Mill Pellatt: A Study in Achievement.” Ibid., 112.

Introduction

26 Matthew 5:14. See also Mark 4:21–25 and Luke 8:16–18. We owe this reference to Cameron Macdonell.

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Lawson, Canada and the Empire, 18–25. Armstrong, Making Toronto Modern, 17. Ibid., 20. Winterton, “Toronto’s Edwardian Skyscraper Row,” 78. Ibid., 80. “Imperialism and Architecture,” cited in Winterton, “Toronto’s Edwardian Skyscraper Row,” 80. Winterton, 78. Smyth, Toronto. We are grateful to Joan Coutu for information on the Orange Order. Berger, Sense of Power, 182. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.” Winterton, “Toronto’s Edwardian Skyscraper Row.” Williams, Landscape Architecture in Canada, chap. 13. Simmins, “Competing Visions,” esp. 253–4. Lemon, “Plans for Early 20th-Century Toronto.” “Toronto’s Casa Loma Immortalized on Commemorative Coin,” cbc News, 5 August 2014, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-s-casa-loma-immortalized-on-commemorative-coin-1.2727911. See Pepall, “Robert McCausland & Co.,” for a brief biography of the company. Curiously, while major commissions for the Bank of Montreal (now the Hockey Hall of Fame) and Trinity College at the University of Toronto were noted, the company’s work for Casa Loma has not been well advertised.

42 In this way, it operated like other house museums and living history sites. For example, see Terry, Family Ties; Gordon, Time Travel.

43 Jim Foster, “Garden’s Glory to Bloom Again at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 27 June 1988. 44 Kingwell, Nearest Thing to Heaven, 36. 45 Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, xiv. For the art collection, see Catalogue of the Valuable Contents.

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1 Houses on the Ridge Casa Loma’s Neighbours and the Elite Architecture of Davenport Ridge sean blank and dav id winterton

By the turn of the twentieth century, the class boundaries of Toronto’s established residential neighbourhoods, stable for a generation, had entered a state of flux. The appearance of Casa Loma on Davenport Ridge was one exuberant outcome of that flux. Davenport Ridge, separating the lower shore plain of Toronto from a higher, northern tableau, was distinguished by its physical proximity to – yet atmospheric divergence from – the emerging city below. The wealthy had built dwellings of some description here since the city’s founding, but the year 1851, with the construction of Senator William McMaster’s Rathnelly, ushered in a new era distinguished by the construction of extravagant estates. Still, the older lower city neighbourhoods maintained their patrician lustre for another half century before the ridge saw its greatest architectural efflorescence, the focus of this chapter. We trace the social and topographical evolution of Toronto’s elite neighbourhoods, starting with the original enclaves in lower Toronto. At the turn of the century there was a new, imperially focused wealth that pushed new boundaries for elite neighbourhoods up the hill, leading ultimately to the construction of Sir Henry Pellatt’s imposing Casa Loma. Casa Loma did not command the impressive vista alone, however, as it seems to do now. Although Casa Loma was indeed the most significant and iconic of the houses on the ridge, an ensemble of quasi-country villas was constructed nearby – a necklace of escarpment bastions, each poetically

Casa Loma’s Neighbours

Figure 1.1 Map of Davenport Ridge with estates marked.

33 named – for the families made rich by a new strain of capitalism that profited from the global expansion of the British Empire (fig. 1.1). In this light, it is important to see Casa Loma not as a single building but rather as a neighbour with similar aspirations as those of nearby Ardwold (Eaton family), Spadina (Austin family), Lenwil (Lennox family), and Benvenuto (Janes, then Mackenzie families). This chapter recontextualizes Casa Loma – both physically and socially – within this elite milieu.1 Descriptions of the genesis and architectural pedigrees of the neighbouring houses on the ridge and the families inhabiting them show that Casa Loma was an

sean bl ank and dav id w interton

integral member of this ecosystem of Edwardian millionaires and their codes of architectural representation. And lest anyone doubt their cultural allegiances, the houses span a range of British architectural period revivals: Scottish Baronial palace, Carolean villa, and Tudor-Jacobean manor house.

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As the well-to-do have done in all times and all cities, so too in Toronto: families of means continually sequestered themselves further from the densifying city to occupy the best situated, most protected, and most amenity-rich geographies at the urban fringe. In Toronto’s case, this phenomenon began in its early settler period with the bestowal of the aptly named Park Lots to a colonial gentry, and gentrification (indeed, in the original sense) swept northward, generation by generation. In 1900, the accepted Victorian upper-class neighbourhoods were still fully intact and had maintained their cachet. The grandeur of many of the residences was impressive. In the east, the gently sloping quartier surrounding the verdant Horticultural Gardens (soon to be renamed Allan Gardens) was defined by Sherbourne and Jarvis Streets – by far the city’s most legendary boulevards – displaying the estates and mansions of the more established families (e.g., the Masseys, Allans, and Coxes) (fig. 1.2). In the west, the leafy spine of old St George Street continued north through the newer Annex neighbourhood, northwest of the historic city boundaries that had, thanks to Simeon Henan Janes (developer of the Annex and builder of Benvenuto) and his vision, spurred the development of a unique neighbourhood. It was characterized by a distinct modern hybrid of Romanesque and Queen Anne Revival residential architecture that, along with the salubrious orientation of the neighbourhood, attracted families such as the Eatons and Gooderhams. The venerable Sir Edmund Walker’s Long Garth was nearby on the part of St George Street embedded in the expanding university campus. Eastward was bucolic Queen’s Park, where a procession of mansions, among them those of the Christie bakery family, Sir Joseph Flavelle at Holwood, and E.R. Wood at Wymilwood, led to the thoroughfare of Bloor Street. Prior to its transformation into an elite commercial high street, Bloor was where the Heintzmans, Nordheimers, and Gages once raised immense, rambling, urban edifices (including Senator McMaster’s city house and E.J. Lennox’s commission for the well-connected lawyer James Crowther).

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Figure 1.2 Map of Toronto’s elite Victorian and Edwardian neighbourhoods.

35 To the north, along and across Bloor Street and the ravines, South Rosedale had been laid out and partially developed. Though the Glen Road bridge was completed as early as 1881, the protected sylvan setting of North Rosedale was not fully domesticated until around 1907 and, as a result of this timing, contains a fine collection of stern-but-with-a-whisper-of-wit Edwardian residences. Indeed, North Rosedale attracted the penultimate wave of quasi-aristocratic villas in Toronto. The Rosedales (north and south) were contiguous with the established lower-shore plain of Toronto, but they were islanded from it by the deep ravines that defined their boundaries. The Annex and the Garden District, however, shared the plain

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with fellow citizens rich and poor, but without the natural separations that allowed Rosedale to maintain its enclave status to this day. Yet none of these neighbourhoods could claim to command extensive vistas or to represent the upgraded status conferred by sheer elevation, as, for instance, enjoyed by Toronto’s elite rivals in their grand residences in Montreal as they vied up Mount Royal’s southern slope. The next aspirational ring of development in Toronto then – Davenport Ridge – was soon to be breached, spurred by an influx of new wealth generated by the city’s imperial financiers.

e dward i a n bu s i n e s s m e n

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As capital investments from both home and abroad fed the imperial machinery of expansion in the Dominion of Canada, new and extreme fortunes were accumulated, a heady time justifiably referred to as the Gilded Age. In Canada, the connected leaders of the transportation, utility, and financial industries were tagged in the press as plutocrats.2 Toronto’s social and financial elite, even after the fall of the Family Compact generations, remained an interconnected and self-interested group of families and individuals. The inhabitants of the Davenport Ridge neighbourhood exemplified this interconnectedness of Toronto high society.3 Toronto’s transformation in the first decades of the twentieth century paralleled the expansion of the dominion’s western agricultural settlements and industry. Wealth grew generally, yet was concentrated in the hands of the Toronto plutocrats and their manufacturing and retail brethren, thanks to calculated leveraging of their financial interests in railways, banks, and other concerns. Toronto’s commercial and financial hold on its hinterland and the Great West was indeed triumphant and unassailable, and people gravitated to its promise. The various imperial-scaled initiatives (banks, railways, and hydroelectricity), imprinting across the landscape and presided over by this handful of Protestant conservatives, created opportunities for many, and housing the many brought the bustle of the city to the doorsteps of the old neighbourhoods described above. As a node in the vast worldwide migrations triggered by New World opportunities and Old World class problems, Toronto’s population increased significantly from the end of the nineteenth century to before the Great War. This growth was

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due in large part to emigrants from the British Isles (about a third of the population),4 but was also a result of an exodus of people from the province’s bustling towns and hamlets, enticed by employment opportunities in industry and increasingly in the managerial class of white-collar jobs (many of the members of the Group of Seven, for example, were in this class of white-collar clerks, working at Grip Ltd., the graphic design firm), serving the ever-multiplying business operations and their office jobs spawned by plutocratic activity. Fortunes were to be made by providing utilities to the residents of the growing city. Some of these enterprises, such as William Mackenzie’s street railways and his and Henry Pellatt’s vision to supply hydroelectricity, would serve the infrastructural needs of the growing “nearly national metropolis”5 while assuring tidy profits for these men to pursue their grandiose dreams. Successive annexations to the growing city became a challenge to absorb without increasing taxation, since the new suburbanites rightly demanded the extension of standard city services (water and streetcars). However, the private companies that ran many of the utilities were not motivated to extend their services, so demand grew for reform and deprivatization (again, a narrative tied to the rise and fall of Pellatt and his castle). As the city densified with buildings and people within its now “locked-down” boundaries, it grew vertically with the arrival of skyscrapers,6 vying with the Victorian steeples for a new metropolitan skyline. Pressures on the established neighbourhoods intensified when the new categories of workers (e.g., bachelor clerks and single women employed in retail and clerical positions) who flocked to their office-building and department-store jobs, sought housing. Previously unthinkable because morally suspect, apartment buildings began to appear in the old elite neighbourhoods close to the core. In 1912, the Wellsboro Apartment Building was constructed at Jarvis and Maitland Streets, followed by the Ernescliffe at Sherbourne and Wellesley Streets in 1913. Even venerable Sherbourne Villa (originally the Ridout estate, once owned by the indefatigable Senator George Albertus Cox), just north of Sherbourne Street Methodist Church, had been purchased by the new owner of the Robert Simpson Company department store, Harris Henry Fudger, who converted the villa into a boarding house for female employees of the department store in 1916.7

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e dward i a n re s i d e n t i a l a rch i te c ts

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Only a decade prior to this social/housing upheaval, on patrician Sherbourne Street lived a concentration of Toronto’s business elite: Pellatt (and his eventual architect, Lennox) among them. Here many of these Protestant men and their families gathered to worship at the “Millionaires’ Church,” the turreted, Romanesque Revival Sherbourne Street Methodist (now St Luke’s Church, designed by Langley and Burke in 1886–87) at the corner Sherbourne and Carlton Streets. In 1898, thirty-nineyear-old Pellatt – having secured a lot across from the Horticultural Gardens on Sherbourne Street, and one house south of the church – hired thirty-four-year-old Edgar Beaumont Jarvis, a talented and inventive architect, to design an intriguing freestyle Scottish Baronial townhouse (fig. 1.3), expressing perfectly in architecture and location his client’s cultural alignments. As the essays in this volume describe in detail, these alignments would be expanded and explored more inchoately through Pellatt’s next residential architectural experiment, on Davenport Ridge. Jarvis was one of the bright lights of Toronto’s vibrant architectural scene. By the turn of the century, a sophisticated architectural culture unique to Toronto had matured and hit its stride, made evident by its ability to spawn, then harness, the energy of the rogue Toronto Architectural Eighteen Club. From our perspective, it seems the mission of this architectural movement was to give form to a zeitgeist marked by new wealth and civic aspirations that connected the devotion to Britannic architectural forms with a nascent Canadian nationalism, sparked to life by an optimistic Toronto boosterism. Indeed, the boosters of Edwardian Toronto were so enamoured with the architectural successes of their fine houses that a brochure, Toronto, a City of Beautiful Homes (fig. 1.4), was published in 1910, then updated and republished. It contained photos of architecturally prominent houses and, importantly, the names of their proud owners. To make it into the book was, at the very least, to be identified as a member of Toronto’s managerial class. Toronto’s cadre of busy Edwardian architects, both émigré (e.g., Britain’s Eden Smith) and homegrown (e.g., Frank Darling, E.J. Lennox, and Edmund Burke – all of the same generation – as well as the younger Jarvis), were brimming with contemporary ideas, many based not only on the inventive work of England’s Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912) but also on the refreshingly new Arts and Crafts work of William Richard Lethaby (1857–1931) and C.F.A. Voysey (1857–1941). Toronto’s architectural culture and output of the time could be described as a

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Figure 1.3 Left Henry Pellatt’s town house, Sherbourne Street, Toronto, 1902. Figure 1.4 Right Residences of Ambrose J. Small, Mrs T. Eaton, W.S. Dinnick, and Albert Gooderham, 1910.

unique hybrid: modern Arts and Crafts ideas around house planning mixed with a desire to evoke Old England, encouraging academic period or vernacular revivals, while North American climatic, material, and social realities, as well as ever-present American influence, cohabited with the Britannic outlook of Toronto’s upper classes and their architects. One example of this unique approach brought Eden Smith, famously, to design a house type peculiar to the city: “the turned about house” with side entrances and living spaces at the rear of the house so the inhabitants could enjoy the garden in privacy, following Arts and Crafts notions about utility and comfort.8 Smith’s austere and simple architectural expression occupied

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the restrained end of the spectrum of fine masonry residences in Toronto. It was of a defining character, to be sure, but shared a connection of aesthetic innovation to more exuberant revivalist examples at the other end of the spectrum, such as the hybrid and inventive Romanesque house style prevalent in the Annex. From this rich architectural movement, a privileged handful were invited to design residences atop Davenport Ridge for the newly minted Edwardian aristocracy of Toronto who, by a few years into the century, had set their sights beyond the established neighbourhoods described above – neighbourhoods whose lustre of exclusivity was quickly diminishing. The architects either designed improvements to existing houses (e.g., Darling’s work on Benvenuto) or designed entirely new residences (e.g., Lennox’s work on Casa Loma and on his own residence, Lenwil, neighbouring Pellatt’s house). Although these properties were laid out on the traditional country estate plan, with a main house served by wings and outbuildings (e.g., stables and fabulous greenhouses), the estates on Davenport Ridge still very much functioned as the “town” seats of these families. The Eatons, Pellatts, Janeses, and others may have enjoyed the seclusion of Davenport Ridge, but these properties by no means served as retreats.9 On the contrary, the estates were instruments of social advancement, often playing host not only to the city’s elite but also to some of the international glitterati of the time. In May 1912, Mackenzie lent his Benvenuto to the Canadian vice-regents, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, when they were in Toronto for the Ontario Jockey Club’s fashionable “race-week.”10

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As a remnant of glacial geography in the region, Davenport Ridge rises above the city’s lower plateau and traces the shoreline of the ancient Lake Iroquois. Seventy metres above Lake Ontario, the ridge affords remarkable vistas over the city. The ridge also crossed part of a lateral, two-hundred-acre farm lot (#24) between Concession 2 (Bloor Street) and Concession 3 (St Clair Avenue). Davenport Road, one of the few ancient Indigenous paths transcribed into the transportation network of the emerging city, travelled the base of the ridge on its way to the Humber River’s Carrying Place. The farm lot remained intact until 1865 when, at auction, Toronto entrepreneur James Austin bid £3,550 to purchase eighty acres from William Willcocks Baldwin. Baldwin had inherited the farm lot – known by the

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family as Spadina (derived from the Anishinaabemowin term espadinong, meaning “hill”)11 – from his father, Robert. Robert’s father, William Warren Baldwin, had himself come into ownership of the property through several inheritances, based on his wife’s relation to William Willcocks, the original grantee of the lot. In 1889, Austin subdivided more than half of the estate – forty-nine acres of the western portion – into 114 town and villa lots serviced by four new roads,12 and he retained forty acres. Pellatt would buy twenty of these lots in 1903 for the site of his grand project. Austin also dedicated an eighty-foot road allowance on his land for the northerly extension of Spadina Road from the foot of Davenport Road so that it could extend up and over the hill. Temporary wooden steps were constructed to allow public access from Davenport Road to what would later become Spadina Road. Shortly thereafter, in 1892, Austin divided the estate among his children, deeding Spadina House and twenty acres to his son, Albert Austin; the remainder went to his daughter Anne Austin Arthurs, which she named Ravenswood.

t he houses The ridge had been loosely occupied in the nineteenth century, mostly with modest farmhouses. As mentioned, grander villas were constructed at mid-century when the population of Toronto was approaching thirty thousand. Construction on Rathnelly (fig. 1.5), an Italianate villa, was started in 1851 for Senator William McMaster and was soon followed by the Gothic Revival Oaklands in 1860 for John Macdonald, a wholesaler (fig. 1.6). These were the first of the country villas designed with an architectural intention to impress and were followed by Spadina (the third iteration completed 1866) on the Austins’ acquired acreage of the original farm lot. Samuel Nordheimer came next in 1872 with his own rambling confection, Glen Edyth, on the ridge between Spadina and Rathnelly (fig. 1.7). At the time it ranked as one of the most magnificent houses in the country. Our interest in this chapter is mostly with the houses that were built or altered in and around the long Edwardian era (the 1890s to 1918) and were aligned with the aristocratic aspirations of their owners. What these grand homes lacked in coherent style, they matched in effect and purpose: to impress and to entertain. Each of the houses is designed around a sequence of formal spaces anchored by a very grand hall, used for large-scale entertaining, and of course to harken to Old World aristocratic spaces of legitimacy. Indeed, in

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Figure 1.5 Above Rathnelly, south façade, ca. 1897. Figure 1.6 Top right Oaklands, north façade, June 2018. Figure 1.7 Bottom right Glen Edyth, south and east facades with corner tower, 1912.

42 this intensely imperial sociopolitical environment, titles were coveted – and conferred on – most of Toronto’s Edwardian plutocrats, and there is a sense that the great-halled villas were a prerequisite for consideration of a knighthood. Linking back to the narrative of the plutocratic exodus from the old city, William Mackenzie was the first of Pellatt’s cronies to make a move up the hill. He bought Benvenuto from Simeon Janes in 1897, a year before Pellatt had occupied his new Scottish Baronial house on Sherbourne Street in the rapidly changing downtown neighbourhood. This must have inspired (or irked!) Pellatt because in 1903, just

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five years after occupying his new Sherbourne Street abode, he began purchasing his ridge lots from James Austin for a new Pellatt family seat. Beginning in 1906, publishing tycoon John Bayne Maclean began amassing his hilltop estate, but he only began building in 1910. John Craig Eaton, scion of Timothy Eaton, had spent his childhood in the Annex in the family mansion at Spadina and Lowther Streets not far from the ridge (fig. 1.4). In 1908, only one year after his father’s death and his succession to the head of the Eaton Company, Eaton was next to buy eleven acres within a stone’s throw of Pellatt’s acquired property and adjacent to Spadina, overlooking his boyhood neighbourhood. E.J. Lennox served as Pellatt’s architect for Casa Loma (and for some of Pellatt’s business interests too) and, as a result of the success of his architectural practice, Lennox was able to buy a property of three acres adjacent to his most extravagant work and client, naming the house he designed for his family Lenwil. The following sections describe this fascinating ensemble in chronological sequence of construction: Spadina, Mackenzie-era Benvenuto, Eaton’s Ardwold, Maclean’s Wells Hill, and finally Lennox’s Lenwil.

Spadina Spadina House (fig. 1.8) vies with Oaklands as one of the oldest houses on the ridge – but its importance lies more in its original property extents than in the architectural pedigree of the house; it is from the vast Baldwin/Austin acreages that the ample lots for Ardwold and Casa Loma were dispensed. The property that Austin purchased in 1865 extended roughly from Davenport Road to the south, Walmer Road to the west, Russell Hill Road to the east, and St Clair Avenue to the north. On it sat the second iteration of Spadina House, a simple, one-storey, wood-frame dwelling that had been used as the Baldwin family’s country house, built in place of a larger, two-storey structure that was destroyed by fire. Austin intended to establish his family’s primary residence at Spadina and had grander plans for its main house, demolishing the existing house and building a new one on its foundations. The third iteration of Spadina House was completed in 1866, likely to the designs of an architectural pattern book prevalent at the time. The not-unimpressive twostorey square masonry structure was constructed with simple ornamentation. Two double-height bay windows on the southern façade overlooked an expansive lawn to the limit of the ridge and to the city beyond. Formal gardens and vegetable beds were located directly west and north of the house. In the year of Confederation, at

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Figure 1.8 Looking northwest from Casa Loma tower, view of Spadina House and estate, with Ardwold beyond to the right, 1915.

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the edge of the estate, 150 yards parallel to Spadina House and on the edge of the ridge, Ravenswood was built. In 1897, Albert Austin, with a desire to modernize Spadina House and keep up with some of the estate-building activity occurring on the ridge further east (such as Benvenuto), hired Toronto architect Vaux Chadwick to design additions to Spadina. A two-storey addition to the northern façade was completed in 1898, including a billiard room and ground-floor kitchen. A private family golf course was completed a year later, in 1899, spanning the entire western length of the property, from north to south; the first hole was originally located on the current site of Casa Loma.13 In 1905, Toronto architect Eustace Bird – the Toronto associate of the great New York City architects Carrère and Hastings, who were busy putting the finishing touches on Toronto’s first New York–style skyscraper, the Traders Bank (see fig. 0.14) – was hired to make further enhancements to the property. A large, halfdodecagonal-shaped Palm Room/conservatory was added to the southern façade of the house, providing a balustraded terrace from which to take in city views from the second floor (figs 1.9 and 1.10). One of the most notable additions was the iron

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Figure 1.9 Top Spadina House, 1912. Figure 1.10 Bottom Ground floor plan of Spadina.

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and glass porte cochère designed by Carrère and Hastings – a commission likely facilitated by Bird – and appended to the main entrance on the western façade. This filigree added a flair of New York sophistication and a touch of modernity to the otherwise architecturally and decoratively staid manor house. In 1908, Austin sold Ravenswood and eleven acres on the southeastern boundary of his Spadina property to Sir John Craig Eaton.14 Eaton demolished the house and

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began building Ardwold. In an effort to keep up with the far more extravagant properties under construction on either side of them – namely, Ardwold and Casa Loma – the Austins then decided to add a third, cedar-shingle-clad, mansard roof level to Spadina House. Likely designed by Bird, the addition enhanced the structure’s verticality and added two family bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and staff bedrooms. A greenhouse was constructed northeast of the house, and a former driving shed was demolished and replaced with a Tudor Revival three-bay garage and chauffeur’s residence. A fieldstone wall topped with limestone urns was also constructed along Spadina Road to the edge of the ridge. In 1926 Austin sold the northern portion of his estate (a wedge of land between the entrance to Ardwold and St Clair Avenue) to the City of Toronto. By 1929, construction of the St Clair Reservoir had begun, which was accessed via the newly constructed Spadina Road Bridge that crossed the Nordheimer Ravine. These improvements helped to open northern suburbs for future development. Austin died in 1933, and the family continued to live in the house until 1982, when his daughter Anna Kathleen Thompson deeded the property, house, and furnishings to the City of Toronto for use as a historic house museum. Opened to the public in 1984, it remains in use today.

Benvenuto

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Across Avenue Road from the robustly Gothic Oaklands, Benvenuto was built in 1890, similarly Romantic in silhouette to Oaklands but at the vanguard of American architectural trends (fig. 1.11). Simeon Janes had made his fortune developing a large swath of properties that had once been part of Baldwin’s land at the northern edge of the city; the area came to be known as the Annex, since it was eventually annexed by the city. This fortune enabled Janes to purchase 5.5 acres of what had previously been Senator McMaster’s Rathnelly estate, obtained from Senator James Kerr, who had purchased it upon McMaster’s death in 1888. This property was on the crest of the ridge and enabled Janes to look out over the extended city that made his fortune. Janes enlisted American architect A. Page Brown. Brown had opened his own architectural firm in 1885 after working for the storied McKim, Mead, and White of New York, where he had absorbed the lessons of his mentors’ great synthesis of H.H. Richardson’s Romanesque into their hybrid shingle style, which he applied to the design of Benvenuto.15 Distinct similarities are evident in

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Figure 1.11 East façade of Benvenuto in winter, ca. 1890s.

massing and composition to McKim, Mead, and White’s turreted Osborn House of Mamaroneck, New York, completed in 1885. By 1890 Brown had left New York and established a new practice in San Francisco.16 The landscape design was handled by the famed American landscape firm the Olmsted Brothers. The entrance to Benvenuto sat atop the ridge and was approached from the north by way of Avenue Road. An estate wall of massive, rough, ashlar Kingston limestone masonry lined the street and led to the gate house, supporting intricate wrought-iron gates designed by the Sienese artist Benedetto Zalaffi.17 The drive wound southward past a circular fountain to approach the porte cochère on the eastern, long side of the 2.5-storey Norman Revival manor house. Solid looking, with Romanesque round-arched windows made of heavily rusticated masonry from the same Kingston limestone used for the estate wall, the pile’s stout volume was enhanced by a steeply pitched, maroon-coloured terracotta-tiled roof.18 The footprint was L-shaped, with a wide porch flanked by two fat round towers that anchored the southern, ridge-facing façade and expressed the pseudo-keep’s architectural character aptly by its silhouette. Another tower, half-octagonal in shape, anchored the northern façade. When Janes sold Benvenuto to William Mackenzie in 1897 (the estate was purchased for $100,000 in railway stock),19 he routed the streetcar line up Avenue Road to St Clair Avenue past Benvenuto, thereby providing the house with better access to the city below.20

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Figure 1.12 Top West façade of Benvenuto, 1916. Figure 1.13 Bottom Ground floor plan of Benvenuto.

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Little of the house or its grounds was added to or altered immediately after its purchase. In 1911 Mackenzie was knighted for his imperial-scaled efforts to develop western Canada, and in 1914 he hired Toronto establishment architects Darling and Pearson to design a large addition in a sympathetic idiom, nearly doubling the mansion’s footprint but keeping the original arrangement of formal spaces: from the porte cochère, one entered directly into a great hall, which oriented the visitor to the rooms pinwheeling about it (fig. 1.13, 1.14, 1.15). The southern turrets contained the library on the east and the drawing room on the west. A veranda the width of the southern end linked the two, where views onto the Olmsted-designed landscape and the city beyond could be enjoyed. Mackenzie died in 1924, and his property was sold by his heirs. By 1931, the first two of the three buildings in the art deco Mayfair Mansions apartment complex Figure 1.14 Great Hall at Benvenuto, 1890.

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Figure 1.15 Right Dining room at Benvenuto, 1890. Figure 1.16 Opposite Aerial view of Ardwold estate, 1919.

designed by Herbert Charles Roberts were constructed at 394 and 396 Avenue Road, on the hill south of the gate and gatehouse.21 Another exclusive apartment building in the Tudor Revival style (designed by N.A. Armstrong) was constructed in 1930 at the southwest corner of Edmund Street and the newly laid out Benvenuto Place.22 The estate’s main house and outbuildings remained on the site until they were demolished in 1932. The third Mayfair Mansions apartment building at 398 Avenue Road stands on the site of the Benvenuto gatehouse, and Benvenuto Place Apartments, one of Toronto’s most celebrated modernist structures (by British modernist Peter Dickinson), was built in 1956 where Benvenuto’s main house once stood.

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Ardwold In 1908, the Toronto department store heir John Craig Eaton purchased eleven acres from Albert Austin, owner of neighbouring Spadina House, for $100,000 in bank notes. The property, formerly named Ravenswood, Albert’s sister’s estate, was located east of Spadina House, and the Italianate Ravenswood building (from ca. 1868) was promptly demolished to make way for the Eatons’ grand Restoration Revival mansion, which they named Ardwold (“high green hill” in Gaelic).23 The

eleven acres extended from Davenport Road to the Nordheimer Ravine, and a corridor of land to the north gave the Eatons a second, formal entrance to their new estate from Spadina Road (fig. 1.16). Ardwold was designed by architects Wickson and Gregg, who were responsible for many fine houses in Toronto’s syncretic British vernacular styles in Rosedale and the Annex. Construction on Ardwold began in 1909.24 Eaton and his wife, Flora McCrea Eaton, were deeply involved in the execution of the project, often intervening in its design mid-construction.25 Flora (later known as the indomitable Lady Eaton) had developed a discriminating taste and would eventually be responsible for selecting French designer Jacques Carlu to create some of their department store’s most

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memorable art deco interiors.26 The house itself was a 2.5-storey Carolean mansion, faced in “Eatonia” brick,27 the design of which was based, as suggested by William Dendy, on Belton House in Lincolnshire, and its predecessor Clarendon House in London – two important Restoration-era palaces.28 Indeed, the choice of a Restoration palace as a precedent was an interesting and symbolic one; it was definitely outside the orbit of Wickson and Gregg’s usual Arts and Crafts or vernacular Edwardian modes. It is probably a stretch to suggest that the Eatons sought an architectural connection to an exuberant, active, and sophisticated monarchy such as that of Charles II, comparable in those respects to the reign of Edward VII, which ended just as Ardwold was erected. Yet the earlier period had a mercantile flair, with Charles’s support for the proto-imperialist East India Company and its expansive trade and retail empire, an analogue for the Eaton’s department store and mailorder catalogues’ Canada-wide empire. Regardless of these conjectural connections, the architectural allegiance certainly matched Eaton’s imperial allegiance, assuring him his knighthood in 1915. The house was twelve bays wide, with the south-facing garden façade framed by three-bay end pavilions that projected slightly from the central block. A steeply pitched, red Ludowici-tiled hipped roof topped the second storey and was enlivened by regularly spaced dormers and tall chimneys.29 Crowning the roof was a balustraded terrace and a tall copper cupola that afforded panoramic views. A simple conservatory projected from just off-centre of the southern façade.30 A threestorey service wing extended to the north off the eastern end of the house, giving the mansion an L-shaped floor plan. The service wing was enlarged in 1919, and two-storey wings with arcaded porches were added to each side. Upon arrival, one entered directly into the double-height and vaulted great hall from the porte cochère, which was located east of the central axis of the main mass (fig. 1.17). Through a subtle shifting of axes, one would re-centre in the great hall (fig. 1.18), with the fireplace to the west and the grand stair to the east, and then orient across the east-west corridor axis, as in the so-called Peacock Alley in Casa Loma. The various rooms facing the ridge on the other side of the arcade and corridor, south of the great hall, were more intimate spaces like the library and the music room (fig. 1.19), while the large and equally sized billiard and dining rooms (fig. 1.20), suitable for entertaining on a regal scale, occupied the footprint of the slightly projecting pavilioned ends.

Figure 1.17 Ground floor plan, Ardwold.

Brick retaining walls delineated the property boundaries at gated entrances via Davenport and Spadina Roads. A 1.5-storey brick gate house (extant) signified the formal entrance on Spadina Road, opening to a winding drive that passed gardens and the many outbuildings, including a brick garage and stable building, as well as a half-acre brick-and-glass greenhouse complex with a swimming pool connected to the main house by a vaulted brick tunnel.31 Both display and production conservatories provided flowers and specimens year round, and the natural landscape that characterized Ravenswood was replaced by formal Italianate gardens with balustraded terraces, pools, and fountains aligned with city views, not dissimilar to Casa Loma’s landscaping (fig. 1.21). On the northern end of the property, another balustraded terrace was flanked by stone stairs and a rock waterfall terminating at the Nordheimer Ravine.

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Figure 1.18 Opposite Great Hall at Ardwold, 1918. Figure 1.19 Top left Music room at Ardwold, 1918. Figure 1.20 Bottom left Dining room at Ardwold, 1918.

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Wickson and Gregg’s perseverance was rewarded with the commission to design the handsome and modern Timothy Eaton Memorial Church (1913) dedicated to Sir John’s renowned father, as soon as Ardwold was completed. In a sense, the firm consequently served as court architects to the Eaton family; they were also commissioned to design the Eatons’ Lake Rosseau summer cottage, Kawandag, and the Villa Fiori on their immense country estate in King City. After Eaton died in 1922, the Ardwold property was little used by Lady Eaton. By 1935, new neighbourhoods had come to surround it, and Lady Eaton announced plans to cease operation of the estate, demolish the house and most of its outbuildings, and subdivide the property into a residential development.

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Wells Hill Wells Hill was the estate of publisher John Bayne Maclean, who purchased ten acres of land between 1906 and 1909 from Nina de Pencier, the granddaughter of Joseph Wells of Davenport.32 Maclean kept the name Wells Hill for his new estate. John M. Lyle was enlisted to design the buildings on the property, while its landscape was entrusted to the Olmsted Brothers (fig. 1.22).33 Maclean initially commissioned the lodge to serve as the gatehouse at the entrance to Wells Hill, with a much larger mansion planned for the crest of the ridge. Although the lodge was completed in the summer of 1910, plans for the main house were put on hold and never materialized.34 By 1912, with the construction of additional wings at either end of the lodge, the Macleans moved into it full time. The building became a 1.5-storey, lightgrey wood-framed stucco Georgian Revival mansion, with wood trim around the windows and doors and at the eaves, organized around a rectangular plan. The Macleans enjoyed this iteration of Wells Hill throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s. In 1934, they purchased additional land to make way for additions

Figure 1.21 Opposite View from Ardwold looking south to gardens and pergola, with city behind. Figure 1.22 Above Wells Hill, south façade, with lawn.

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to the lodge, courtesy of architects Mathers and Haldenby. A two-storey service wing was added to the eastern end of the building, and another wing was added to the eastern end of the southern façade, in part to accommodate a drawing room purpose-built for eighteenth-century panelling that Maclean had purchased in the 1920s, originally in Carlton House, London.35 The Macleans lived at Wells Hill until John’s death in 1950, and over the course of the next few decades the property was subdivided for upscale detached residential use, while the lodge remained in place. No original interior elements remain today, having been lost to demolition.

Lenwil

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Situated on nearly three acres of land that E.J. Lennox purchased in 1905 from the heiress Nina de Pencier, Lenwil extended north from Davenport Road and westward from Walmer Road.36 The site provided southern views across the city, and much closer, eastern views of Casa Loma. By 1913, eight years after being engaged by Pellatt to design Casa Loma’s stables and his purchase of the property, Lennox had decisively put pen to vellum to record designs for his own house on the ridge, adjacent to his most indulgent patron. Lennox had undoubtedly explored architectural ideas at Casa Loma – with greater or lesser success – that he could perfect, on a less aristocratic scale, for himself and his family at Lenwil. Indeed, in preparing this book, the authors considered whether Lenwil was in fact a “right-scaled” Casa Loma, and the pleasing interior volumes, appointments, and arrangements certainly suggest this reading. The exterior, however, has a much more subdued expression in its relative plainness, more akin to the popular and satisfying Arts and Crafts austerity of Eden Smith’s houses, with a touch of simple Jacobean manor house, than it is akin to the symbolic Scottish Baronial display next door. It is interesting to postulate if, out of deference to his patron’s imperially scaled project, Lennox’s Lenwil took on a quieter tone, as if not to compete with Casa Loma but rather to serve as its supporting background, or if Lennox’s personal sense of domestic propriety held more sway. His practice, second only in terms of output to the prodigious establishment architects Darling and Pearson, and at that time focused mostly on Pellatt’s projects, provided an income sufficient to deserve a reward such as Lenwil. Lennox’s firm’s portfolio, as Sharon Vattay outlines in the next chapter, included many sophisticated houses for Toronto’s emergent manage-

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Figure 1.23 Lenwil, entry at north façade.

rial and executive classes, and these were important additions to Toronto’s Late Victorian and Edwardian residential architectural scene. If Lenwil was a right-scaled Casa Loma, then it was a result of Lennox’s careful and experienced regulation of the interior volumes, their density of decoration, and the controlled spatial flow between and amongst them. On the exterior, the first storey is clad in the same Casa Loma ashlar limestone, and the upper storey is in stucco, with a terracotta tiled roof. Arriving from the north at the deep porte cochère, signalled by the simple central gable with its Tudor oriel bay (fig. 1.23), and flanked by an angled, western service wing and a tall chimneyed eastern gable, one would be forgiven for describing the exterior as dour and cheerless, which is all the more intriguing as it belies a rich interior life (fig. 1.24). One then enters a small vestibule that communicates directly with the double-height hall, vaulted corridor, arcaded space, and grand stair, the hall containing as its focus a fabulous stone Tudor mantelpiece with a minstrels’ gallery or glazed balcony over the cresting,

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60 similar to that in Casa Loma. Here, the aedicular fireplace occupies about half the height of the hall and is comfortably proportioned to the space in both its density of detail and mass (fig. 1.25). “Lenwil” is an amalgamation of Lennox’s surname and that of his wife, Emmeline Wilson. The house is reputed to have cost $250,000 to build at the time. Lennox died in 1933, and his wife continued to live at Lenwil until her death two years later.

Figure 1.24 Opposite Ground floor plan, Lenwil. Figure 1.25 Left Fireplace in double-storey Great Room, Lenwil.

Their son, Edgar Edward Lennox, also an architect, then lived in the house until 1935. After this, it stood vacant until it was purchased for $28,000 by American businessman Frederick Morrow, whose intention was to convert the structure into an apartment house, a plan that never materialized.37 In 1949, the Ukrainian Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, Christ the King Province, purchased Lenwil from Morrow for use as their Ontario residence. In 1951, they sold the estate’s frontage on Davenport Road for a residential subdivision, thereby reducing the estate’s acreage, cutting off access from the base of the hill, and buffering the view from the street to the estate above. In recent years, the sisters commissioned a sensitive addition to the southeast of the mansion, accessed by a skywalk.

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conclusion The suburban estate neighbourhood on Davenport Ridge was short-lived. Rathnelly (1851), the first of the estates to be erected, was also the first to be dismantled, and the other Victorian-era houses met similar fates, except for venerable Spadina and Oaklands. The grandest houses of Pellatt’s closest peers, Eaton’s Ardwold and Mackenzie’s Benvenuto, fell between the wars. The changes that affected the estate properties signalled not so much a decline as a shift, and an inevitable one at that. It seems strange that the inhabitants of these properties, by all accounts some of the shrewdest, most successful of the city’s business elite, were unable to forecast the rapid change that would confront their neighbourhood and ultimately afford them so little time to enjoy the idyllic atmosphere they sought in this area. Perhaps in some respects it was due to their shrewdness and example that the area changed so drastically. Figure 1.26 City encroaching on Benvenuto, 1930.

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Subdivision of the neighbourhood came early, as the property owners recognized that the city below them would only continue to develop and this real estate was desirable. Senator McMaster of Rathnelly, who purchased his estate exclusively as a country property in 1850, began to carve the southern portion into building lots in the 1880s. Simeon Janes, who purchased the largest lot carved out of the western portion of the Rathnelly estate and built Benvenuto, made the money to do so by developing the Annex neighbourhood. Janes’s successor at Benvenuto, Mackenzie, ran his street railway up Avenue Road and past his estate to have better access to and from the city. Pellatt, Mackenzie’s friend and business partner, electrified the city with the Toronto Electric Light Company (telc), running the lines north of the city’s boundaries and thereby spurring development. Each of the estate builders (or their heirs) at some point subdivided their properties, increasing densification and forever altering the character of the neighbourhood (fig. 1.26). These acts of densification resulted in rising taxation. This – combined with the city’s annexation of the neighbourhood in 1909, its major infrastructural initiatives, and a general shift in lifestyle after the excesses of the Gilded Age were called into question by the horror and sacrifice of World War I, shortly followed by the Great Depression – would ultimately spell the end of the estate era. Yet while Davenport Ridge’s character as a cohesive neighbourhood of expansive suburban estates ultimately changed, its reputation as an elite neighbourhood did not, and it remains such today. Over the course of its more than two hundred years of history, Davenport Ridge has maintained its aura of a privileged bastion overlooking Toronto.

n ote s 1 This essay builds upon themes from Sean Blank, “City at Their Feet.” 2 Kerr and Holdsworth, Historical Atlas of Canada, 170, plate 15. 3 Financial leadership of the Bank of Commerce aligned the earliest of Davenport Ridge inhabitants. The bank had been founded by Rathnelly’s McMaster, and John Macdonald of Oaklands (1860; one of the earliest of the grand houses on the ridge) had initially been a director, but he chose to resign after a disagreement with McMaster. In 1867, his seat was filled by James Austin of Spadina. After his term in 1870, Austin obtained a charter for his own bank, the Dominion Bank, and placed its subscription books in the hands of the firm of Pellatt and Osler, which at the time was helmed by Henry Pellatt Sr. One of the original nominations of directorship at Austin’s new bank was the piano manufacturer Samuel

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4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Nordheimer, who was simultaneously assembling his Glen Edyth estate immediately to the east of Austin’s Spadina. See Thompson, Spadina, 135–7. Careless, Toronto to 1918, 201, table 6. Ibid., 149. Winterton, “Toronto’s Edwardian Skyscraper Row.” See especially Lombardo, “White-Collar Workers and Neighbourhood Change.” Adams, “Eden Smith and the Canadian Domestic Revival,” 104. The idea of these estates as town seats can be further advanced by examining the private real-estate portfolios of the families who resided there. Pellatt himself retreated to Cliffside, overlooking Lake Ontario at Victoria Park, and he also had Southwood, a summer cottage inherited from his father on Lake Couchiching outside Orillia; Mackenzie and his family retreated to an immense camp on the shores of Balsam Lake, as well as a large mansion in his hometown of Kirkfield, Ontario; John Bayne Maclean, too, withdrew to his hometown of Crieff, Ontario, and made considerable improvements to his family farmhouse there; the Austins owned a working farm in Clarkson, Ontario; and the Eatons retreated to Kawandag, a rusticated neoclassical mansion on Lake Rosseau, and later the Norman Revival château Eaton Hall in King City, Ontario, adjacent to Pellatt’s Marylake. “Princely Home on Hill of Railroad Builder,” Globe and Mail, 6 December 1923. Lundell, Estates of Old Toronto, 64. Ibid., 159–60. Thompson, Spadina: A Story of Old Toronto, 181. Ibid., 201. Herbert W. Wills, “Some American Notes.” In California, Janes eventually hired Bernard Maybeck, who would go on to develop a signature West Coast Arts and Crafts style. Dendy, Lost Toronto, 184. Adam, Toronto Old and New, 144. Fleming, Railway King of Canada, 83. Lundell, Estates of Old Toronto, 86. Dendy, Lost Toronto, 144. “Fine Apartment House Near Completion,” Toronto Daily Star, 29 August 1930. Eaton, Memory’s Wall, 138. The contractors were the Toronto firm Thomson Bros, and the Don Valley Brickworks supplied the brick and limestone masonry.

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25 Eaton, Memory’s Wall, 100. 26 Eckler, “The Sources for and Influence of Jacques Carlu’s Eaton Auditorium, Toronto 1930.” 27 “Eatonia” brick utilized a range of four shades in its design: Shade 200 (Light); Shade 201 (Reddish Brown); Shade 202 (Medium); and Shade 203 (Dark). It was produced by the Don Valley Brickworks and described in their 1920 catalogue as “considered the most beautiful brick made.” See Don Valley Brickworks, Building for Beauty, Permanence and Individuality, 8–9. 28 Dendy, Lost Toronto, 185. 29 “Sell Many Fine Fixtures from Famous Eaton Home,” Toronto Daily Star, 19 September 1936. 30 Dendy, Lost Toronto, 185. 31 Stefaniuk, Walter, “Renovators Tunnel into Rich History,” Toronto Star, 15 March 1990. 32 Chalmers, Gentleman of the Press, 177. 33 Job 06722, Olmsted Archives, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, US National Park System. 34 Chalmers, Gentleman of the Press, 178. 35 Ibid., 179. 36 Martyn, Aristocratic Toronto, 210. 37 Ibid., 214.

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2 Casa Loma’s Architect E.J. Lennox’s Architectural Practice and Its Legacy in Toronto sharon vattay

The first chapter of this book situated Casa Loma on Davenport Ridge and within the development of elite neighbourhoods in Toronto. This chapter turns to consider the architectural context of Casa Loma in the career of its architect (and neighbour), Edward James Lennox (1854–1933). In a city with no shortage of capable architects in Toronto in 1905 (over one hundred architects or firms were operating at that time), how did Sir Henry Pellatt come to entrust the design of his home to E.J. Lennox? It is particularly interesting that Pellatt would choose Lennox to design his baronial castle when clearly, in terms of style or pedigree, Lennox was not the most “British” architect in Toronto at that time. The architect Eden Smith, for example, was well known in Toronto for his English style of architecture, brought with him when he emigrated from England in the 1880s. And given that Smith’s son, Henry, was a major in the Queen’s Own Rifles, Pellatt would surely have known the architect.1 Likewise, the firm of Sproatt and Rolph, which had developed a reputation for Late Gothic Revival buildings, notably their Collegiate Gothic buildings at the University of Toronto, employed a revivalist aesthetic for their residential commissions, which would have certainly appealed to Pellatt’s Old World ideals. Lennox, however, was among a generation of architects who were locally trained, schooled, and apprenticed in Toronto. While he initially worked for William Irving (a Scot who came to apprentice in Toronto in the 1850s), and likely had access to British periodicals at the library of the Mechanics’ Institute in

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Toronto early in his career, a review of his architectural output from the beginning of his practice to the time that he worked on Pellatt’s property reveals a strong influence of American architecture. Thus, while Pellatt was an imperialist and captivated by the Old World, Lennox was rooted concisely in Toronto and neighbouring cities of the United States. He was a Canadian architect who, by virtue of wanting to keep abreast of the best architecture of his day, looked to the United States – the New World – for inspiration and for the latest in technology and construction. But Lennox, as designer of perhaps the best-known building in the city at the time (the Municipal and County Buildings, now generally known as Old City Hall), was getting a great deal of publicity at the turn of the century, not all of it positive. He received negative press for his acrimonious relationship with the city and for the project’s cost overages, which led to a lengthy legal battle. One would think that a 1900 newspaper headline of “Lennox Stubborn as Ever He Was” would have had an impact on the architect’s future commissions, but someone as bold and brash as Pellatt seems not to have been swayed by such libelous commentary and retained Lennox regardless.2 Although Lennox was already working for Pellatt on his Toronto and Niagara Power Company buildings in Niagara Falls, Pellatt had professional dealings with or knowledge of several other architects who could just as easily have been retained to build his new mansion on the hill. For example, architect David Brash Dick had designed Pellatt’s father’s home on 349 Sherbourne Street in 1885; in 1891, the firm of Langley and Burke had designed Sir Henry Pellatt’s summer cottage, Cliffside, at Victoria Park in Scarborough; and the architect Edgar Beaumont Jarvis designed Sir Henry’s home at 559 Sherbourne Street in 1898. While Lennox’s then recently completed Municipal and County Buildings in Toronto were a great advertisement for the architect’s abilities, a 1905 self-published monograph by Lennox illustrating his architectural work to date would likely have also impressed Pellatt. Wanting to leave a lasting legacy, perhaps Pellatt felt that an architect who had a practice successful enough to warrant such a publication was a perfect fit for his architectural aspirations. It included photographs of more than fifty buildings, constituting only a portion of the projects that Lennox had designed – in the architect’s own words, “a few of the more prominent buildings.”3 As an impressive advertisement of Lennox’s architectural abilities, the projects illustrated in the monograph (some reproduced here) included all types of commissions: residential, commercial, institutional, ecclesiastical, and industrial. He was thirty years into what was eventually a fifty-year career, and thus the publication was as much an advertising tool for future work as it was

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a retrospective of his work. The year of publication (1905) was also the year that he first started to work with Pellatt on the Davenport ridge site. Thus, when he began working on Casa Loma with Pellatt, Lennox was in the prime of his career. He was certainly qualified to take on this substantial assignment. Having begun his career as an architect in 1876, he quickly became adept at designing buildings of all types and in all styles of architecture. Beginning with High Victorian designs in the 1870s and early 1880s, he soon came to emulate (like many of his contemporaries) the prevailing American architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His skills as an architect also capitalized on the latest in building and mechanical technologies. This chapter briefly examines Lennox’s oeuvre, which led to the Pellatt mansion commission, not only revealing his significance to design in Toronto but perhaps also helping us to appreciate what Pellatt saw in this particular architect. While Lennox moved in some of the same social circles as Pellatt, and the two men were for a time in the 1880s both living on fashionable Sherbourne Street, their professional relationship was likely the determining factor in Pellatt’s choice of Lennox to design his ambitious home known as Casa Loma. Lennox’s success, like that of many architectural practices in nineteenth-century Toronto, was built on good relations with potential clients, and while some architects could make a whole career off the patronage of one influential person and/or company, Lennox never had that luxury. He was an architect who worked tirelessly to achieve his success in the business. Word of mouth was likely a key to his growing client list, as were the physical advertisements of his completed buildings that adorned the city.

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t r aining, apprent i ceship, and bui ld i ng a repu tat i on Chronologically following a generation of architects who were born and trained in Britain before immigrating to Toronto to open practices, Lennox belonged to a new generation of architects trained on Canadian soil. In the nineteenth century, Canada had no schools of architecture as such, and Lennox had to be trained through the usual means at that time – a good liberal education (with the basics of mathematics), supplemented with drawing classes (to develop good draughts-

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manship), followed by an apprenticeship with an established architect. Documentation shows that Lennox attended drawing classes at the Toronto Mechanics’ Institute. Nineteenth-century Mechanics’ Institutes were public institutions based on a British model, formed not by mechanics and tradesmen but rather by influential men of the upper middle class who were determined to provide opportunities for adult education to the masses. These institutes were centres for lectures, exhibitions, evening classes, and libraries (precursor to the public library), and the programs were free or offered at a nominal fee. “Mechanics” were defined broadly to include most skilled workers (including carpenters, wheelwrights, shoemakers, and masons) and those specifically engaged in the mechanical arts.4 Intended to address the needs of these workers, there were classes in reading, writing, and technical skills, including the more refined activities of art. The field of architecture was of prime importance to the institute, and it offered one of the few local opportunities to study architectural drawing.5 Aspiring architects were also given the opportunity to review architectural theory and design through a wide range of publications and periodicals held in the collections of the institute’s library.6 Lennox graduated from the Mechanics’ Institute in the early 1870s “at the head of his class,” and his architectural training then continued through an apprenticeship with an established architect.7 He apprenticed for several years (ca. 1870–76) with the Scottish-born, Toronto-based architect William Irving (1830–1883). Lennox had chosen his mentor well. Irving, known for his excellent skills in delineating and draughting, was a leading architect in Ontario during the late nineteenth century.8 Looking at the projects that came from Irving’s office during the first half of the 1870s, the young Lennox would have observed the need for an architect to be proficient at many different types of buildings. The output from Irving’s office during Lennox’s tenure included commercial buildings (rows of stores) and industrial buildings (warehouses along Front Street), institutional buildings, and middle- to upper-class housing. One notable residential commission at the time was the mansion for George Brown on Beverley Street (at the corner of Baldwin Street) in 1875. Today, the building still stands as one of the best examples of Second Empire style architecture in the city. While at Irving’s office, Lennox met William Frederick McCaw (1850–1902), a young, well-trained Irishman who had come to the city in 1872 and was employed as Irving’s head draughtsman for the next four years. McCaw and Lennox set off

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together to open their own firm in 1876, and after establishing the firm of McCaw and Lennox, quickly received several commissions. In addition to a handful of residential projects and a few commercial buildings, their practice included notable institutional and ecclesiastical buildings.9 One of their first commissions was for a Masonic Hall at Queen Street West and Bathurst Street, known as Occident Hall. Not surprising for the 1870s, McCaw and Lennox employed the then-fashionable Second Empire style that the pair would have become familiar with while working at Irving’s office. The mansard roof, with a heightened central frontispiece, has since been removed from this building, which still stands at 651 Queen Street West, but the rich ornamentation typical of Second Empire architecture – sculptural roof brackets and dentils, round-headed windows with prominent keystones – remains. In 1878, cornerstones were laid for no fewer than three churches designed by McCaw and Lennox, including the Bond Street Congregational Church (northeast corner of Bond Street at Dundas Street in Toronto), the Erskine Presbyterian Church (Caer Howell – now Elm – Street at Simcoe Street in Toronto), and the Knox Presbyterian Church (in Cannington, Ontario), all now demolished (fig. 2.1). While each church was unique and site-specifically designed, they all shared certain qualities, such as the mixed use of stone and brick, asymmetrical elevations with tall towers at one corner, and the use of the Gothic Revival style, befitting the ecclesiastical architecture at that time. Lennox would later include the Bond Street Congregational church in his 1905 monograph, with a photograph of the church interior (fig. 2.2). His design for the church was based on the newly popular amphitheatrical plan instead of the traditional plan of nave, aisles, and chancel for most churches prior to the 1850s. Based on American precedents, the amphitheatrical plan had been introduced to Canada by the architectural firm of Langley, Langley, and Burke in their design for the Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto (1874–75).10 But with its combined amphitheatrical arrangement and domed, stained-glass ceiling under an octagonal roof, Lennox’s Bond Street Congregational Church was a unique design in Toronto. The double-dome arrangement was not only novel but useful both for lighting and ventilation.11 Thus, even at this very early date in Lennox’s career, he was lauded for his abilities in the mechanics of architecture, including acoustics, heating, and ventilating.12 The Daily Mail also credited McCaw and Lennox for their skills in construction, which included slender cast-iron columns supporting the gallery and the groined plaster vault of the ceiling.13

Another high-profile commission for the young firm was the Hanlan Hotel on Toronto Island, a popular summer resort that became the centre of the island community, then known as the Coney Island of Canada. The 1880 building was a sizable balloon-frame structure (i.e., constructed of wood in a framework of milled timbers) with wooden verandas and balconies; given the building’s construction, it is not surprising that it was destroyed by fire in 1909. The picturesque design can be classified as the Stick Style of architecture, developed in the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century as a direct expression of wooden construction, also characterized by its informal open planning, verandas, and Romantic display of hipped roofs.14 McCaw and Lennox’s partnership lasted only about five years, but that was not due to a lack of work or success. In 1881, McCaw and Lennox were in fact looking to expand their office when they placed an advertisement for a draughtsman to assist with the firm’s work.15 Rather, the partnership ended due to McCaw’s failing health, which precipitated a move to milder climates in the United States, where he successfully sustained a practice for many years in Portland, Oregon.16 Following the dissolution of the partnership, Lennox continued on as sole practitioner for almost the remainder of his career; it was only in the final five years of his life and practice that he worked again in a partnership, bringing in his son, Edgar Edward, to form E.J. Lennox and Son. Notably, Lennox’s mentor, Irving, died in 1883, likely

Figure 2.1 Left Erskine Presbyterian Church, Caer Howell Street at Simcoe Street, Toronto, 1878. Figure 2.2 Right Bond Street Congregational Church, Bond Street at Dundas Street East, Toronto, 1878–79.

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leaving a gap in Toronto’s architectural business at the very time that Lennox started working on his own.

l ate v i ctor ian clients and commissions

Figure 2.3 Residences for Mrs Bilton, Gerrard Street East, Toronto, 1882–83.

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The first decade of Lennox’s sole practice included a steady stream of residential work. This was not unusual given the urban expansion, ultimately engaging almost every major architectural firm in Toronto in the design of domestic architecture.17 A review of Lennox’s early house designs – or additions and alterations to existing houses, as was often his commission – reveals a quintessentially High Victorian style of architecture. Using the ubiquitous red brick of Toronto, Lennox’s picturesque designs were generally in the Queen Anne Revival style with irregular silhouettes, broad gables, multi-sloped roofs and tall, decorated chimneys, a variety of verandas, balconies, greenhouses, and porches, and windows of varying sizes and shapes. One exemplary early building was a semi-detached dwelling on Gerrard Street East at Victoria Street, designed in 1882 and built in 1883 (demolished 1948). In this instance, Lennox also employed a compositional type that in the 1870s and 1880s became “Toronto’s architectural trademark”18 – the bay-and-gable configuration whereby polygonal or square bay windows, whether one or two storeys in height, project forward under narrow gable ends on semi-detached or row houses (fig. 2.3). Also designed in 1882 and built in 1883 was the villa residence for Henry E. Clarke at 603 Jarvis Street at Charles Street, likewise demolished in 1948 – the first of many houses that Lennox designed (or designed additions for) on fashionable Jarvis. The picturesque variety of architectural features abounded in this textbook example of the Queen Anne Revival, with a variety of window bay shapes, multiple and variously sized gable ends with decorative wood fascia, a range of chimneys, and a wood-framed veranda and balcony (fig. 2.4). The layout of the Clarke home on Jarvis Street was typical of an upper-class home for the period, with impressively sized rooms on the main floor (figs. 2.5a and 2.5b). Located at the front of the house, to the left of the front hall, was the drawing room with its angled bay window on one end and the music alcove on the other; to the right of the front hall stood the library. The dining room was laid out adjacent to the rear kitchen wing, which included a scullery, bakery, and butler’s pantry. Access to the south-facing conservatory was provided via the dining room.

Casa Loma’s Architect

Figure 2.4 Clarke Residence, Jarvis Street, Toronto, 1882–83.

On the upper floor were no fewer than five bedrooms, plus servants’ quarters. During the design process (as evidenced in the extant drawings), Lennox added a bathroom to the second floor to bring the house up to the most modern standard of the day. Indoor bathrooms (rooms dedicated for personal hygiene) were just then becoming standard for the upper-middle classes, developed in conjunction with modern plumbing. Lennox owned copies of catalogues that illustrated the revolutionary plumbing fixtures that were replacing the washstands and chamber pots of the preceding decades, and his clients were of the calibre to request these innovations for the design of their new houses. Another Jarvis Street house from the 1880s was for Charles H. Massey (519 Jarvis Street). As with the Clarke house to the north, Lennox designed for Massey a grand Queen Anne Revival brick home. (The building survives but is now greatly altered.) This project marked the beginning of a professional relationship between Lennox and the wealthy and influential Massey family, who had built an empire of agricultural machinery with their Massey Manufacturing Company. As work was being completed on Charles’s house at 519 Jarvis Street, his brother, Hart A. Massey, asked

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Lennox to design an addition and to make interior alterations to his house immediately next door at 515 Jarvis Street. The interior alterations included a new grand staircase, while the addition comprised a veranda and a large conservatory (fig. 2.6).19 While the alterations to the Hart Massey house were a relatively minor commission for Lennox, the project likely fostered the architect’s relationship with the Massey family. The Massey Manufacturing Company had just expanded their industrial complex on King Street West, and Lennox was tasked with designing a fourstorey office building (1883–85) on the site. The office building was multi-functional, containing not only offices but also a library and reading room on the second floor

Casa Loma’s Architect

Figure 2.5 Opposite and above Clarke Residence, Jarvis Street, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing of basement and ground floor plan, 1882.

and a lecture room and concert hall on the third floor within the mansard roof. As with his residential designs of the time, the red-brick office building was in the Queen Anne Revival style, incorporating multiple dormer windows, a variety of tall chimneys, and a cupola (fig. 2.7). While the building still stands, at 915 King Street West, it has been much altered and has lost most of those architectural features.

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Figure 2.6 Above Residence of Hart Massey, 515 Jarvis Street, Toronto, additions, 1883 and 1886. Figure 2.7 Right Office Building for Massey Harris Company, King Street West at Massey Street, Toronto, 1883–85.

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Figure 2.8 Fred Victor Mission, Queen Street East at Jarvis Street, Toronto, 1892–94.

About a decade later, the Massey connection once again paid off for Lennox when he was commissioned by Hart Massey to design a mission building that would house the benevolent endeavour of caring for the city’s poor. The Fred Victor Mission Building (named to honour Hart’s youngest son, Victor, who had died in 1890 at the age of twenty-two) was designed in 1892 and completed in 1894 (demolished 1960).20 Located at the southeast corner of Queen Street East and Jarvis Street, the building rose six storeys, higher than any of its neighbours at that time, making it a notable landmark. Unlike any other design Lennox had yet produced, the mission building was fashioned in a Renaissance Revival style with a rusticated Ohio sandstone base, round-arched window openings, and an elaborate overhanging cornice (fig. 2.8). Lennox capitalized on the corner site, placing the main entrance on the rounded corner and also decorating the exterior of the top floor as it rounded the corner with a striking ocular window surrounded with detailed terracotta work. Also different for Lennox was the use of a buff-coloured brick instead of the typical red brick used for most of his previous buildings. This use of the lighter brick and Ohio sandstone was likely a means of conveying the aesthetic of a stone Renaissance palazzo while still relying primarily on an inexpensive brick material. It is quite telling that, concurrent with the mission project, Lennox was retained to design the Massey Mausoleum (1890–94) at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto.

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Figure 2.9 Massey Mausoleum, Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto, 1890–94.

The stone tomb was based on the form of a small Romanesque Revival church, with a central tower, a corner turret, arched windows, and a heavily rusticated entrance arch (fig. 2.9). For a project as personal and enduring as the family’s mausoleum, we might assume that the Masseys had ultimately developed great respect for and confidence in the architect.21

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innovat ion and influence from chicago Another repeat client who brought Lennox significant commissions was Alexander Henderson Manning (1819–1903). Manning began his career as a contractor but moved into politics later in life, becoming mayor of Toronto in 1873 and again in 1885, while continually engaging in real estate and business pursuits.22 His major investment was in Toronto properties, upon which he erected significant buildings

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– three of them by Lennox. The multi-storeyed, mixed-use (office and retail) Manning Arcade at 20–28 King Street West (now demolished) was designed in 1884 and completed in 1885. Arcades were a unique type of building, then popular not just in Toronto but also in many Victorian cities. Lennox’s had a twenty-foot-wide glazed passageway and included at least a dozen shops.23 A highly distinctive building, the Manning Arcade’s High Victorian exterior was decorative and sculptural; it used a dark-brown stone on the lower levels foreshadowing the material choice at Lennox’s Municipal and County Buildings, whose design began just a few years later. Carved stone figures adorned the entrance, including an allegorical figure of Industry, who bore the weight of a circular balcony at the second floor (fig. 2.10).

Figure 2.10 Manning Arcade, King Street West, Toronto, 1884–85.

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With the design of the Manning Arcade in the 1880s, Lennox’s designs began to show the influence of the Chicago school of architecture (here with the grid of windows, notably in the grouping of three windows per bay), a style that can more clearly be seen on another of Lennox’s commercial buildings designed for the same client. About a decade after the Manning Arcade, Manning hired Lennox to design a multi-storeyed office building at the northwest corner of Queen Street East and Bay Street (then known as Terauley Street). Designed in 1895 and constructed between 1899 and 1900, this seven-storey building was much less flamboyant than the arcade and was a good example of the new skyscraper aesthetic recently introduced by American architects, notably Louis Sullivan. Composed of a distinctive base (the ground floor with the entrances and commercial uses), a shaft (defined by the regular fenestration across multiple storeys), and a capping element (here the sixth-floor windows were grouped with the round window above, in harmony

Figure 2.11 Manning Chambers, Queen Street East at Terauley Street, Toronto, 1895–1900.

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with a broad, overhanging, decorated cornice), this building was certainly a modern addition to the cityscape (fig. 2.11). Its design marks a transitional period of architectural design when the historicism of past architectural styles was being reimagined as a new aesthetic for the modern multi-storeyed buildings. Lennox had also recently constructed another multi-storeyed office building at the corner of Victoria Street and Adelaide Street East: the Freehold Loan and Savings Company Office Block (1889–91). While the exterior of that building took its design cues from the historically based Romanesque Revival and had not yet fully embraced the modern aesthetic of tall office buildings, it is an important example of Lennox’s work because it demonstrated his abilities to integrate modern materials and construction techniques. As touted by the Toronto World, “the interior of the building will be very substantially constructed of iron and steel frame work and fireproof bricks on [sic] the new and novel manner.”24 Lennox, however, is not recognized as the architect who brought American architectural advancements to Toronto – that achievement goes to the architect Edmund Burke. As Angela Carr has noted, “Conceptually Lennox understood the potentials of the metal frame, but as Burke observed, did not make the most of its possibilities. In fact, the engineer’s aesthetic perfected by the ‘Chicago men’ was singularly absent from Canada until Burke experimented with it in the mid-1890s.”25 Burke’s six-storey department store for Robert Simpson, built (in 1894, rebuilt 1895 after a fire destroyed the first building) a few years after the construction of Lennox’s Freehold Loan and Savings Company Office, was the first true self-supporting metal-frame building in Canada.26 Yet in the context of Toronto in 1890, Lennox’s Freehold building was still considered advanced. Other modern amenities included two iron passenger elevators, lavatories on all floors, and an extensive ventilation system. Interestingly, one of the eventual tenants of this five-storey office building was the Electrical Development Company of Ontario (edc), a syndicate formed in 1903 by Pellatt.

cr aftsmanship, contac ts, and cl assicism No writing on Lennox would be complete without mention of the Toronto Municipal and County Buildings, now known as Old City Hall, although the background history and architectural details of the massive civic structure is too complex to recount in this chapter.27 While a major part of his professional career

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was dedicated to this commission (spanning close to fifteen years between the time his design was chosen to the time he was ultimately paid by the city after lengthy legal battles about architectural fees), a few aspects of this project are particularly relevant as we move closer in time to Lennox’s working relationship with Pellatt at the outset of the twentieth century. With this important commission, Lennox was able to illustrate his architectural abilities on many fronts, continuing his reputation as an architect skilled not only with the newest technologies but also with fine craftsmanship and artistic ornamentation. Regarding technology, Lennox ensured that the building had the very best system of heating, plumbing, gas fittings, and electrical lighting – something that would be capitalized on when designing Pellatt’s home.28 As architect and general contractor, Lennox was involved in all aspects of the building’s design and construction. His attention to detail became legendary, and many notable sub-contractors and craftsmen were retained. For example, the Toronto Fence and Ornamental Iron Works produced the fanciful metalwork of the grand staircase in the double-height front hall of the Toronto Municipal and County Buildings. This metalwork included the railings as well as the lamp standards and the decorative griffins flanking the stairs (fig. 2.12). Also in the front hall is the oversized stained-glass window commissioned from the McCausland family of glaziers.29 Depicting the “Union of Commerce and Industry,” the site-specific window symbolizes and commemorates the building of the new municipal structure, using allegorical figures that stand for the city’s business and industrial ventures. The building still includes integrated wall paintings by George Reid, a leading muralist and major figure in Toronto’s art community. Outside, the ornamentation is especially notable in the extensive stone carving. Carried out by the prolific Toronto firm of Holbrook and Mollington, the details include carved capitals, friezes, and corbels.30 The calibre of work Lennox demanded was likely not lost on Pellatt, who would have aspired to the same deliberate treatment on his mansion. Ultimately, these architectural details came together in what is perhaps the best example in Toronto of the Richardsonian Romanesque style of architecture. Developed as the signature style of American architect Henry Hobson Richardson in the 1870s and 1880s, the style first made its way to Canada in the late 1880s, but it was Lennox who was its most “skillful imitator.”31 Indeed, it is well known that Lennox’s Municipal and County Buildings are inspired by Richardson’s Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail in Pittsburgh (1884–86) – leaving as a clear understate-

Figure 2.12 Municipal and County Buildings, Toronto, interior details by the Toronto Fence and Ornamental Iron Works Manufacturers, 1898.

ment Lennox’s assertion that “Pittsburgh is the only city that has a building that is somewhat similar in its appointments.”32 But Lennox was not plagiarizing the great Richardson; rather, he was showing his abilities as a masterful designer who could emulate the current and highly fashionable styles of American architecture. Lennox’s next big commission, the King Edward Hotel, has been called one of the best Edwardian buildings in the city. At the time of the commission in 1901, Lennox was known and respected by many of the prominent citizens of the city, and it is not surprising that the Toronto Hotel Company (comprised of men such as Aemilius Jarvis, George Cox and George Horace Gooderham) hired him to complete the building that was initially designed by American architect Henry Ives Cobb. Built during a period of prosperity in Toronto, the commission was a good preparatory exercise for the lavishness of the Pellatt commission. The new hotel was referred to in the press as “colossal and palatial.”33 The buff brick exterior featured grey stone details and, high above the street (under the massive overhanging cornice), moulded terracotta panels detailed to look like stone carvings (fig. 2.13).

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Figure 2.13 Right King Edward Hotel, King Street East, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing detail of two upper storeys in terra cotta, as amended for new King Edward Hotel, January 1902. Figure 2.14 Opposite Power House for the Electrical Development Company, Niagara Falls, 1903–08.

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On the interior, some of the best American designers were commissioned to supply fixtures and furnishings – a move that Canadian Architect and Builder questioned for its neglect of Canadian talent.34 Mural decorations, for example, were commissioned from a number of companies based in New York City, including Tiffany.35 In considering Lennox’s practice and his ability to foster relationships with clients, we need only analyze the guest list of a dinner held at the new King Edward Hotel in April 1903.36 That night Lennox was rubbing elbows with members of the Toronto Hotel Company syndicate, which included the notable businessman George Horace Gooderham and the lawyer and entrepreneur David Faskin. Within a few years of that dinner, Lennox received contracts for a new house on University Avenue for Faskin (1905) and, although modest, a cottage/fishing bungalow for a member of the Gooderham family (W.H. Gooderham, 1904). With the massive Municipal and County Buildings under his belt and the modern King Edward Hotel opened in 1903, Lennox quickly turned to another highprofile project, designing the Toronto and Niagara Power Company buildings in Niagara Falls for the Electrical Development Company of Ontario. Incorporated in 1903, the edc was responsible for conveying electrical energy from Niagara Falls to the City of Toronto. This achievement was due in no small part to Henry Mill Pellatt, the edc’s president.37 Lennox’s design for the massive powerhouse, drawn up in 1903, was approved by the company in January 1904 (fig. 2.14). The building left little doubt that the architect well understood the logic of the popular Beaux-Arts mode of design, capitalizing on the drama and elegance of the classical vocabulary and an axially planned layout. The building is constructed with a heavy steel frame and an Indiana

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limestone exterior, described as an architecture “every bit as powerful in design as the power the generators it housed would create.”38 A central pavilion with a projecting temple front is flanked by lengthy colonnades along the wings, and at the end of the west wing, an apsidal temple projects from the façade. The laying of the cornerstones on 9 May 1906 was documented in the newspapers of the day, which commented on the group of people who travelled by train from Toronto to Niagara to take part in the ceremony. Lennox, who supervised the laying of the cornerstones, was in the party, which included engineers, government officials, and delegates of the power company.39 Thus, once again, he found himself in an auspicious situation with access to numerous potential clients – including Pellatt, with whom he had already started working on the proposed mansion in 1905.

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Pellatt’s “castle” commission, which required the architect’s attention roughly from 1905 to 1913, may seem like a major work of architecture, but in reality Casa Loma was just one of many commissions that Lennox had underway during the first and second decades of the twentieth century. While very little historical documentation has yet been found specifically related to Lennox’s architectural office, it must have been of some size, with a team of delineators helping to produce the hundreds of drawings and reams of specifications for concurrent commissions. Otherwise, he would not have had the ability to simultaneously design several pavilion buildings on the campus of the Toronto Western Hospital. His work there spanned the course of five years, culminating in 1909 with the hospital’s new main building. As with the mansion, the hospital project required dozens of detailed drawings produced throughout several years of construction. The design of the hospital could not have been more different from that of Casa Loma. At the hospital, where the need for health facilities far outweighed the public funds available, Lennox designed buildings that were handsome yet plain (fig. 2.15). They were predominantly constructed in red brick, the ornamentation fairly limited and primarily achieved through contrasting colour combinations, with Roman Stone detailing for the quoins and window surrounds. As we will see in the following chapter, the use of Roman Stone was concurrent with Lennox’s use of this artificial material at Casa Loma.

Figure 2.15 Toronto Western Hospital, Bathurst Street, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing detail of centre bay, July 1901.

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Perhaps the largest commission during the Casa Loma years was the rebuilding of the west wing of the Provincial Parliament Buildings (1909–10) at Queen’s Park. Following a fire, Lennox was tasked with ensuring that the new construction met all the new fire codes to prevent another disastrous loss in the future. In keeping with the original architectural style employed by Richard Waite, the American architect of the 1890s structure, Lennox again revealed his skill with the Richardsonian Romanesque style with its heavy rounded arches, stone carvings, and robust forms. One of Lennox’s last works was a truly personal one: the new St Paul’s Anglican Church (1909–13) on Bloor Street East was the church in which he worshipped (fig. 2.16).40 The splendid Gothic Revival stone structure was constructed immediately adjacent to the nineteenth-century parish church, a building that Lennox had previously altered several times. Given this brief summary of his career, it should come as no surprise to the reader that the architect once again excelled in the design of the church, here employing a bold, early-twentieth century version of Gothic Revival. On the north/front elevation of the stone structure, the three deeply recessed arched doorways with archivolt moulding are echoed by the three towering lancet windows, and on the east and west elevations, the transepts feature massive rose windows filled with stained glass. A comment in a newspaper article published shortly after Lennox’s death reveals the architect’s benevolence towards the church:

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It was fitting that the funeral service should be held in the edifice he loved and which would stand for all time as a memorial to his genius. The late Mr. Lennox had long been actively associated with St. Paul’s; he had prepared the plans for the extension of the old church, also for the parish hall. He had planned and built the present church and knew every fibre in it. E.J. Lennox devoted all his great talents and time in the construction of the church and in hastening its completion. When the task was completed he had insisted that his work be accepted as his contribution to the building fund.41 Lennox died on 15 April 1933 in a house he had built for himself adjacent to Casa Loma. Every local newspaper carried an article or obituary about him. One article specifically cited in its headline that he had designed the Old City Hall (the Municipal and County Buildings), Casa Loma, and other major Toronto buildings.42 Lennox designed close to two hundred projects (almost all in Toronto) over his

Figure 2.16 St Paul’s Anglican Church, Bloor Street East, Toronto. E.J. Lennox preliminary sketch, July 1909.

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fifty-year career from about 1876 to the outset of the 1930s. Many of those buildings were small in scale (i.e., residential), but others were notable structures or key landmarks, including massive industrial complexes, substantial commercial buildings, important institutional buildings, and prominent churches. Ultimately, Lennox was not a builder of castles, and, aside perhaps from his own house, Lenwil, no other commission relates to Casa Loma in terms of style and composition. But in his extraordinary diversity as a designer and his sheer energy and industriousness as an architect, he remains most deserving of the title of “Builder of Toronto.”43 And it was likely Pellatt’s acceptance of Lennox as a “builder of Toronto” that led to the Casa Loma commission. Perhaps Pellatt saw in Lennox a kindred spirit, a bold personality who was at the front line of Toronto’s architectural scene. As this very brief review of Lennox’s work indicates, he had strengths working in a variety of styles, a track record of employing the latest in modern technologies and construction techniques, and notable skills in building residences and other larger-scale projects. As both a home and a city landmark, Casa Loma was an ideal opportunity to exploit his talents and creativity.

notes 1 2 3 4 5

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Neal, Eden Smith, 9. “Lennox Stubborn as Ever He Was,” Toronto Daily Star, 11 May 1900. Lennox, E.J. Lennox, Architect, 1905. Ramsay, “Art and Industrial Society,” 85. Classes in architectural draughting had been offered since 1863. See Carr, Redefining Canadian Architecture, 11. Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 138n337–8. Mulvany, History of Toronto, 354. Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Canada, 1800–1950, s.v. “William Irving,” http://www.dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org/node/107. Litvak, Edward James Lennox, 1. Litvak’s 1995 publication is a comprehensive source for reviewing the chronological history of the architect’s practice. Carr, Redefining Canadian Architecture, 27. Robertson, Landmarks of Toronto, 482. “Dedication Service: Opening of the Bond Street Congregational Church,” Daily Mail (Toronto), 2 May 1879.

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13 “Architectural Progress: Description of some of the buildings erected during the past summer,” Daily Mail (Toronto), 5 November 1878. 14 Curtis, Modern Architecture, 93. 15 Globe (Toronto), 28 April 1881. 16 Hines, Illustrated History, 677. 17 Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 117. 18 McHugh, Toronto Architecture, 16. 19 Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 115. The house was designed for A.R. McMaster. Upon McMaster’s death in 1882, Hart Massey purchased the house. 20 Fagan, Fred Victor Mission Story, 23. 21 It is interesting to note that, even though Lennox received several commissions from the Massey family in the 1880s and 1890s, he was not chosen for the design of Hart Massey’s Music Hall of the same time period (1893–94). That commission went to architect Sidney Badgley, although numerous history books on Toronto over the years have mistakenly attributed the hall to Lennox. It appears from Lennox’s cash book that he was paid for “looking over plans” of the hall in September 1895. 22 Alexander Reford, “Alexander Henderson Manning,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/manning_alexander_henderson_13E.html. 23 “New Arcade on King Street,” Toronto Mail, 11 August 1884. 24 “New Freehold Loan Building,” The Toronto World, 25 January 1890. 25 Carr, Redefining Canadian Architecture, 110. 26 Kalman, History of Canadian Architecture, 574. 27 Arthur, Toronto: No Mean City, 201–9. 28 “The New Municipal Buildings, Toronto,” Canadian Architect and Builder 10, no. 12 (December 1897): 230. 29 In 1896, the company was Joseph McCausland & Son. In 1905, the company was named Joseph B. McCausland & Sons (as indicated by Joseph McCausland’s obituary). (The “Son” was Robert.) According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, the stained-glass department of Joseph McCausland’s firm was made under a separate company in 1897. Robert’s first major commission with the firm was the 1897 Municipal and County Buildings window. The company name changed to “Robert McCausland Limited” at least as early as 1913 when On the Making of Stained Glass Windows was published by the company. The 1914 City Directory lists two firms: “Joseph McCausland & Son” and “Robert McCausland Limited.” 30 The best-known stone carvings on the building are those designed to honour Lennox

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31

32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

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himself, including a face purported to be his portrait in the massive composite capital by the building’s front entrance and the letters spelling out the architect’s name on the carved cornice corbels that wrap around the building. Angela Carr has asserted that Langley and Burke’s Sherbourne Street Methodist Church (1886–87) was one of the earliest Canadian manifestations of Richardsonian Romanesque, but the church Lennox designed in the following year (1887) made it clear that he was one of Richardson’s few genuinely skilful imitators. See Carr, Redefining Canadian Architecture, 34–5. “The New Court House,” Globe (Toronto), 13 May 1886. “The Palatial New Hotel,” Toronto Daily Star, 14 March 1903. “By the way,” Canadian Architect and Builder 16, no. 8 (August 1903): 126. “Contracts Awarded,” Contract Record, 30 April 1902; and “Contracts Awarded,” Contract Record, 21 May 1902. “A Notable Event,” Globe (Toronto), 25 April 1903. The newly incorporated Electrical Development Company of Ontario was a marriage between Pellatt’s Toronto Electric Light Company, William Mackenzie and his Toronto Railway Company, and Frederic Nicholls of the Canadian General Electric Company. This merger formed a new holding company called the Toronto Power Company. See Mathews, Road to Marylake, 35. Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 61. “Service in St. Paul’s for Noted Architect,” Globe (Toronto), 9 May 1906. “Noted Architect E.J. Lennox Dies in His 76th Year,” Globe (Toronto), 17 April 1933. “Noted Architect, E.J. Lennox, Dies,” Mail and Empire (Toronto), 19 April 1933. “Ed. J. Lennox Dies Aged 75,” Evening Telegraph (Toronto), 17 April 1933. “Builder of Toronto E.J. Lennox Passes,” Toronto Daily Star, 17 April 1933.

3 The Design and Construction of Casa Loma, 1905–1913 sharon vattay

While documents confirm that architect Edward James Lennox prepared his first sketch for Sir Henry Pellatt’s new mansion early in 1905, we actually know less about the overall design process or the patron-client collaboration than we might expect for a twentieth-century building. As noted elsewhere, Pellatt’s personal documents are sparse, and unfortunately the same can be said for Lennox. The architect’s office files (including architectural drawings, specifications, financial records, and a library of source materials) have not survived in one complete collection. Rather, those original documents that do survive have been dispersed among several public and private collections, and some have been relocated several times over. This dispersal has led to the loss of a comprehensive record of the architect’s practice. To date, no daily journals have been found that would provide insight into Lennox’s day-to-day activities and his design process. Nor, more importantly, have personal documents such as correspondence with his clients (specifically with Pellatt) been discovered. Similarly, local newspapers are typically a good source of information when researching the history of a modern building campaign, particularly one as large as Casa Loma, yet newspaper articles on the development of the site are rare. One of the few notices can be found in the Toronto Telegram of 1907, and that was only a brief notice about the proposed “palatial residence” to be erected in the summer.1

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This chapter examines the extant documentation for the house, with a particular focus on the architectural drawings that survive, in an effort to chronicle the history of the design of Casa Loma and its outbuildings and also to attempt to describe the client-architect relationship. The estate as we know it today includes not only the castle with its massive garden on the south slope of the Davenport hill, along with the adjacent stables to the north, but also the lesser-known caretakers’ lodge and the workers’ cottages. Formerly, there were also extensive gardens associated with the stable complex. What may be surprising to some is that the development of the estate began not with the house but, as Pellatt said late in life, “grew out of a greenhouse.”2

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After Pellatt’s first purchase of land for his house in 1903, a second purchase in 1905 completed his twenty-five-acre holding, combining dozens of individual building lots first surveyed for development in 1889.3 According to Lucy Booth Martyn, Lennox accompanied Pellatt to Britain in 1905 to purchase the extra lands from Nina de Pencier, granddaughter of Colonel Joseph Wells.4 (Colonel Wells had purchased the lands in 1821 from John McGill, who built one of the earliest structures on the ridge, named Davenport.) Martyn also claimed that during that trip Lennox bought nearly three acres for himself on which he would later build his own home, Lenwil (see chapter 1). For Pellatt, 1905 was a pivotal year. On 8 November, he was knighted – a title he had coveted for some time. That same year, he directed Lennox to sketch out a proposal for his new home on Davenport Ridge. The architect produced preliminary sketches of the ground-floor plan in January 1905, followed by a sketch for the first-floor plan in February 1905. These sketches were amended on 5 and 6 April, the first of many amendments to the plans, which continued to be refined over the course of several years. Unfortunately, these earliest drawings have not been located; Lennox’s record book provides us only with the title and date of these versions, and thus the actual design remains a mystery. The architect appears to have done no further work on the design of the mansion until 1909. Instead, architect and patron focused on the impressive complex

Figure 3.1 Advertisement for the Roman Stone Company Ltd, incorporating E.J. Lennox’s drawing of the garden wall around the caretaker’s lodge at Casa Loma, 1905.

of out-buildings and gardens. One of the earliest extant architectural drawings for the Pellatt site is a modest plan and elevation for a garden wall and gate. Dated January 1905, this drawing reveals Lennox’s attention to detail: even something as pedestrian as a fence garnered the architect’s skills in design and delineation. Here a robust classical balustrade runs along the top of a stone wall whose plan follows the curve of the road on the northwestern corner of Austin Terrace and Walmer Road. On top of each balustrade pier is a decorative stone carving of a vase with flowers, while piers flanking the stairs’ iron gates are given a sculptural Beaux Arts treatment akin to the design of Lennox’s contemporary King Edward Hotel (see fig. 2.13). While the above description refers to “stone,” in reality the garden wall is built of a much less permanent, but thoroughly modern, building material – an artificial stone or concrete composite that became widely available in the first decade of the twentieth century and was ultimately used extensively on the castle itself. At that time, of several new manufacturers of precast artificial stone, the largest in Canada was the Roman Stone Company of Toronto, established in 1903.5 A 1905 advertisement for the company used Lennox’s drawing of Pellatt’s garden wall and gate as an example of this versatile material (fig. 3.1). Roman Stone, the advertisement claimed, gave architects an opportunity to ornament their designs by using a material purported to be more durable than cut stone without increasing the cost. However, according to Pellatt biographer Carlie Oreskovich, the Scottish masons who ultimately worked on the castle’s construction became contemptuous of this

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artificial stone, anticipating that it would disintegrate.6 Their disdain proved well placed, as the material did fail quite quickly and continues to be a major focus of restoration efforts at the site. The garden wall depicted in that 1905 drawing was not for Pellatt’s mansion but rather for a building sometimes referred to as the caretaker’s lodge, which predates the castle. Indeed, the first structures to be erected on the Pellatt property included a two-storey caretaker’s lodge (at the corner of Walmer Road and Austin Terrace) and two-storey semi-detached workmen’s cottages farther north (at 334 and 336 Walmer Road). Architecturally, the lodge and cottages are very similar in style (figs 3.2 and 3.3), and when compared to Lennox’s residential work of the previous decade (fig. 3.4), they reveal an evolution in his architectural style. Certainly the picturesqueness and variety of architectural features that appeared in Lennox’s late nineteenth-century work are still used here, but now the bolder outlines and limited ornamentation trends toward the early twentieth-century Edwardian era. Both the caretaker’s lodge and workmen’s cottages have squat corner towers (based on octagonal plans) and a conical roof. Both also have a round-arched parapet projecting above the roofline and broadly overhanging roofs on both the house and the projecting porches. Materials, consistent across the two properties, include rubble-stone foundations and a red brick exterior with Roman Stone details at the Figure 3.2 Postcard, Sir H.M. Pellatt’s stables at “Casa Loma,” Toronto, Canada. Valentien & Sons Publishing Co. Ltd, 1910.

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Figure 3.3 Left Workmen’s cottages, Col. H.M. Pellatt’s Estate, Davenport Road, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, June 1905. Figure 3.4 Below Residence of James B. Boustead, Bloor Street, Toronto, 1891–92.

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window heads, sills, and quoins. The main difference between the two buildings is in size and plan, each being designed specifically for their respective uses. The lodge, whose ultimate use was intended for the caretaker of the Pellatt estate property, was also designed to serve as a retreat for Pellatt and his wife prior to the mansion’s construction. Living then on fashionable Sherbourne Street (see fig. 1.3), and even with their summer cottage in Scarborough, the Pellatts often withdrew to the ridge to tend to the extensive gardens planted on their newly acquired lands (fig. 3.5) (see chapter 5). An architectural plan of the lodge’s second-floor layout provides a sign of what would eventually come in the mansion proper (fig. 3.6). One portion of the plan was devoted to Pellatt’s chambers, a suite of rooms consisting of a bedroom, dressing room, closet, and bathroom. A larger portion was reserved for Lady Pellatt’s chambers, including her bedroom, wardrobe, closet, bathroom, and sitting or dressing room. Both of these combinations of rooms of various shapes and sizes

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Figure 3.5 Opposite View of Casa Loma gardens, 1910. Figure 3.6 Left Plan of the caretaker’s lodge. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing.

with interconnecting doorways would find their way into Lennox’s final design of the second floor of the mansion a few years later. And while a relatively modest affair, the caretaker’s lodge still had the requisite servants’ quarters. Once the lodge and cottages were nearing completion, Lennox began the design of the building now generally referred to as the stables and coach house. The stables consist of several connected buildings or pavilions forming a complex that served a range of uses. Built on the west side of Walmer Road, between the workmen’s cottages and the caretaker’s lodge, the rambling stable complex stretched across several building lots. The L-shaped plan begins at the south with the flat-roofed potting shed and a small, apsidal conservatory, then continues northward through the long, narrow, gable-roofed automobile garage. This is followed by the Latin cross plan portion that housed the stables proper. At the head of the stable pavilion rises a cluster of towers – three and a half storeys and six storeys tall. The most northerly wing of the stable complex was occupied by a coachman’s residence. With five greenhouses running eastward from the eastern façade of the potting shed, a U-shaped courtyard layout was ultimately formed (fig. 3.7).

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Figure 3.7 View of Casa Loma stables complex, 1913.

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William Dendy and William Kilbourn described the stable complex as “grandiosely overbuilt,” asserting that the stables cost a quarter of a million dollars, making them more expensive than all but a few of the largest mansions in Toronto at the time.7 The importance of the stable complex to Pellatt and Lennox is clear by the dozens of drawings that were prepared, beginning in November 1905 and continuing throughout the first half of 1906 – certainly more drawings than any house Lennox had previously designed. For each elevation, he produced dozens of additional detailed drawings of decorative features (figs 3.8 and 3.9). No two elevations were the same, and the variety of architectural features abounded, including towers, turrets,

The Design and Construction of Casa Loma

dormers, parapet walls, and finials. It was here at the stable complex that Lennox first introduced the castle aesthetic into his architectural vocabulary, taking as his inspiration the grandiose Victorian stable complexes of Britain such as Shadwell Park in Norfolk.8 What was particularly extraordinary at the stable complex was the six-storey baronial tower. Serving no specific useable function, it was clearly meant to create a monumental landmark high upon Davenport Ridge. When work on the stable complex was completed in mid-1906, there followed a lull in the development on Pellatt’s property for more than two years. In 1909, before work commenced on the mansion proper, Pellatt seems to have been considering even more additions to the stable complex. In February that year, Lennox drew up a proposal for new conservatories to be constructed adjacent to the existing greenhouses (fig 3.10). The humble brick potting shed was also considered for reuse as a conservatory, replacing its existing flat roof with a glass conservatory roof, and a new linear conservatory structure was to run along the eastern end of the existing greenhouses, parallel with Walmer Road. At the centre of the proposed greenhouse, a two-storey glazed pavilion with an onion-domed roof would have marked the location of a lily pond within the building. Lennox was well versed at designing glasshouses, or conservatories, on many of his residential commissions (see fig. 2.6), although this seems to have been the largest and most ambitious that he had designed to date. (All of his previous conservatory designs were attached to houses.) This conservatory was never constructed, likely because the developing plans for the mansion would eventually include an integrated conservatory or Palm Room.

the castle After four years, the architect’s attention returned to the house proper in 1909. In September, Lennox prepared new drawings of the mansion’s floor plans for the basement and ground floor, replacing the sketches of 1905. Given the number of renditions of the plan, we can speculate that client and architect had discussed various options for layout and program over the years, even if, sadly, we have no documentary evidence of these exchanges. Also regrettable is the loss of those earliest floor plans from 1905; as noted, we know about them only from a list of drawings in Lennox’s record book and therefore do not know if or how the plans may have evolved throughout the design process.

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Figure 3.8 Above Scale details of stable, coach house, etc., for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, east cart shed entrance, June 1906.

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Figure 3.9 Opposite Scale details of stable, coach house, etc., for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, driveway entrance, June 1906.

In examining the extant architectural drawings for a variety of Lennox’s projects over the years, one is struck by the fact that the drawing of a building’s plan almost always predates the drawing of the elevation. This would suggest that Lennox focused initially on the practical need of appropriately arranging interior spaces and understanding their intended uses, as opposed to being confined by a predeter-

mined form and massing (the general “look” of a building). This seems to be the approach used for Pellatt’s mansion. Lennox’s Register of Drawings reveals that the first time he drew up the mansion’s exterior was in May 1910 – five full years after first proposing a plan. The design of the exterior of the castle begs the question of who was directing the style of the building: the architect or the patron? Dendy and Kilbourn contend that Pellatt handed Lennox a sheaf of sketches and photographs illustrating his ideas about castle architecture, but the source of this claim is uncited and may well be spurious.9 The assertion was perhaps made on the basis of several newspaper accounts written at the time of construction and beyond. For example, one writer for the Canadian Magazine penned an article on Pellatt in 1912, lauding Pellatt’s many achievements:

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Figure 3.10a, b Opposite and left Sketch plan of new conservatories and alterations to greenhouses; also new glass roof to present potting house for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill. E.J. Lennox, ground plan, 13 February 1909.

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His eye seems to be intuitively artistic, and he is able to properly appreciate a piece of architecture … He has planned many houses for himself and friends, and while listening to or taking part in any discussion, he habitually makes a design with his pencil. But the crowning achievement of this side of his nature is the mansion that is now under construction above the Davenport Road, on the crest of land overlooking the city of Toronto. Sir Henry has not rushed the building of this mansion. For years it has been turning about in his mind, where, by building up and tearing down, so to speak, many important features have evolved themselves.10 The writer made no mention of Lennox. Could it have been that Pellatt was more of an amateur architect than we know, or was the journalist’s account simply biased toward the subject of his article? A Pellatt newspaper interview in 1924, almost two decades after the mansion was first conceived, again seems to provide us with some evidence about who was responsible for the designs. In the Toronto Star Weekly, we read that Pellatt “designed Casa Loma himself ” and that he described it as a “monument to the fortress architecture of the ages.” It bears reproducing a large part of this article said to quote Pellatt himself:

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I have been a student of architecture all my life and as I have traveled very extensively, particularly in England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Italy, I have had a splendid opportunity to observe and carefully examine for myself the ancient fortresses and castles of the world. Casa Loma is a result of my travels and consequent observations. My home is a collection, as it were, of all the little bits of castle architecture that attracted me most. I drew the plan of every room and part of it myself, the measurements are all my own, the design is my own, the choice of stone, the decoration, the general plan, every bit was planned by myself and there was no alteration. I had no difficulty in constructing the building, and had it not been for the fact that the perspective work bothered me, I could have dispersed with an architect altogether. As I go over the place now, I can see little bits of the ancient castles of Scotland, a piece of some old fortress from Italy or a tower that is an exact reproduction of one that crowns some ancient Schloss upon the Rhine, a bit

The Design and Construction of Casa Loma

of Picardy, a turret from England, or a square battlement from a crumbling Irish home. That is what I want you to understand, Casa Loma is not merely a big house. It is an architectural museum, something absolutely unique, the union, as it were, of the fortress architecture of all the ages.11 From this excerpt, there is apparently no doubt as to the source and authorship of the building’s design: Pellatt’s house seems to be a product of his architectural aspirations and knowledge. But five days after the article appeared, the Toronto Daily Star published a letter received from Pellatt, who sought to correct the article, which he called “misleading” and not as intended “in reference to the originating, planning and designing of his residence.” To clear up any “injustice” unintentionally done to Lennox, Pellatt wrote, “I wish to be distinctly understood that when I decided to erect Casa Loma and its stable buildings, I handed the commission to Mr. E.J. Lennox, architect, who is responsible for the planning, designing and construction and interior decorations, and it was not my intention in any remarks that I may have made to discredit the important professional association that Mr. Lennox carried out in connection with this undertaking entrusted to him.”12 Irrespective of Pellatt’s adamant clarification, the authorship of the mansion’s overall design was continually attributed to the owner and not the architect, largely due to the repetition of the previously published information. In Frederick Griffin’s biography of Pellatt, written in 1939 upon Pellatt’s death, the author recounted a statement said to have been made by Pellatt, clearly taken from the earlier Toronto Star Weekly article. Griffin paraphrased Pellatt: “All my life I have been a student of architecture and I have travelled extensively, particularly in England, Scotland, Ireland Germany, Austria and Italy. I had an opportunity to observe and carefully examine many ancient fortresses and castles. Casa Loma is a result of my observations and travels.”13 This statement was subsequently repeated in a comprehensive 1982 publication on Pellatt14 and is perhaps why to this day the attribution of the design is still clouded in uncertainty. But even with a style of architecture that was completely anomalous in Lennox’s oeuvre, much of the mansion’s layout and overall design can be understood as a product of the architect’s well-developed skills. While at first glance the house seems very complex, in actuality it takes its cues from a fairly straightforward layout.

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Lennox’s floor plans show a generally I-shaped layout, with the main portion of the plan running east-west (see plans 1 through 4). And while the house seems grand in scale, it is ultimately a three-storey house amplified in height by the multiple chimneys and towers – each in a different language of historicist design (plan 5). The tower over the front entrance portico is square in plan with a crenellated parapet wall rising above the roofline. The other two towers are circular. In addition to the three towers, the exterior of the castle has other medieval or medieval-inspired architectural features, such as the bay windows, canted oriel windows, stone-balustraded balconies, arcades, castellated parapet walls, and bartizans (plans 6 through 9). Dendy and Kilbourn asserted that these features “create facades that appear haphazard but are actually carefully controlled to give each room a unique space, character and outlook.”15 Peter Coffman, quoting Michael McCarthy’s description of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, called this “conscious asymmetry” in keeping with the British picturesque tradition.16 One example of this irregularity can be found on the front/north façade of the castle. To the right of the square tower over the entrance, a wide two-storey oriel window corresponds with the Great Hall and stair within, while to the east of the tower, a lower two-storey open arcade marks a loggia and balcony. Lennox was well versed at designing in an asymmetrical manner, as was evident in his earlier Richardsonian Romanesque buildings such as the Municipal and County Buildings and the Broadway Tabernacle Church. Asymmetry was also typical of his Queen Anne Revival style residential buildings. Indeed, many of the architectural features that make up the exterior aesthetic of Pellatt’s mansion – towers, oriels, and bay windows, corbelled brickwork, stepped gable ends, and a variety of tall chimneys – were common characteristics of both of these earlier styles of design. As noted, the design of the castle began with the plan. In plan, the principal rooms of the house were arranged along the southern flank thus offering a view of the city below Davenport Ridge. The rooms included the drawing room (in the western-most pavilion), the double-storeyed Great Hall, the library, and the dining room (in the eastern-most pavilion). These four rooms were arranged off of the central corridor, which provided an uninterrupted view from east to west and direct access from one end of the house (the western veranda) to the other end (to the conservatory or Palm Room). On the north side of this corridor were the smoking and billiard room, the great staircase, the entrance vestibule, and Pellatt’s business

The Design and Construction of Casa Loma

office. The remainder of the ground floor was devoted to the service rooms (including the kitchen, breakfast room, butler’s pantry, scullery and servants’ quarters). These were all requisite rooms for elite residences of the time and not unlike the layout of many of Lennox’s previous residential commissions (see figs 2.5a and 2.5b). What did differ was the size of the rooms at Pellatt’s house. The double-height Great Hall certainly would have awed even the upper classes, who may have had an impressive entrance hall in their homes, but few were of the double height in the vein of great British manor houses. The Great Hall at Casa Loma found an equal only in contemporary houses such as Chorley Park (the French Renaissance chateau-style mansion built 1911–15 for the lieutenant governor of Ontario), or John Craig Eaton’s nearby home, known as Ardwold (1909–11) (fig 1.18). But whereas the halls at Chorley Park and Ardwold were finished in stone, the woodbeam ceiling of Pellatt’s Great Hall resembles the contemporary hammerbeam, open-truss Great Hall in the University of Toronto’s new Hart House (1910–19). The second-floor layout, also arranged with a long corridor spine (labelled on the plan as the “Picture Gallery”) running from one end of the floor plate to the other, contained the more intimate rooms for the family. The private spaces for the master and mistress of the house occupied the entire southeastern range of the second floor. Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt each had a suite of rooms – a series of interconnected chambers for sleeping, sitting, dressing, and bathing. Again, the arrangement of the private suites was not out of the ordinary for contemporary residential buildings (Lennox’s earlier design for the caretaker’s lodge had the exact same suite of rooms). Rather, what made Casa Loma so grand were the additional rooms on the second and third floors. On the second floor, there were (in addition to the maids’ rooms) further bedroom suites: one particularly grand one in the southwest range included an impressive round room. These suites were clearly not for the Pellatt family (they had just one son) but were likely planned in anticipation of special guests. Given Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt’s love of gardening, it is no surprise that the Palm Room, or conservatory, would be a major feature in the mansion’s plan. Lennox was still producing architectural details for this space late in 1912, and he continued into 1914, suggesting that the conservatory was one of the last rooms to be completed. (The framing design for the glass dome dates to February 1914.)17 Heated conservatories, a common feature for houses of the upper classes around

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1900, were often connected to the main house, providing an opportunity for yearround botanical interests. Advanced heating systems were integrated into the planter boxes, warming the soil and maintaining a steady temperature in the entire space. Located at the far eastern end of the ground-floor plan, the conservatory is accessed from the central corridor, providing a processional approach to the grand, light-filled space. The square floor plan includes an apsidal projection on the far eastern end of the room, in which stood an ornamental fountain, apparently brought by Pellatt from Rome.18 The conservatory includes materials not found in any other part of the residence, specifically Caen stone from France. Marble, which is used in the house’s numerous bathrooms, is also employed here in a richly decorative manner: the floor is paved with pink and green Italian marble, and the planting boxes and freestanding columns flanking the door to the corridor are faced with greenish-grey Canadian marble. Crowning the room is a striking stained-glass dome designed by Robert McCausland (fig. 0.6). This dome-shaped skylight was not naturally lit; rather, a separate roof structure was constructed above the decorative glass, and artificial lighting in conjunction with glass prisms on the exterior roof meant that the room was continuously bathed in light (fig 3.11). Another opulent feature in the conservatory is the grouping of three bronze and glass doors, two leading to the dining room and one from the corridor. While Lennox did not design these massive doors (they were imported from New York City), he did prepare the construction drawings for their mounting and door surrounds (fig. 3.12). The drawings reveal details of the castle’s construction – specifically, that the wall is comprised of terracotta blocks. A much cheaper material than stone, they are also significantly lighter in weight and thus allow for the spanning of much larger spaces than a stone lintel can span. In the example of the conservatory door surround, the terracotta block is used as the lightweight infill over the door arch, and the more expensive and heavier Caen stone is used solely as facing material. In other locations in the mansion, terracotta blocks are formed into springing arches with solid concrete poured on top of the arch. Embedded in the concrete are large steel I-beams and steel girders, creating a sturdy assembly. Stronger than any regular residential building would need, the construction method came to be explained in subsequent years as a necessity if Pellatt intended the mansion for a purpose other than his family residence (as discussed below).

Figure 3.11 Top Palm Room, Sir H.M. Pellatt Mansion, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, June 1913. Figure 3.12 Bottom Bronze door between corridor and Palm Room, Sir H.M. Pellatt Mansion, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawings, December 1913.

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Indeed, while “medieval” may be a term used to describe the overall aesthetic of Pellatt’s home, it is in fact a truly modern building. In addition to the building materials and techniques used, including steel I-beams and girders and Roman Stone, the house was filled with modern amenities, the most up-to-date and cutting-edge technologies as befitting its owner who was at the forefront of bringing electricity to the people of Toronto. A built-in central vacuum system with outlets in all rooms and corridors, an electronically operated elevator, and telephones in every room (a total of thirty-two sets, including in the bathrooms) were just some of the features that put Pellatt’s home ahead of many of his contemporaries. Indeed, the telephone system was said to be the largest residential one in North America.19 And while bathrooms had become standard for most upper-class residential buildings by 1910, Lennox seems to have been given a generous budget for designing and outfitting these functional rooms related to modern hygiene. Sir Henry’s and Lady Pellatt’s bathrooms continue to attract attention. His marble-paneled washroom has a bathtub and separate shower stall with brass pipes that “encircled the bather like a bird cage.”20 The enameled or porcelain-lined cast-iron sinks, bathtubs, and toilets were also important in the trend toward hygiene in the modern home. Lennox owned a copy of a catalogue for J.L. Mott Iron Works, a New York–based company that manufactured the very latest in plumbing fixtures. The stamp on the underside of Pellatt’s bathroom sink clearly identifies the company – more precisely, its “Imperial Porcelain” lavatories. While Imperial Porcelain was first imported from England in the 1880s, the manufacturing of these sanitary appliances was revolutionized by Mott in 1894, and for some time, American-manufactured Imperial Porcelain was exclusively employed in the best private and public buildings.21 But perhaps the most impressive show of modern convenience was the use of sophisticated electrical technology – not surprising given Pellatt’s ownership of the Electrical Development Company of Ontario. A multi-page article in Electrical News (1913) provided a comprehensive description of the electrical equipment in Pellatt’s new mansion. The article was preceded by a brief biographical note about the man himself: A man may be known in military circles as a soldier of renown and as a generous patron of military arts; he may be a financier with world-wide reputation for wisdom in council and honor in all his dealings; he may be the holder of athletic records and have made a mile in faster time than any other athlete

The Design and Construction of Casa Loma

on his continent – but any one of these takes second place to the man who advances, not one stage, but many, the universal utilization of electricity by showing how it may best be developed, demonstrating its commercial possibilities and backing his faith by a final demonstration that eclipses anything the world has seen. And what then of one man who combines all these qualities. This is Col. Sir Henry Pellatt, C.V.O., a true maker of electrical Canada.22 A subsequent article in Electrical News went on to laud Pellatt for installing the most complete and thorough adaptation of “the electrical arts” to a private residence. So interesting were the switchboards operating the thousands of lights on the Pellatt property that the journal reproduced photographs of the panels – in themselves works of art, constructed of the finest Italian marble. Thus, what appears to be a medieval castle had in fact the most modern of elements, notably in the rooms in which Lennox designed indirect (recessed) lighting, as in the plaster ovals over the dining room and in the oak-panelled drawing room.

conclusion In the light of Casa Loma’s sophisticated steel-frame construction and employment of extensive modern amenities, we may wonder whether it was designed with more than elite domesticity and hospitality in mind. A 1927 article in Canadian Homes and Gardens first speculated that Pellatt had wanted the building to become a military museum. The overbuilding of the structure and the size of the spaces within can certainly be explained by the planned eventuality of having heavy military displays set on the floors of the building. The article went on, “This purpose behind the castle’s destiny explains many features of its planning … the many exits to the rooms, the doorways wide enough to drive a motor through … Glassed cupboards for five thousand books or objets d’art, reveal their special significance.”23 Later, in 1930, when interviewed for the Toronto Star on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Pellatt stated that his ultimate purpose in building the mansion was for it to serve as a military hospital.24 Certainly, a later third-floor plan of the mansion (dated January 1913) supports this claim. Suites of bedrooms, some illustrated with two beds per room, organized around shared bathrooms, would have been appropriately arranged for future use as a hospital. On another occasion, Pellatt told a

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Globe and Mail reporter that he built the castle for a military institute or an art gallery. He said: “Of course, I intended to live in it for a while. But that place was well built. Do you know there is steel within all the stone and brick, there is steel beneath all the floors? And there is a four-foot space between the ceilings and floors, so workmen could get in between there to fix lighting and so forth.”25 Perhaps Pellatt made these assertions about an alternative use only after he had to reluctantly leave his mansion behind in 1923 when his luck and money ran out. This is just one of the many mysteries still yet to be resolved about this famous site. In recounting the documentation related to its construction and authorship, it becomes evident that the history of the castle continues to be shrouded in some mystery. On the other hand, we can acknowledge Pellatt’s aspirations and Lennox’s dedication to his craft, and conclude that the castle was a product of the relationship between two remarkable men.

notes 1 2 3 4

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

“A Palatial Residence,” Toronto Telegram, 20 May 1907. “No Equal Anywhere to Casa Loma Wine Cellar,” Toronto Star Weekly, 21 June 1924. Thompson, Spadina, 190. Martyn, Aristocratic Toronto, 210. Unfortunately, Martyn did not cite sources, and additional evidence of this trip has not been found. Ritchie, “Roman Stone,” 21. Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 128. Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 181. Worsley, British Stable, 259. Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 181. MacTavish, “Henry Mill Pellatt,” 118. “No Equal Anywhere to Casa Loma Wine Cellar,” Toronto Star Weekly, 21 June 1924. “Sir Henry Wants Credit Given Castle’s Architect,” Toronto Daily Star, 26 June 1924. Griffin, Major-General Sir Henry Mill Pellatt, 27. Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 129. Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 181. Coffman, “Casa Loma,” 8. It should be noted that the mansion never was completed – notably, most of the west wing, including the drawing room, billiard room, and smoking room. In 1913, the Pellatts moved

The Design and Construction of Casa Loma

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

in despite the unfinished condition. Lennox continued to produce architectural drawings in 1914 (e.g., for the marble swimming pool) and in 1916 (e.g., a detail of hardware for the library). Foster, “Memories of a Canadian Castle,” 26. “The Electrical Equipment of Casa Loma,” Electrical News, 13 June 1913, 113. Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 138. See J.L. Mott Iron Works, Imperial Porcelain Lavatories, catalogue, 1900, 50. “The Makers of Electrical Canada: Col. Sir Henry Mill Pellatt, C.V.O.,” Electrical News, 15 June 1913, 106. Foster, “Memories of a Canadian Castle,” 23. “Father Time Deals Kindly with Sir Henry Pellatt,” Toronto Star, 7 January 1930. Undated and unattributed newspaper clipping, City of Toronto Archives file.

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4 The Casa Loma Collections and the Sale of 1924 matthew m. reeve

Casa Loma was a house that was inhabited and even animated by images and objects, a fact made painfully clear when the house was stripped bare, its contents sold at auction in 1924. The many roles it played during the Pellatts’ ownership as a private home, a grand space for entertaining, a site for philanthropy, and a symbol of aristocratic status are inconceivable without its literal and figurative furnishings: the paintings, sculptures, carpets, objects, and furniture that filled its spaces and that articulated the broader image of the Pellatts’ famous home. As a gesamtkunstwerk – a building designed to be experienced in its totality – Casa Loma and its collection was conceived within a tradition of great European and particularly British houses of the eighteenth century to the present. Embodying what Clive Wainwright described as “the Romantic Interior,” these houses staged mainly antique furniture as well as select modern works of art. In so doing, the spaces were curated to suggest a specific historicity for themselves and their patrons, to create an illusion of an ancient lineage. This was achieved as much by building in back-dated styles (principally the “Scottish Baronial,” in the case of Casa Loma) as by positioning ancient objects within these fictive homes to suggest a grand family continuity in which the contemporary resident lived with the great objects collected by his family for generations (even though much of the collection

The Casa Loma Collections and the Sale of 1924

was purchased in a decade or less). When complete, Casa Loma held one of the most striking collections of art and furniture in Canada, much of it facilitated by Pellatt’s wealth and his frequent trips to Great Britain, the United States, and the Continent. However discordant it might be with our contemporary tastes, the collection was spectacular in the most literal sense. It amounted to a superlative statement of Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption”1 – the ostentatious display of wealth for the purpose of acquiring or maintaining status and prestige. But the collection also paradoxically served as a sign of Pellatt’s cultural engagement and sophistication, which sought to deny a reading of it as “conspicuous consumption.”2 Typical of the psychology of the nouveau riche collector, Pellatt sought to construct a grand dynastic display via his collection, which articulated many of his claims to power as the aspiring Lord Toronto. The Casa Loma collection was the most extensive of a handful of major collections within the city of Toronto during the early twentieth century. In locating the collection within contemporary Toronto, it bears stating an obvious fact: when Casa Loma began to be constructed in 1905, there were no major public art venues in the city. Exhibitions of art, such as that of works by Glasgow painters lent to them by the Albright Museum in Buffalo in 1906, took place under the auspices of the Toronto Art Museum at 165 King Street West (of which Sir Henry Pellatt was a council member).3 The Royal Ontario Museum was not formally created until the signing of the rom Act in the Ontario Legislature on 16 April 1912, and the museum awaited a grand opening until the Duke of Connaught, then governor general of Canada, opened the new building to the public on 19 March 1914. The Art Gallery of Ontario likewise did not exist in these years. It originated in the Grange, the grand neoclassical villa built in 1817 by D’Arcy Boulton Jr and his wife, Sarah Anne, and now a wing of the gallery. The first exhibition held in the Grange was in June 1913. As one of the most significant homes in Toronto, the Grange would hold various exhibitions, and it seems clear that Casa Loma was likewise intended to serve as a gallery space. Lennox’s plans for the house indicate that the Long Gallery was called a “picture gallery” or “corridor,” doubtless based on a range of long galleries in British architecture. The house was described as an art gallery in newspaper reports of the 1924 sale, and Pellatt himself would later claim, “I built it for a military institute or an art gallery.”4 Significant here is the extent to which the interiors were designed with multiple objectives: as the home of a leading family who drew

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enjoyment from the collection; as an articulation or even projection of the Pellatts’ elite status for a wide audience; and as pedagogical space in which viewers were to be educated in a grand tradition of European and Canadian art. The decline of Pellatt’s fortunes led to a major social and political event in Toronto: the public sale of its contents over five days in 1924 by Jenkins Art Auction in Toronto. The sale liquidated the entire Casa Loma collection and was widely reported in the media, variously as a tragic story of loss or the just comeuppance of Sir Henry Pellatt. Our knowledge of the collection now rests upon the 1924 catalogue and a handful of copies of the catalogue in public and private collections that contain annotations of the prices of objects sold and, occasionally, the buyers, pre-1924 photographs of the house, and the objects provenanced to Casa Loma that are now in public and private collections.5 As this suggests, much remains to be done to reassemble the collection, and parts of it surface regularly in Canada and the United States. The collection deserves a more extensive treatment than is possible here; instead, this chapter offers an overview of the collection and articulates a series of ideas and themes that ran through it.

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An initial question to be considered is one of agency. Although the majority of evidence we have for the collection at Casa Loma points to Henry Pellatt as the driving force behind its acquisition, the 1924 sale catalogue refers to it as “The Lady Pellatt Collection.” It continues, “Lady Pellatt has been long and widely known as an authority on Art and Art objects, each and every piece in the collection was obviously gathered with a definite purpose in view that it would eventually find its place and give charm or utility to a carefully considered room.”6 The Pellatts had been collecting for many years before Casa Loma was built, and the origins of the Casa Loma collection lie in the one they built and displayed in their Sherbourne Street home (fig. 5.10) before relocating it to Casa Loma in 1914. Further research may clarify whether or not there was a controlling hand in the Casa Loma interiors, but the evidence as it now stands suggests that the collections were a collaborative venture between husband and wife. As in the case of their architectural patronage, the Pellatts’ art patronage lacks any significant guiding statement: as far as we know,

The Casa Loma Collections and the Sale of 1924

neither wrote anything on art, nor did they collect a significant library of art historical literature. Sir Henry, however, was a member of the Art Museum of Toronto and the fledgling Royal Ontario Museum. He would host Oscar Wilde on his famed tour of Canada in 1882, and Wilde, with Pellatt, would praise the Canadian painter Homer Watson in an Ontario Society of Arts exhibition.7 Pellatt would thus have heard Wilde’s famous lectures “The Decorative Arts” and “The House Beautiful,” although it is not clear whether they were influential upon him. As in his business dealings and acquisitions, Pellatt could be ruthless and petulant in his art buying. Perhaps due to Wilde’s influence, a year later he would vie to purchase a Homer Watson, and he subsequently accused others of artificially “bidding up” Watson paintings to raise the price at auctions.8 We can trace some of the Pellatts’ dealings in the art market through documentation. For example, a series of letters between Henry Pellatt and the artist Charles M. Russell and his wife, Nancy, recount the acquisition of a series of Russell’s paintings for Casa Loma between 1912 and 1919. The famed “cowboy painter” from Montana painted a series of scenes of rural life and representations of local Chippewa First Nations as well as landscapes. Pellatt purchased five paintings from Russell in Calgary in 1912 to show in an exhibition, later hanging them in his office at Casa Loma.9 Russell’s rugged paintings of western imagery of hunting and riding in wild, untamed settings is one strand of an overtly masculine, equestrian taste that ran through much of Pellatt’s imagery. Pellatt remained in contact with Russell and expressed his interest in adding to his collection; flatteringly, his 1919 letter renamed his office the Russell Room because of the array of Russell’s paintings that hung directly above the wainscoting around the room (fig. 4.1). The same letter reiterates Pellatt’s desire for further paintings but also reflects his own failing finances, which he blames on the war: “I should have three more to complete the walls but do not feel like spending much money now after the great expense of the war we have just passed through.”10 Pellatt continued buying art into the 1920s, however, including Pierre Billet’s Avant la pêche (originally purchased from the salon in Paris where it was exhibited in 1897) from Jenkins Art Auction in Toronto. Sadly, Jenkins would in turn sell the painting in Pellatt’s sale four years later.11 A large part of the furnishings of Casa Loma appear to have come from the burgeoning European salvage trade. A contemporary account of the house by Pellatt’s gardener George Thompson recounts, “Then, when some rooms of the Castle were nearly ready for occupation, I remember lots of furniture arriving (some of the

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Figure 4.1 Russell Room, office of Sir Henry Pellatt, Casa Loma, ca. 1913.

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men and myself had to help unload it). Much of it came from a Castle in England. It was beautiful furniture – beds, tables, chairs, and scores of other items including several Grandfather clocks. I remember that when Lady Pellatt had picked out the pieces she wanted for the occupied rooms – there was a lot left over and we took this upstairs and put it all close together in a big room facing north.”12 As this account indicates, the Pellatts acquired lots of furniture from an unnamed castle in England, and Mary Pellatt – who is given the role of interior designer in this passage – selected her favourite pieces and stored the rest. It is unclear whether or not the Pellatts saw the furniture before it was purchased in England or viewed images from a dealer or a catalogue. What is clear is that they were not exactly sure what furniture this lot contained. Doubtless it was purchased from the

The Casa Loma Collections and the Sale of 1924

“Wardour Street trade” – the burgeoning market for architectural salvage and antiquities in England and eventually in New York and Montreal.13 The acquisition of lots of European furnishings was common enough in these cities; beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, North American patrons sought aristocratic blood ties to Europe and increasingly imported European objects to legitimize their status, thus fostering a new transatlantic trade in antiques.14 The same source that describes the furniture also suggests that “23 fireplaces imported from European castles”15 were also brought into Casa Loma. Seizing on the declining fortunes of great houses in England around 1900 and especially after the First World War, the Wardour Street trade was active and occasionally unscrupulous in the sale of period rooms and pieces to New World buyers. The conventional view of Pellatt might suggest that this acquisition of historical furniture from England was “by the pound”; if that was the case, it was little more than nouveau riche arrivisme, an attempt to purchase the trappings of European aristocracy without knowing precisely what these trappings were or what they meant. But it is more fitting with the evidence as it now stands to see the Pellatts as acquiring furnishings in the historical mode of the “Romantic Interior,” which saw patrons build new houses in a medievalizing fashion and fill them with furniture and building fabric taken from older houses. Here we need to implicate E.J. Lennox, who must have been involved at least with the fireplaces, around which chimneys and rooms and their furnishings had to be arranged. At Casa Loma in particular, ancient furniture and furnishings served as relics: like the remains of holy bodies that animated their metalwork heads, hands, and effigies in the Middle Ages, so too do such literal vestiges of European aristocratic life animate and authenticate Pellatt’s new Gothic home. Several factors – including the appearance of images of Fonthill Abbey and Horace Walpole (see below and chapter 6) – suggest that the Casa Loma interiors and collections reflect a conscious updating of this tradition. Although it falls beyond the scope of this study, it is significant to note that Pellatt also acquired art and objects for philanthropic purposes. In this way, the Pellatts’ collecting practices were in line with those of their neighbours on Davenport Ridge, most notably the Eatons, who generously donated to the Royal Ontario Museum.16 A series of letters at the museum indicate that Pellatt intended to endow it with the “Sir Henry Pellatt Collection” of arms and armour, a natural extension of his interest in military history. Beginning in 1912, Pellatt, with C.T. Currelly, a curator at the museum and a professor at the University of Toronto, began to allocate $8,000 in

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monthly installments. It was Currelly’s intention to use the Pellatt collection as a teaching tool and to produce a catalogue, a lecture series, and postcards to promote it. Much of the collection had been purchased from Fenton and Sons in London and from other English dealers. Pellatt’s collection was intended to extend beyond European armour; a letter of 1913 from S. Allen and Co. of Charing Cross in London proposed that he purchase a lot of “oriental” armour and weaponry “belonging to an Indian Raj” that was apparently superior to anything then in the Wallace collection. Pellatt’s finances in the postwar years, however, prevented his continuing to endow the collection. Fortunately, a beautiful series of the drawings by the artist Mary Hand records the collection, some of which still resides at the Royal Ontario Museum figs. 4.2 and 4.3).17

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It might be said that it was F.B. Housser in his 1927 book A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven who set the tone for the reception of elite Canadian collections in the early twentieth century: “Canadian opulence bought pictures as it bought stocks, bonds, rugs and antiques in an ostentatious display of newfound wealth.”18 Although Housser does not mention Pellatt by name, there can be little doubt that Pellatt represented one of the principal examples of the mode of collecting of which he is critical. Housser’s aim was to position the Group of Seven as Canada’s first national school of painting and thus worthy of appearing in Canadian collections, and he considers all prior art collection to be aping or avariciously acquiring the arts of Europe rather than fostering those of the collector’s own country. The Group of Seven, in his view, reoriented Canadian tastes toward more apparently pure expressions of Canadian art. While such a view might seem to apply to the Pellatt collection, especially in light of its vast number of European paintings, sculpture, and furniture, a closer reading allows us to nuance it considerably. The Casa Loma collection structured a series of narratives running through its objects and images and their strategies of display that reflect some of Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt’s dominant preoccupations: the chivalric and militaristic, the connection to Britain and to empire, and the patriotic celebration of Canada and its artistic traditions. The Pellatts’ worldview was to a large extent an old-fashioned one belonging as much to the nineteenth century as to the twentieth, and this is certainly

The Casa Loma Collections and the Sale of 1924

reflected in what seems like a high Victorian aesthetic throughout the house. Modernism in painting and sculpture appears never to have featured in Casa Loma, and in that sense the collection is notable for the complete absence of paintings by the Group of Seven and their European and American contemporaries. It is thus ironic that in the house’s current capacity as an entertainment venue, the Liberty Group has chosen to hang a Group of Seven collection – a series of copies of the famous originals – on the third floor as an allusion to a Canadian school that had no traction whatsoever at Casa Loma during Pellatt’s time. If Housser’s views require reassessment, we may nonetheless follow him in understanding that that Casa Loma was built on shifting cultural sands and would represent the last gasp of a particular aesthetic and ideological order in Toronto. If we turn to Pellatt himself for direction in reading the collection, he offers us a brief but telling aside: “Perhaps the French predominates just as the furnishings are mainly those of the great Napoleonic period, but this perhaps is right and proper in a building specially reared as a military monument, for from a military point of view, this age transcends all others.”19 Even a casual perusal of the catalogue

Figure 4.2 Left Helmet from the Casa Loma collection of arms and armour. Figure 4.3 Right Swords from the Casa Loma collection of arms and armour.

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leaves little reason to question this assessment. Pellatt’s furniture is largely assigned to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the 1924 sale catalogue, with a particular affiliation with the reign of Louis XVI (1754–93) – for example, a Louis XVI “China cabinet shaped front with finely decorated Vernus Martin panels, Watteau subjects” (no. 796), or “A magnificent Gold Drawing Room Suite, handsomely carved and upholstered in Louis XVI d’Aubusson tapestry” (nos. 864–8). As well, the catalogue refers to “Louis XVI bedrooms” (Sir Henry’s own bedroom principally featured Louis XVI furnishings; see fig. 4.4), which contained, among other things, paintings by J.-B. Greuze and J.-A. Watteau. While Pellatt surely had some firsthand experience of French furnishings in France, he was no doubt influenced by the dominant fashion for French ancien régime furnishings prevalent in Britain in the later Victorian and Edwardian periods. Appreciation of “the Louis styles” was punctuated by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild’s newly built house at Waddeston Manor, Buckinghamshire, ca. 1890.20 As Elizabeth Mansfield has shown, the “Louis styles,” and that of Louis XVI especially, had a particular signification in the English interior: by obscuring or leapfrogging the French Revolution, these interiors and objects implicitly suggested continuity with the aristocratic life of the ancien régime. As Mansfield and Rothschild intimate, however, this taste flourished at the end of an aristocratic tradition in Britain “as a means of coping with the perceived inevitability of the final collapse of Britain’s nobility.”21 Understood in these terms, English patrons dressed their homes in a fantasy of aristocratic longevity at a time when the end of the tradition of aristocratic life was in sight. That Pellatt sensed this prospect is debatable; what is most likely is that his acquisition of art and furniture reflects the egotism and optimism of a Canadian empire builder whose buying of French art was meant to replicate the look and feel of the British homes that he visited and admired. Indeed, any sense of an overt preference for pre-Revolutionary art over that of the Revolution and afterward (and thus any related historiographical construction in Pellatt’s mind of these events) is dashed by the prevalent appearance on one hand of art of the neo-classical “Empire style” of Napoleon’s period, and on the other of art specifically referencing Napoleon. Pellatt called the drawing room off the great hall the “Napoleon Drawing Room” (fig. 4.5), and he filled it with objects principally of that era. It was one of the most lavish parts of Casa Loma, adorned with rich wood panelling with French Baroque designs; its overt masculinity served as the antithesis of the Palm Room at the other end of the house, which often served as

Figure 4.4 Top Bedroom of Sir Henry Pellatt, Casa Loma, ca. 1917. Figure 4.5 Bottom Napoleon or Oak Drawing Room, Casa Loma.

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a place for the display of the Pellatts’ greenhouse-grown flowers (see next chapter). The Napoleon Drawing Room featured a range of period objects, from Pellatt’s famous 1770 Aubusson Tapestries (no. 862) to an “Empire table. Ormolu Mounts, Inset with Sevres Miniatures, showing Portraits of Napoleon I and his Generals, Companion Table in Musée du Malmaison” (no. 860); “a magnificent pair of M. Imple de Sevres vases in royal blue and gold, finely decorated with panels representing the marriage and crowning of his Majesty Napoleon I painted by Pascault, companion pair in Musee du Louvre” (no. 861); and an “Empire Inkstand, marble and Ormolu, surmounted by bust of Napoleon” (no. 872), and so forth. Pellatt also commissioned a copy of Napoleon’s writing desk for his office (fig. 4.1), collected the five-volume Private Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte (1830) (no. 683), and purchased a related range of furnishings for the house, including “M. Imple de Sevres Combined Dinner, Dessert and Fish Service in Royal Blue and Gold with painted miniatures of Napoleon and his officers and beauties of the court, every piece marked and titled. This set is one of three, being a special commission by Napoleon and presented to Marshal le Fleurve” (no. 416). Pellatt’s biographer, however, believed that parts of Pellatt’s collections were “excellent fakes” bought for Pellatt by dealers abroad; he considered the 132-piece royal blue and gold Sèvres dinner set in particular to not be genuine. If he was correct, Sir Henry had been duped: the set apparently cost him 80,000 francs or $16,000 and sold for only $2,600 in 1924.22 Fake or not, these objects indicated that one narrative running through the collection was an allusion to Napoleon as a perceived ancestor, a typological allusion that Pellatt felt with the famed military leader. Yet Pellatt never saw battle, despite his lifelong work with the Queen’s Own Rifles, and so his identification with Napoleon was perhaps best understood in the sense of financial empire builder. It may well be that Pellatt was the only person to make such an association; such grandiosity was extraordinary at the time and is surely grist to the mill for those who wish to position him as a grossly deluded egoist without self-awareness, much less a sense of irony. Casa Loma contained at its zenith one of the most significant collections of paintings in Toronto. It was spread across the main rooms of the house, with particular focal points being the Napoleon Drawing Room and the picture gallery. The collection has never been carefully studied, but we can point to at least three specific orientations within it: the Hague School of painting, British art, and Canadian art. The fashionable Hague School, the collection of “modern Dutch masters,”

The Casa Loma Collections and the Sale of 1924

formed an integral part of Canadian taste during the last several decades of the nineteenth century up to the First World War.23 The Pellatts collected a long list of Hague School paintings by greater and lesser luminaries, including Herman Johannes van der Weele (no. 3890), Gerke Henkes (no. 483), Theophile Emile Achille de Bock (no. 895), Willem Maris (no. 896), Anton Mauve (no. 901), Adrianus Johannes Groenewegen (no. 905), and others. The height of the Hague School’s popularity coincided with an era of ambitious private collecting among the nouveau riche, of which the Pellatts in Toronto, and David R. Morrice (1829–1914) and Edward Black Greenshields (1850–1917) in Montreal, were significant examples.24 The Hague School is often thought to have been introduced to North America at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and again at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, although by the 1870s, Hague School paintings had been purchased by prominent Canadians and by the early 1900s had become integral to the great collections in Toronto and Montreal. Given that the patrons for these paintings were principally Scottish (including Pellatt), it has been suggested that there was a specific appeal to those of Scottish descent. Not only had the Netherlands and Scotland been closely bound by trade since the Middle Ages but both shared reformed, Protestant sensibilities and focused their imagery on working men, whether Highland crofters or humble fishermen.25 Balancing the Pellatts’ tastes for Dutch art was a predilection for British painting and prints. As chapter 6 notes, Pellatt purchased and displayed two high-status British paintings that implicitly associated Casa Loma with the tradition of English Gothic Revival mansions: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s 1754 Portrait of Horace Walpole (the famed patron of Strawberry Hill) and Turner’s watercolour view of William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey (see chapter 6, figs. 6.8 and 6.9). These paintings hung at one time on either side of the wall between the dining room and the library, with the Reynolds in the dining room and the Turner in the library. Such images of famous men and homes in Britain were signs of empire in the house that coexisted with and informed other objects, including a chair apparently given by Queen Victoria and an equestrian statue of Edward VII by Remington Clark (no. 387) (fig. 4.6).26 The Pellatts also collected a number of significant British paintings, including ones by or attributed to Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Sir Thomas Lawrence, John Constable, George Romney, and others. Alongside these works of canonical British painting were series of cheap British prints. In keeping with the intended levity of a billiard room – centred around a

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Figure 4.6 Left Equestrian statue of Edward VII by Remington Clarke, formerly at Casa Loma. Figure 4.7 RIght John Leech, Our Friend Mr Noddy Has a Day with the Brookside Harriers – with His Usual Prudence He Gets a Horse Accustomed to the Hills. Satiric print, 1865.

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carved mahogany table made by Cox and Yeaman of London – was a series of prints by John Leech, an artist who rose to fame as a Victorian illustrator in Punch (fig. 4.7). These satirical prints are largely rural and equestrian in nature, featuring scenes from the tradition of the English hunt. They are of interest because they code the billiard room as an inherently jovial and informal space removed from the more official rooms of the house. Surely among the least expensive imagery in the house, the set of prints point on one hand to a jolly, upper-middle class Englishness (or “horsiness”) and on the other to Pellatt’s understanding of an English, elite sense of humour, transposed from England to Toronto’s Davenport Ridge. The foreign works discussed so far stood alongside important Canadian paintings. Unlike other collectors to whom Pellatt might be compared – such as Greenshield, whose collection was principally of European art, with only two Canadian paintings27 – the Pellatts’ collection included a long list of works by Canadian (or Anglo-Canadian) painters, including William Nicholl Cresswell, Homer Watson, Cornelius Krieghoff, William St Thomas Smith, Charles McDonald Manly, Laura Muntz, and Paul Peel. Now in the ago but formerly at Casa Loma is Paul Peel’s The Shepherdess (1892), which remains one of the artist’s most significant works

Figure 4.8 Paul Peel, The Shepherdess. Oil on canvas, 1892.

(fig. 4.8). The Pellatts’ collection of Canadian art is significant as it contradicts – to some extent at least – the polemical voices on Canadian art in the period. J.E.H. MacDonald’s article “A Whack at Dutch Art,” published in The Rebel in 1917, comments upon the “anti-Canadian and pro-Dutch connoisseurs” (referencing the dominant Hague School) who had created the mansions of Toronto and Montreal as “shrines of Foreign art” filled with “the weary monotony of doubtful specimens of European genius.” These “shrines” of European paintings became commodities that endowed their status-conscious owners with “a reputation for cultivation, affluence, and good business sense.” For Macdonald, the taste in foreign art was a form of Canadian idolatry that must be waning in the light of the changing political currents after the First World War.28

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Much work remains to be done to locate specific images within the spaces of the house and thus to reconstruct its larger picture hangs. While the breakfast room was hung principally with Canadian paintings, the 1924 sale catalogue indicates a more informal arrangement in the picture gallery, in which Canadian art is hung alongside works of European masters. Cornelius Krieghoffs, Paul Peels, and other significant Canadian paintings appear to have been hung against and beside works of the Hague School and even Old Masters. As a space to inform viewers about elite taste, such hangs were arguably informed by the same logic that positioned Pellatt’s anglophilia and deep investment in empire on the other side of the same coin as his investment in Canada as a nationalist and empire builder. Put differently, the Pellatts appear to have been positioning key works of Canadian art in what they understood as their right place alongside European works, thus introducing Canadian art into a transatlantic canon of art.

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The 14 June 1924 edition of the Toronto Globe includes an advertisement posted by the Jenkins Art Gallery for the Casa Loma sale. Described as “Announcement of the Most Important and Distinguished Art Sale Ever in Canada,” the sale was to take place over five days (23–27 June) and be presided over by auctioneer Chas. M. Henderson. Previews were held on 16 and 17 June, and an illustrated ninety-one-page catalogue was published. Located in the conservatory (or Palm Room), the sale was widely attended and reported in the media. A rare image of the sale still exists in the Toronto City archives (fig. 4.9): Henderson is at centre left amidst a series of attendants who hold a range of paintings in front of a solid curtain obscuring the conservatory, and a congested group of buyers bids frantically, as is manifest in the blurred exposure. The sale was one of the most spectacular and public events in the Toronto media in 1924. Sensational headlines such as “Senator Hardy Pays $10000 for Eight Pellatt Curtains,” “Ontario’s Millionaires Bid for Masterpieces Stripped from Casa Loma’s Art Gallery – Paul Peel’s ‘The Shepherdess’ Brings $4100,” “Five Days Bidding Fails to Deplete Casa Loma’s Store,” and “Persian Rugs Knocked Down for Price of Good Doormats” punctuate the pages of the Globe.29 These headlines alone suggest something of the sensational nature of the event for the public. Henderson struggled to obtain anything like the value that Pellatt paid

The Casa Loma Collections and the Sale of 1924

Figure 4.9 Casa Loma sale, 23 June 1924.

for his collection, and many works sold for far less than even their market value, much to his exasperation. Pellatt himself stated that it was the saddest day of his life, and there is no reason to doubt that.30 Casa Loma and its collection were unique. Although aspects of it could be paralleled in other homes, no home was ever built and decorated in the same fashion in Toronto for the simple reason that no other patrons had the same agenda as the Pellatts. It is clear that the sale of 1924 registered a moment of change in twentieth-century Toronto. It would be the first of a number of major collections to be sold in the 1920s, including Jenkins’s 1927 sale of the combined collections of Chester D. Massey, Sir William Mackenzie, and Sir Edmund Walker, which also received an illustrated catalogue.31 These collections, as well as the demise of many of the great estates discussed in chapter 1, saw the decline of a number of prominent families from the Gilded Age. The Casa Loma collections were not only dismantled in these years but their various components – especially the Hague School pictures – were already out of fashion by 1924.32 The debate between Dutch and Canadian art was being won in the favour of Canadian painting, and A.Y. Jackson would be

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seen “as artistically faithful to the Canadian landscape as the Hague School had been to their native countryside.”33 Underlying many of these changes was the tidal wave of the First World War, which produced what Benedict Anderson has famously called “the nationalization of culture.”34 After the First World War, many of the men who had left Canada as proud British subjects returned with a sense of Canadian identity and a desire to develop a Canadian nation. In the face of the drive for a new nationalistic artistic identity, the Pellatts’ collection of expensive foreign works became synonymous with the ambitious capitalism and conspicuous consumption of Canada’s “robber barons.” By 1924, the nationalization of culture had resulted in major public collections being opened at the ago and the rom, taking the place of private collections as the vehicles for the dissemination of knowledge on art and taste in Toronto. The Casa Loma collection, no less than the house itself, was an extraordinary dream, an attempt to remap the mores of an Old World aristocracy upon an increasingly secure and self-confident, modern and forward-looking city that increasingly had little time for it.

notes 1 2 3 4 5

132 6 7 8 9

10

Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, chap. 4. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 11. Catalogue of Pictures by the Glasgow Painters. Undated and unattributed newspaper clipping, City of Toronto Archives file; “Senator Hardy Pays $10,000 for Eight Pellatt Curtains,” Globe (Toronto), 27 June 1924. Joan Crosbie has collated the various accounts of the Casa Loma sale into a single document now at the Archives of Toronto, including their hammer price and buyer(s). City of Toronto Archives 471, series 2227, file 25. Catalogue of the Valuable Contents of Casa Loma. “Oscar Wilde’s Farewell Lecture,” Globe (Toronto), 29 May 1882, 6. Letter dated 21 November, 1883, Homer Watson fonds, National Gallery of Canada. I am grateful to Brian Foss for this reference. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma, TU2009.39.2741.1–4; my thanks to Marcela Torres for bringing these documents to my attention. See also Troccoli, Masterworks of Charles M. Russell. Gilcrease Museum, TU2009.39.1780.

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

American Art News 18, no. 28 (1920): 4. George Thompson, “I Saw the Castle Grow!” Harris, Moving Rooms. Craven, Gilded Mansions. Thompson, “I Saw the Castle Grow!” Haight, “Object Lessons,” esp. chap. 3. Pellatt’s correspondence and the Mary Hand portfolio are now in the Registration Department of the Royal Ontario Museum. I am grateful to Tricia Walker for access to them. On the collection of armour in the period, see, most recently, Jonathan James Tavares, “‘Whence the Splendour of Our Ancient Baronial Halls May Be Revived’: Samuel Luke Pratt and the Arms and Armor Trade in Victorian Britain,” PhD diss., Bard Graduate Centre, New York 2013. Housser, Canadian Art Movement, 44–5. Interview, Toronto Star, 21 June 1924. Rothschild, “French Eighteenth-Century Art in England,” 389–90. Mansfield, “Edwardian Ancien Régime,” 74. Oreskotvich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 211–12. See, in general, Hurdalek, Hague School. I am grateful to Dennis Reid for discussing this with me. Buis, “Ut Pictura Poesis.” Fowle, “Hague School and the Scots.” Sewell, “Chair a Gift from Queen Victoria.” Buis, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” 5–6. MacDonald, “Whack at Dutch Art.” Globe (Toronto), 27 June 1924, 28 June 1924, 24 June 1924. For a day-by-day narrative of the sale, see Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 205–18. Catalogue of Highly Important Old and Modern Pictures and Drawings, n.p. Buis, “Ut Pictura Poesis,” 86–90. Hurdalek, Hague School, 23. Anderson, “Staging Antimodernism.”

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5 Performing Place Ornamentalism at Casa Loma michael windover

In her autobiography, Flora, Lady Eaton, described being led on a tour of Casa Loma by Sir Henry Pellatt. Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt were neighbours and friends within Lady Eaton’s “hilltop group,”1 and she marvelled at Pellatt’s dedication to building his “fabulous castle”: For him that castle was more than life itself; certainly it was obvious to me following him around, up the twisting stone stairs, into the turrets, through the empty, echoing bedrooms, that he knew every detail of the design, the craftsmanship, and just as surely every effect he had hoped to achieve when he turned the first sod. When our tour was almost over and we were pausing in the corridor before a handsome carved oval frame that was still waiting for a painting, he said, “I wish I had another million dollars. What do you think I would do with it?” There was hardly time for me to answer before he went on, “I’d finish this house – and then I’d die happy.”2 While Lady Eaton admired Pellatt’s ambition and vision, she pointed to the failure of the enterprise. He finished neither Casa Loma nor the country estate, Marylake (which neighboured the Eatons’ own estate, after Pellatt encouraged them to purchase the farm next to his).3 Most revealing in Lady Eaton’s account of the tour

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

was the location of Pellatt’s sudden disclosure of a desire for more capital to finish the project. They stood in front of a “handsome carved oval frame that was still waiting for a painting.” The inclusion of this detail is curious. Why pause there? Was the frame emblematic of the failed building project, grandiose in scale and with picturesque massing and carefully designed grounds but containing “empty, echoing bedrooms”? Was Casa Loma an unfinished self-portrait of the Pellatts? Picture frames are ornament. Being neither inside nor entirely outside a work of art, frames are supplementary; they play a role in marking a kind of threshold, in defining the work, and have the curious ability to be added and yet be indispensable.4 In his study of ornament in architecture, Antoine Picon points out that the “Latin word for ornament, ornamentum, shares … a common etymological origin with the verb ordino, meaning to organise, to order, as if an ornament, any well-conceived ornament, expressed the underlying order of things.”5 He reminds us of how ornament traditionally – that is, before the Modernist critique of, then break with, ornament – marked social status and performed political purposes. In support of his argument about the political impact of ornament in Western society, he cites the work of British historian David Cannadine, whose theory of ornamentalism, I argue, helps to explain the construction and life of Casa Loma. Cannadine contends that the British sought to recreate their domestic vision of a hierarchical, socially graded class system in their colonies, dominions, and mandates. This vision was buttressed increasingly through “ornamental” means: the creation and extension of titles, honours, ceremonies, and other activities designed to reinforce the “culturally created and imaginatively constructed artifact” known as the British Empire.6 That this attention to class structure was more persuasive than the perpetuation of racial or ethno-cultural difference (i.e., “Orientalism”) is debatable; however, ornamentalist strategies, as Cannadine indicates, were nonetheless effective, and Casa Loma demonstrates them. Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt were imperialists, a subject identity that was not at odds with Canadian nationalism, especially in Edwardian Toronto (see chapter 6). Sir Henry’s support through both leadership and financial contributions to the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor evidences his alignment with ornamentalist policies. An article in the Canadian Magazine is worth quoting at length: He saw that the Society of Knights Bachelor could be made a powerful organisation for Imperial purposes. He realised that the backbone of the Society

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would be distinguished colonials from all parts of the Empire who had fought for and earned distinction in their various walks of life. These were the men to help in Imperial affairs; so he set about to reconstruct the old Society. He advanced the necessary money. He worked hard personally to get all Knights wherever resident to join the Society and to take an interest in it. He secured a habitation for the Society at Clifford’s Inn, Fleet Street, London … He furthermore obtained from His Majesty King George the right to use the word “Imperial” in the title “The Imperial Association of Knights” … [He] believes that such a body must be a useful organisation of great power for the promotion of Imperialism.7

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Building on Alla Myzelev’s perceptive interpretation of Casa Loma as a performative and theatrical space,8 I assert that the building was designed principally for the enactment of a local ornamentalism. Here the Pellatts lived as North American aristocrats, or at least as they imagined a modern knight and his lady ought to live in the early twentieth century. Casa Loma could be understood as an investment in an imperial system that had already reached its zenith in Canada. Undertaken at the height of British imperialism, its failure mirrored that of ornamentalism in Canada. The passing in the House of Commons in 1919 of the “Nickle Resolution,” which asked that the monarch no longer bestow titles such as knighthoods, offers evidence of this imperialist system’s decline.9 While Casa Loma’s excessiveness aligns it with some of the mansions of Gilded Age plutocrats in the United States and puts it at odds with homes of other wealthy Torontonians, its situation in Canada and its association with British imperialism make it unique. Indeed, Casa Loma had a kind of quasi-public quality that seems more in keeping with traditional English country homes than those of the American robber barons. The castle on Davenport Ridge contains all the contradictions and complexities of ornamentalism. It revels in Romanticism, invented traditions, and a nostalgic vision of a stable, ordered society. These attributes lend the building a sense of heritage (as lived if invented history) and permanence. Meanwhile, Pellatt and E.J. Lennox indulged in the latest technologies for lighting, communications, and building. Janus-faced Casa Loma is the embodiment of Edwardian-era modernity: fashionable yet fuelled by nostalgia. This chapter examines how Casa Loma operated as ornament. It considers how the landscape and interiors provided space for and perhaps even participated in

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

the enactment of ornamentalism. I begin with somewhat public performances – the use of the landscape and castle as a backdrop for the Pellatts’ imperialist interests. The collection of buildings, from the caretaker’s lodge and workers’ cottages to the stables and greenhouses, together painted a picture of a contained country estate. In the castle itself, the interior layout and choice of styles demonstrated an anglophilia that in essence reinforced the image of prestige and power the Pellatts sought. The interior furnishings are markers of fashionable taste and cosmopolitanism and are integral to identity production. Antiques, reproductions, and salvaged (or spoliated) items played a role in creating an air of nostalgia that was productive for the Pellatts. This nostalgia, a modern form linked more to the creation of heritage, differs from the nostalgia we experience when visiting the house museum today or even that evoked by Lady Eaton in her memoirs, who might herself have seen Casa Loma as a relic of a bygone era.

per for ming or namentalism Architecture, landscape, and interior design played important roles in buttressing Britons’ hierarchical social order throughout their empire. As Cannadine notes, the Marquess Wellesley argued as early as the turn of the eighteenth century that India, as “a country of splendour, of extravagance, of outward appearances,” should “be ruled from a palace, not from a counting house; with the ideas of a prince, not those of a retail dealer in muslins and indigo.”10 Palaces and government buildings were constructed not only for the British viceroys but by nawabs and maharajas for themselves. These were often in the “Indo-Saracenic” style,11 a hybrid mode that I suggest drew from a Romantic logic similar to medieval and Tudor (and other) Revival styles in the United Kingdom, in that it borrowed forms from a seemingly authentic past and grafted them onto modern buildings. Through the act of building, these Indian princes reaffirmed their “natural” status within the British Raj and, by extension, the British Empire. Although differentiated across the empire, English patterns of life were recreated in the settler dominions too. “From Melbourne to Toronto, Sydney to Cape Town,” Cannadine observes, “gentlemen’s clubs, grand hotels, railway stations, public schools, new universities, provincial legislatures and Anglican cathedrals proliferated during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many of them constructed in Scottish Baronial or Gothic Revival style redolent of

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history, antiquity, hierarchy and tradition.”12 Key to the success of ornamentalism, then, were the spaces of its enactment. It is also worth emphasizing that the graded social system succeeded, to greater or lesser extents, through voluntary adoption of its ideals and by making hierarchy visible and thus “immanent and actual.”13 While Cannadine points to the establishment of spaces and the significance of style, he does not explore how a building, its grounds, and its furnishings operated within the socio-cultural imperialist project. Casa Loma, a voluntarily created space of imperialist performance, offers an example of how this may have worked. In his consideration of the political import of architectural ornament, Picon points to the theatrical underpinnings of ornamentation. A kind of artificial, immersive world is created in the relationships between ornaments, and Picon describes this organizing system as “décor,” a term that retains its association with stage-set designs in French. “Ornament not only communicates about politics,” according to Picon: “it represents one of its preconditions by delimiting the space it needs for its deployment.”14 For Oleg Grabar, architecture “is always at the service of man and has no greater purpose than to adorn his manifold activities, something as simple and prosaic as eating or listening to a lecture and something as glorious as worshipping God or contemplating a work of art.”15 With all of this in mind, we could think of Casa Loma itself as ornament or perhaps as décor of late British imperialism. It provided space for activities and propagated imperial, social ideology through adornment. The Pellatts and Lennox designed Casa Loma as a stage set for public performances. Photographs held in the City of Toronto Archives depict huge crowds of Torontonians sitting on a sloping hill or standing on the veranda or first-floor balconies facing the grounds west of the castle to view public spectacles (fig. 5.1). Often these images feature fluttering Union Jacks and uniformed soldiers, reminding us of the Pellatts’ penchant for financially supporting and participating in imperialist pageantry. Pellatt’s biographer, Carlie Oreskovich, detailed several occasions when the Pellatts paid for spectacles associated with visiting royalty or celebrating the Queen’s Own Rifles, the Toronto militia unit of which Pellatt was commanding officer from 1901 to 1912. The most elaborate event was the week-long celebration of the unit on the Toronto Industrial Exhibition (today the Canadian National Exhibition) grounds in June 1910. It included, among other things, four hundred schoolchildren arranged in the form of a Union Jack to sing patriotic tunes, followed by a war dance by Indigenous men from Brantford, Ontario. This two-hour pageant

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

of Canadian history replete with dramatic battle scenes alone cost the Pellatts approximately $25,000, and a grand ball was held in the Transportation Building.16 The enormous amount of money spent on Casa Loma and its grounds can be seen, at least in part, as a continuation of this kind of imperially tinged publicity. A prime example of how the castle and its grounds operated as a site of imperialist performance was their use for rallies and meetings of the Girl Guides of Canada. While Sir Henry Pellatt doggedly sought prestige and affirmation through

Figure 5.1 Military function at Casa Loma, 1920.

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the imperial order (the most obvious being his knighthood),17 Lady Pellatt was likewise flattered by ornamentalist displays and ambitiously sought an active role in society. On 24 July 1912, Lady Olave Baden-Powell asked Lady Pellatt to be chief commissioner of the Girl Guides of Canada. The Girl Guides emerged out of a large rally of Boy Scouts held at the Crystal Palace in London in 1909, when the presence of girls within the parading Scout ranks became evident, and Sir Robert Baden-Powell decided that a separate organization for girls should be created.18 Within a year, there were units in Canada.19 Sir Robert’s linguistically and musically talented sister, Agnes,20 wrote their guidebook with him – How Girls Can Help Build the Empire: The Handbook for Girl Guides, published in 1912 just as Lady Pellatt began her command of the Canadian branch of the organization. While the social vision of guiding was conservative, the texts, Katherine Magyarody has explained, “use a double-tongued rhetoric: while they pronounce ideals of imperial motherhood in order to assuage the fears of reluctant adults, they also insist on girls’ abilities to develop according to standards set ‘for boys.’”21 The explicit purpose of guiding was “to get girls to learn how to be women – self-helpful, happy, prosperous, and capable of keeping good homes and of bringing up good children” who would be “good, hardworking, honourable, and useful citizens for our great British Empire.”22 Lady Pellatt repeated this sentiment as she solicited support for the creation of the Dominion Council of the Guides from the wives of lieutenant governors in each province, arguing, “We must train [girls] for womanhood and citizenship. That is the purpose of the Movement.”23 Once the national organization was formed in October 1912, she enthusiastically sponsored Girl Guide activities, including a demonstration of first aid and signalling and the construction of a hut for an audience at Massey Hall in December 1912.24 But it was the numerous events held at Casa Loma that truly demonstrated Lady Pellatt’s commitment to the cause and her own demonstration of an imperial construct of womanly virtue as a gracious and generous hostess. While she may have claimed that there was “no Militarism” in the Girl Guides, a 1914 photograph of her with Sir Henry inspecting lines of girls standing at attention in their self-made uniforms certainly speaks to order and discipline (fig. 5.2). In this photograph, the western grounds of the estate have been activated as the site of a military-like drill akin to those Pellatt would have observed with the Queen’s Own Rifles. Behind the girls, Casa Loma operates as a British backdrop to the event, visually linking the activities to the foundation of the movement in Great Britain. A large banner em-

blazoned with the Girl Guides of Canada’s logo hangs on a wall, and above it a crowd of spectators observes the event from the veranda. Lady Pellatt would host many similar events during and after her tenure as chief commissioner, including a memorable visit of Girl Guides to Marylake. She would be honoured in 1922 with a Silver Fish, the Girl Guides’ highest award, a year after she stepped down due to ill health. Her health issues meant that occasionally she was unable to meet the Girl Guides on the grounds, so they would parade by, and she would regally receive their salute from a window in her suite.25 The Girl Guide events were well covered in the local newspapers, and in one article, commenting on a “Fairy Play” presented by a local company in June 1914, the author evoked the suggestive power of the castle and its environs: “On a lawn enclosed with flowers and hedges, with a background of castle towers and walls, No. 7 Company of the Girl Guides played a charming fairy play on Saturday, before an audience that was numbered by the hundreds. It was easy to go back many centuries, into the land of Tennyson’s ‘Day Dream,’ as one looked at the flags hanging,

Figure 5.2 Girl Guides inspection, Casa Loma, 1914.

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motionless in the still air, on ‘Casa Loma’s’ battlements, and watched a royal procession come down the stone steps on to the greensward, while a page fiddled gaily at an open casement.”26 After describing the play in some detail, as well as the crowning of the May Queen, the author noted that “a tenderfoot was then sworn in over the silk Union Jack, all Guides upon the grounds standing at the salute while the girl promised, on her honor, to be loyal to God and the King, to be helpful, daily, to someone else, and to obey the Guide law.”27 The Pellatts provided ice cream for the children, among them “the happy little ones from the Children’s Shelter, who were guests of honor for the day.”28 The newspaper coverage reflects the kind of publicity the Pellatts sought as charitable and noble citizens of Toronto (and the empire); importantly, it also makes clear how the castle and its grounds facilitated their agendas. The Casa Loma grounds could imaginatively transport local audiences to England through association and anchor a relatively new, imperial organization in the trappings of tradition – despite the house being as modern as the Girl Guides movement itself. The castle, its landscape, and other estate buildings gave the impression of an English country estate, something that within the ornamentalist framework could be constructed seemingly without anachronism in Canada. Tudor Revival or “Jacobethan” 29 domestic architecture was quite popular at the time in Toronto and elsewhere, and even the “nationalist” architecture of Eden Smith was thoroughly rooted in Englishness.30 The picturesque and extravagantly appointed stables, together with the caretaker’s (or “hunting”) lodge and workmen’s cottages, all constructed before the castle was built, helped to unify the estate architecturally. The iconography of the stables (fig. 0.10), featuring heraldic lions and unicorns (see figs 6.17, 6.18), set the tone for the cast stone ornaments on the southern façade of the castle, which included the Pellatt coat of arms flanked in the crenellations of the projecting bay windows by trophies of armour and Union Jacks set within oakleafed borders. The coat of arms was also on display on the ceiling of the library, a gesture that linked the public-facing exterior to a somewhat public space on the inside (see chapter 6). Casa Loma was part of an enclave of villa-estates (see chapter 1) but began, as Sharon Vattay has pointed out, with a garden (fig. 3.5). The estate initially featured large vegetable, fruit, and flower gardens (including an “English gentleman’s garden … crossed and intersected by paths”) (fig. 5.3); a cowshed; a poultry house and

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

Figure 5.3 View of southern grounds of Casa Loma, undated photograph between 1914 and 1934.

cages for Canada geese, pheasants, and turkeys; a meadow for the Pellatts’ cow; and a fenced-in area for elk and deer at the northern end.31 Large greenhouses and a potting shed filled in the space between the stables and caretaker’s lodge (fig. 3.7). No doubt the configuration of all these buildings and designed landscapes would give the visiting public a sense of the enormity of the enterprise of operating a modern castle and may have resonated with an image of English estates, although here perched on a hill above Toronto. To bring expertise and perhaps a sense of authenticity to their project, the Pellatts hired an Englishman, George Thompson, as head gardener. Thompson arrived in Toronto in 1910 after having worked for several years on Dropmore Estate in Buckinghamshire, overlooking Eton College and Windsor Castle.32 He would live in one of the workmen’s cottages – a semi-detached home that Lennox designed in 1905 – just north of the stables on Walmer Road (fig. 3.3).33 It does not appear

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that the design of the grounds on which Thompson gardened was the work of a landscape architectural firm like the Olmsted Brothers, who were employed by some of the Pellatts’ neighbours (chapter 1), and there is no evidence that Lennox drew up a landscape plan, as, for example, architect Samuel Maclure would for Hatley Castle, built about the same time in British Columbia just west of Victoria (fig. 6.7).34 Given this lack of evidence, we may surmise that the landscape design was led by Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt. Pellatt served as president of the Ontario Horticultural Association and entertained its whole membership at his home (see fig. 0.10),35 and by all accounts gardening was a passion for both him and Lady

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

Figure 5.4 Opposite Gardens, Casa Loma, ca. 1914. Figure 5.5 Left Lady Pellatt and group in Casa Loma greenhouses, ca. 1914.

Pellatt, as it was for other plutocrats at the time across Canada.36 Photographs of Casa Loma’s gardens dating from about 1914 depict a careful balance of structured pathways and an almost exuberant naturalness characteristic of Edwardian gardens (fig. 5.4). Like the grandiosity of the house and stables, the design and maintenance of the gardens was a clear sign of wealth and rising status. In addition to clearing land, planting new trees, and tending to the existing gardens, Thompson assisted the Pellatts in producing award-winning flowers. The most southerly greenhouse (identified by Thompson as the “Shaw House”) and a small conservatory at the southern end of the potting shed were used to showcase plants in flower and tall ferns, with a nearby room prepared for serving coffee, tea, and light refreshments should the Pellatts arrive.37 A photograph of Lady Pellatt touring a group of elite Toronto women including Mrs Plumptre and Mrs Gooderham through the greenhouse underlines the social significance of the flowers (fig. 5.5).38 While growing fruits and vegetables had a utilitarian purpose, the cultivation

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Figure 5.6 Palm Room or conservatory, Casa Loma, ca. 1915.

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of tropical plants was a status symbol, like Pellatt’s collection of fine horses.39 Collecting and growing plants in greenhouses were by then well-established practices for the leisurely classes, predicated upon global (sometimes imperial) networks of trade. Gardening was also seen as a morally uplifting activity, one that could assist not only in the beautification of one’s environment but also in the moulding of good citizens and a just society, all the while reinforcing “values of property, family, property, social status and the status quo.”40 The cultivation of flowers joined the collecting of fine art and antiques as a signifier of the Pellatts’ own culturation. So important was the display of exotic plants that one of the largest and most impressive rooms of the castle was the conservatory or Palm Room (fig. 5.6). As chapter 3 notes, the centrally planned room with its projecting, semicircular apse is located at the eastern end of the main corridor and bathed in light from three sides and an artificially lit, cut-glass dome above

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

featuring a grapevine ornament. Vattay notes the unique material qualities of the room, which include Caen stone from France, pink and green Italian marble, and greenish-grey marble from Bancroft, Ontario, in addition to the glass and bronze doors ordered from New York City. After the dark wood-panelled corridor, the lightness of the conservatory seemed to some almost otherworldly. When asked whether she preferred the stables or the conservatory, one awe-stricken Girl Guide among approximately 235 visiting Casa Loma at the time answered, “Oh the conservatories … I hope I go to a place like this when I die.”41 A 1927 article for Canadian Homes and Gardens reflected on the conservatory as embedded in collective memory, especially the annual, autumnal reception for Chrysanthemum Day, when hundreds were invited into the house to witness the Pellatts’ exotic treasures.42 The same article recalled the reception held for Sir Robert and Lady Olave Baden-Powell, with a guest list of more than a thousand.43 The Pellatts received guests in the library, and then dinner was served in the Palm Room.44 The “table was laid in circular fashion in the conservatory, massed with roses and other exquisite blooms,” and afterward “the guests wandered out on the wide, tiled terrace, and down the great stone steps to the green terraces below, and through flagstoned, rose-bordered walks.”45 Casa Loma was remembered for its flowers, its grounds, its spectacular spaces, and importantly its hospitable hosts. The castle was frequently made available to the public, setting it apart from other private houses. Indeed, it would seem to have been designed as a semi-public space in the tradition of great British estates,46 reinforcing an attendant, hierarchically graded vision of society. Inviting the public regularly to watch or participate in events in the castle, surrounding buildings, or the grounds was likely seen by the Pellatts as part of their social responsibility. No doubt, they saw the castle and grounds as an embellishment of Toronto, an ornament enhancing the beauty of their city and reaffirming their understanding of good, ordered society.

a moder n prodig y house Casa Loma was a place specifically designed for ornamentalist displays, and nothing gets to the heart of the whole imperial social system more than hosting aristocracy like the Baden-Powells. Pellatt’s greatest desire, however, was to host the ruling monarch.47 If he could not be lieutenant governor of Ontario and use his home

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for the purposes of this increasingly ceremonial post,48 at least he could prove his worth by hosting fellow lords and ladies of the realm. His motive was spelled out in the Canadian Magazine (1912): As a result of his many trips to England he has had plenty of opportunity to see hospitality and entertainment cultivated into an art, and he began to see that, as the years went on, with the increasing number of visitors of note to Canada from the old country he would have numerous chances of returning in some measure at least the hospitality that had been given to him. A house whose dimensions in most circumstances would be ample, could not permit of something like the style of entertainment that is quite common to the best people of England. So that it was only natural that these experiences should act as an incentive to Sir Henry in the development of his taste for fine architectural design.49

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Sir Henry’s aspiration to keep up with “the best people of England” explains the scale and interior organization of Casa Loma. Indeed, it may be useful to see the castle as a kind of modern “prodigy house.” The term was coined in the 1950s by Sir John Summerson to describe the enormous estate homes built by English aristocrats in the Tudor and Jacobean periods, such as Longleat House (1580), Wollaton Hall (1580–88), Hardwick Hall (1590–97), and Hatfield House (1611).50 These homes were meant to impress through scale and modernity of design (including copious glazing) and to host the still somewhat peripatetic royal court of the time, or at least to provide capacity for doing so. A key feature seems to have been the exorbitant cost,51 which would seem to be in line with the Pellatts’ motivation and experience centuries later. Lennox and the Pellatts designed Casa Loma with references to Tudor-era architecture in mind, likely due to its association with Englishness, royalty, and fashionableness; while they did not necessarily attempt to recreate a sixteenth-century prodigy house in Toronto, they nonetheless infused something of its spirit in their castle. Jacobethan architecture grew in popularity in the nineteenth century. A hybrid style to its core, it could evoke the romance of medievalism, infused with the Gothic imagination that Peter Coffman recognized in Casa Loma,52 and it had the flexibility to engage both with the classical language of architecture, especially in terms

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

of planning, and with regional influences like Scottish Baronial. Probably most important for the Pellatts, however, would have been the association with royal sites, including that of Balmoral Castle. While Casa Loma’s foundations had been laid before Pellatt visited Balmoral on the invitation of King George V in September 1910, the Scottish Baronial style was popularized in part by the royal residence, built privately for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the 1850s, and it may well have influenced Lennox’s designs for Pellatt’s Toronto castle. As the next chapter discusses further, Balmoral exemplified “built unionism” in Britain – a style that “was deemed part of the common [British] heritage,”53 much as it would have been perceived by many in Canada. Books from Lennox’s library attest that he had knowledge of plans and details of Elizabethan and Tudor houses, and these likely influenced design features of the edifice.54 The hall was at the centre of early-modern English home life and likewise would have provided a grandly theatrical space for Casa Loma had it been completed. The logic of the double-volume room with its hammerbeam ceiling, projecting bay window, and organ pipes visible from the balcony of Pellatt’s room seems consistent with the emphasis on display and the spatial dynamics of traditional prodigy houses. We could imagine Pellatt gazing down on visitors from his balcony, much as Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, might have peered from the gallery leading from her suite overlooking the hall at Hardwick Hall. The patron of the house is literally elevated above all others, mirroring his or her social status. The theatricality of the Great Hall at Casa Loma would have been enhanced by the sound of the pipe organ.55 The Pellatts were leading patrons and lovers of music in Toronto. Sir Henry was president of the general committee of the National Chorus of Toronto and hosted meetings and special events at Casa Loma. One event was reported in the Globe as “two delightful little plays … put on by some of the graduates of the Conservatory School of Expression, led by Sir Henry’s niece, Miss Rita Rogers,” followed by songs from the chorus.56 As the Great Hall was yet unfinished, the performance took place on an “impromptu stage … set up at one end of the great library.”57 The library continues the early-modern English architectural references in the Great Hall, but in this case in a more completed form (fig. 5.7). One obvious reference to the period style is the plastered ceiling, replete with the Pellatt coat of arms (reproduced on the castle’s exterior). Matthew Reeve points in chapter 6 to

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Figure 5.7 Casa Loma library, ca. 1914.

Charles Latham’s In English Houses (2nd ed., 1907), a book in Lennox’s collection, as a possible source of this feature. The plastered panels of the ceiling flow effortlessly into the French walnut panelling of the walls. Glassed-in bookcases, with a capacity for some ten thousand volumes (although never filled), line the northern interior wall, while the southern wall, which includes a bay window (common in Elizabethan architecture), provides illumination and views onto the gardens and city beyond. Between each bay of shelves and surrounding the doorways, Lennox included wood pilasters enlivened with strapwork designs, consistent with the

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

period style and harmonizing with the elaborate metalwork of the bookcase doors. The strapwork is picked up again above the fireplace mantel,58 and similar forms appear on the huge Donegal carpet. Taken together, the ceiling, panelling, chimney piece, and carpet lend the room a consistent period quality, enhanced with the addition of some period furnishings, including a pair of deeply carved, Jacobean-era chairs. As figure 5.7 indicates, the room’s other furnishings were somewhat eclectic and no doubt were meant to express the Pellatts’ taste and resources in a room that operated as a place of public performances. The gardener, Thompson, recalled that the library served as the site of Christmas parties the Pellatts hosted for staff members of Marylake and Casa Loma, with long tables bedecked in flowers from the greenhouses.59 According to Carlie Oreskovich, Sir Henry was inspired by such customs from “stately homes in England.”60 Thompson remembered the first Christmas banquet as a “bang-up” affair: “The kitchen maids and cooks were from England, and they knew how to prepare and serve a Christmas dinner in real style. There was a clergyman to say the Grace. The feast started with oyster soup, then roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, vegetables and gravy – then wonderful mince pies and a huge plum pudding with lots of sauce and a sprig of Holly – all ablaze as they carried it in!”61 Entertainments and a singalong were followed by speeches of thanks to the Pellatts and the singing of “God Save the King.” This episode again emphasizes the Pellatts’ attempts to live like traditional English aristocrats, even hiring English staff and eating English food. The setting of the Jacobethan library no doubt would have made these connections more visceral and drawn links between the Old and New Worlds in a performative manner, akin to the castle backdrop of the Girl Guides’ plays on the west lawn. Continuing the Jacobethan sensibility on the ground floor was the groin-vaulted corridor, which displayed some of the Pellatts’ art collection (fig. 0.5). A plan included in an article in Electrical News about Casa Loma labels the corridor as an “art gallery.”62 Hand-carved oak panels line the walls, and a Burmese teakwood floor, supported by an eight-inch-thick concrete slab, is inlaid with mahogany strips and rosewood wedges.63 This corridor is often claimed to be modelled on a Peacock Alley in Windsor Castle, although the term more likely derives from showy promenades in hotels and thus likely gained currency in reference to Casa Loma’s principal corridor during its hotel era in the late 1920s.64 The association with royalty was no doubt meant to lend Pellatt’s castle more legitimacy or at least enhance its Romanticism for visiting guests. As a modern

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prodigy house, it was meant to host aristocracy in its well-appointed and contained suites, each with its own bathroom, on the second floor of the castle’s western side. The sheer number of bedrooms set aside for visitors (bear in mind that the Pellatts had only one adult son) and the magnificence of the public ground-floor rooms only reinforce the idea that the castle was designed primarily to host. In some ways, its subsequent form as a hotel (see chapter 7), where any paying guest was treated as royalty, well reflected its original purpose as a modern prodigy house.

fashion and cosmop olitan tastefulness

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While the Great Hall, library, and main corridor offer something of a unified (if eclectic) aesthetic, the rest of the interior spaces belie any attempt at cohesion from a stylistic perspective. Indeed, a short announcement in Contract Record and Engineering Review describing the project under construction proclaimed that “the interior will be elaborately finished, every room having been designed in a different period. All kinds of selected hardwoods will be used for this purpose.”65 Much like the Palm Room, with its materials drawn from France, Italy, and New York City, as well as within Ontario, designed with the purpose of displaying exotic flowers from all over the world, the interior design and furnishings of Casa Loma represented a pronounced cosmopolitanism. Pellatt described his house in 1924 as a reflection on places he had seen in the British Isles, Germany, Austria, and Italy, resulting in a kind of “architectural museum.”66 In this way, he seemed to be aligning himself with generations of British (and other) aristocrats who travelled through Europe on a Grand Tour and then represented their experiences in the design and furnishings of their manors. Like these aristocrats, the Pellatts used Casa Loma to display their worldly knowledge and sophistication. Part of this was an expression of being fashionable. Fashion was a foundation of ornamentalism. While at first glance the idea of reinforcing the pre-existing social hierarchy seems the antithesis of changeable fashion, the spectacles and pageantry of imperialism were indebted to regimes of taste. This is not to say that every fashionable Londoner or Torontonian was an imperialist; rather, performances of taste through acquisitions and displays of art, antiques, and consumer goods, not to mention clothing, could reinforce one’s standing in a graded, imperial society. Although exceptionally wealthy (for a time)

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

and with ties to England (Lady Pellatt was the only daughter of John Dodgson of Cumberland),67 the Pellatts were upper middle class with aspirations for higher status. They used their house and collection of furnishings and antiques to shore up their position in society, allowing their things to express their individualities and their values. Karen Halttunen asserts that the rise of home decorating and the burgeoning commodification of interiors coincided with the shift in “the dominant conceptualization of the self ” from character to personality.68 She focuses specifically on the transformation of the parlour into the living room from 1890 to 1930, ultimately arguing that “the new focus of interior decoration collapsed the distinction between the self and the commodities surrounding it.”69 This perspective draws attention to the ability of objects to behave as ornaments for individuals, framing and enhancing their personality and assisting in positioning themselves within society. Resonating with this position is Judith Neiswander’s study of what she dubs “the cosmopolitan interior”; she argues that British interior design literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries espoused the values of cultural liberalism.70 Conspicuous displays of objects from all over the empire reinforced individualism, democratizing interior design by leaving the tasteful decision-making for each room up to the homemaker. A view ca. 1914 from the intimate octagonal dining room into the main dining room demonstrates this trend, with its exotic tiger-skin rug, Old World (or reproduction) furniture, playful putti chandelier, and even a Union Jack (fig. 5.8). Although the décor in this photo was likely staged for a special event, the eclectic collection of furnishings and architectural details suggests something of the Pellatts’ personalities as imperial subjects. Neiswander charts the trend toward acquiring antiques based in part on their intrinsic value as wellmade objects but also as an effort to reassert a sense of Britishness, particularly in the early twentieth century. The Pellatts, living in Toronto rather than Britain, likewise demonstrated a penchant for all things English and a cosmopolitan interest in collecting trans-historical and somewhat geographically diverse artifacts.71 They also used their interiors both as a vehicle for individual expression and as a means of demonstrating their knowledge of contemporary patterns of taste. A prime example of their cosmopolitan taste is visible in a photograph of the serving room located off the main corridor in the service wing (fig. 5.9). Located near the pantry, this room was used for preparation during large dinner parties. The original plan was to include a doorway where the inset cabinet containing china

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Figure 5.8 Opposite View into main dining room from octagonal “intimate” dining room, ca. 1914. Figure 5.9 Left Breakfast room, Casa Loma, ca. 1917.

on the right is located, opening an enfilade to connect this room to the kitchen. Closing off the space suggests a change in function, making it more of a breakfast room (as described, for example, in the auction catalogue of 1924).72 Its furniture included a matching ensemble of chairs, dining table, buffet, chest, set of drawers, sideboard, and tripartite screen with figurative panels (perhaps depicting Venus, with putti above). The massive, elaborately carved furniture was likely manufactured in the nineteenth century and has something of a Jacobean Revival sensibility, which resonates well with the dark wood panelling in the nearby hallway and in the library. The arms of the chairs and the brackets of the buffet depict dragons, a Romantic motif picked up in the chandelier, with the beasts blowing electrically illuminated globes of fire. The heaviness of the furniture sharply contrasts with the otherwise classical eighteenth-century Robert Adam–style room, complete with playful antique details like the sphinxes in the corners of the plastered ceiling. The pairing of this furniture with the ornamental details of the room (which harmonize with the rug’s classical anthemion and wave motifs) points to an eclecticism already present in the Pellatts’ tastes when they lived in Sherbourne Street

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(fig. 5.10). It might also indicate a kind of making-do. The Pellatts had a good collection of furnishings but needed more to fill their new castle fairly quickly. As a result, they purchased much from auctions and estate sales from Europe and likely hired dealers to assist (see previous chapter).73 One such dealer may have been Brigitte Jenkins. She operated the Antique and Art Galleries B. M. & T. Jenkins in Toronto and, according to Gordon Sinclair, recruited the “crew of wood finishers” for the wall panelling; thus, she was closely involved with the Pellatts when they were working on Casa Loma.74 Another important trend exemplified in the creation of Casa Loma’s interiors was the trade in architectural salvage. Architectural historian John Harris has explored this phenomenon, focusing particularly on the incorporation of English period rooms in museums and the homes of some wealthy collectors.75 He notes a “growing obsession” for “Elizabethan and Jacobean panelling” among dealers after 1900, spurred on by the publication of Charles Latham’s In English Homes.76 While the Pellatts did not make use of antique panelling, their design decisions may have been influenced by this trend. They were likely familiar with contemporary issues of Country Life and Connoisseur that reproduced images of English country houses, and Lennox was well aware of the growth of scholarship in the area of early modern English architecture, as his book collection, which included In English Homes, indicates. According to Harris, Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (rom) was the first North American museum to acquire an English period room, an Elizabethan room “purchased from Gill & Reigate as early as 1911–1912.” Whether the room was an authentic vignette from Norwich or “a product of Gill & Reigate’s well-known inventiveness,”77 the rom’s acquisition of it points to the popularity and local interest in this style. The Pellatts, in employing this period style and collecting antique chairs or reproductions, were thus both being fashionable and demonstrating their imperial loyalty. Although documented provenance is lacking, Casa Loma clearly benefited from the trade in architectural salvage, as the previous chapter noted. Several chimney pieces adorning fireplaces in guest suites, as well as in the Pellatts’ own, may well have been produced in the United Kingdom or Europe in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. Incorporated into Lady Pellatt’s suite, they became focal points in the sitting rooms while blending effortlessly with the neoclassical details of the room (fig. 5.11). The linear ornament of the sculpture is carried up into the plasterwork of the ceiling, while the dentils of the fireplace’s cornice are mirrored

Figure 5.10 Opposite Pellatt in the conservatory of 559 Sherbourne St, ca. 1905.

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in the entablature above the entryway’s paired, detached columns. These details suggest that the recycled mantelpieces were sought for the more private quarters of the castle. In the case of Lady Pellatt’s bedroom (fig. 5.12), the mantelpiece, architectural details, and furniture together produce a convincing and harmonious whole. Colour – white and Wedgwood blue – plays a role in producing this coherence and points to the personal tastes of Lady Pellatt in the design of the rooms where she would spend much of her time given her frail health. While light and buoyant neoclassicism inspired by Louis XVI or Georgian period décor predominate in the suites, Sir Henry’s bedroom, still in a neoclassical mode, provides a contrast in wall treatment with its mahogany panelling (fig. 4.4). These design decisions offer evidence of both personal taste and a general confirmation of contemporary trends in interior design, including gendered norms with male spaces panelled in dark wood and women’s rooms characterized by lighter colours.

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In her work on period décor and agency in nineteenth-century New York City, Marie-Éve Marchand reminds us that although the accumulation of period furnishings certainly suggested an attempt to display status and wealth generally, it also marked an avenue of personal agency. Period décor, she contends, “played a crucial role in supporting if not prompting” certain performances of class.78 In other words, the appropriate ornamentation of one’s environment was instrumental in reinforcing one’s place in society. Casa Loma’s drawing room – the Napoleon Room – was a tour de force in demonstrating the Pellatts’ performance of taste (fig. 4.5). As the previous chapter noted, the Pellatts’ collection of eighteenth-century furnishings, including fire screens, contemporary tables with ormolu details, and sets of Louis XVI furniture upholstered in Aubusson tapestry, indicated their ability keep up with refined fashion trends. Equally impressive were the oak-panelled walls with deeply carved, Grinling Gibbons–inspired vegetal ornaments enlivening the

Figure 5.11 Opposite Lady Pellatt’s suite, Casa Loma, 1917. Figure 5.12 Below Lady Pellatt’s bedroom, Casa Loma, 1917.

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space, harmonizing with the furniture, and offering a kind of complement to the living specimens on display in the conservatory at the opposite end of the first floor. The dark panelling and ornate ceiling with recessed electric lighting generally resonated with that of the dining room at the other end of the floor (fig. 0.4), although the more organic decoration of the drawing room differentiated the spaces. The sculpture on the overmantel of the drawing room fireplace was purchased in England and had been displayed in the Montreal Art Gallery before its installation; the other work was carried out by German artisans over three years.79 The drawing room’s decorum contrasted with the informality of the nearby billiard and smoking rooms, the latter with playful figurative corbels above the brick fireplace. Despite the rooms’ informality, they were places of performance nonetheless. Pellatt used the billiard room, though unfinished, to play a long-standing game with his neighbour and architect, Lennox. The plans for the room place the table in the middle, elevated by two steps, making it the showpiece. Ultimately, the differences in the decoration of the rooms at the western end of the ground floor indicate the Pellatts’ understanding of how they were to be used. The furnishings suggested appropriate behaviours and point to the potential of objects to provoke certain sensibilities and solicit particular responses from users, whether polite conversation or somewhat rowdier activity. The contemporary decorator Elsie de Wolfe declared, “I believe most firmly in the magic power of inanimate objects!”80 Clearly, in their design and orchestration of furnishings in Casa Loma, the Pellatts likewise understood the value of objects to lend them power to convince their guests of their place within Edwardian society. They used interiors – or décor, in the sense described by Picon – to demonstrate tastefulness and knowledge. Eighteenth-century period styles were seen as most appropriate for drawing rooms and private bedroom suites, while Jacobethan interiors played their role in asserting Englishness in a grand, public manner. Bathrooms, however, provided an opportunity to show off the most up-to-date technologies of hygiene and so were not bound to period styles (fig. 5.13). The elegance of modern plumbing fixtures, including a water heater and a sophisticated shower, were highlighted against a backdrop of veined marble walls. The large master bathroom included a telephone, part of a system of some thirty-two sets throughout the castle, equipment that Electrical News described as “in every respect, one of the most modern of its kind on the continent.”81

Ornamentalism at Casa Loma

Figure 5.13 Sir Henry Pellatt’s bathroom, Casa Loma, ca. 1917.

The treatment of the bathroom and the use of modern communications technology were not at odds with the period-style furnishings, for they all indicated the Pellatts’ desire to be fashionable and especially to appear tasteful. Contemporary interior decoration texts, such as Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr’s The Decoration of Houses (1898) and Elsie de Wolfe’s The House in Good Taste (1913) – texts by high-society authors writing for a mass audience – pointed to principles of proportion, harmony, and simplicity rather than the superficial application of ornament as the hallmarks of good design. But these principles were based on lessons from the past, and the goal of decorating one’s home ultimately was to produce a tasteful space reflective of its inhabitants’ good character. As social leaders, the Pellatts used interiors to do just that, and unlike many others of their class, they invited the public in to witness their success, sharing their tastes with the broader community.

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It may be this desire to share, to lead in a manner more akin to landed gentry in England, that prompted them not only to use their home as a semi-public space of spectacle but also to have so much of their home – despite its incompletion – photographed. More investigation needs to be done on the dissemination of the interior photographs, beyond their use in publications like Canadian Homes and Gardens in 1927 after the Pellatts had vacated the house. However, it is curious that even private spaces – the bedrooms and the bathrooms – were photographed.82 The Pellatts, who were not afraid of using other contemporary media (whether telephones or newspapers) for convenience or social and financial gain, may have seen photography as a tool for reinforcing their place in society. From the start, the castle circulated on postcards and was something of a tourist attraction. It may be that the photographic reproductions, much like the creations of the interiors they depict, were meant to assist in the public performance of taste that was crucial to social status and, by extension, the enterprise of ornamentalism.

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Casa Loma was premised on spectacle, and it demonstrated not only the Pellatts’ social standing and cultural-historical affiliations but also their extraordinary modernity. They expressed this modernity through mastery of their environment – in the landscaping, the cultivation of exotic plants, and the up-to-the-minute use of building, cleaning, and communications technologies. They also expressed it through their taste, as evidenced in their collections of art and antiques and their interior-design decisions. Casa Loma offers an index of the complexities of Edwardian modernity: it represents the invention of tradition, the use of the new to shore up the old, and vice versa. In different ways, Girl Guide rallies, displays of chrysanthemums, and traditional English Christmas dinners breathed life into the space and instilled collective memories that, despite being new activities, carried traces of tradition. In that sense, Casa Loma was always a nostalgic place. What the foregoing discussion of Casa Loma makes apparent is that nostalgia did not mean an escape into the past. Traditional institutions like knights and landed aristocracy were given a potent and productive form (discussed further in the next chapter). The castle’s purpose was not simply to be a place to dwell but to perform. It was designed to host aristocracy, to stage events to enhance the aura of

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its owners, and by extension, to reinforce a graded social order. On the surface, Casa Loma appeared a pleasure palace and architectural hobby of a very wealthy man and his wife, but it was also an active site of identity projection loaded with particular ideas about society and the world. These ideas related to a world order nearing eclipse, and the fact that the castle was never finished lends it another sense of nostalgia. It became the unfulfilled dream of a late-Victorian/Edwardian-era couple just as the Great War wiped that era painfully away. Nostalgia (derived from the Greek nostos, meaning “return home,” and algos, meaning “ache”) has been a powerful force in the architecture of modernity. It expressed a modern feeling associated with one’s inability to return to the past. By the mid-twentieth century, nostalgia became associated with the non-modern, especially by the polemicists of the modernism that sought more utopian models for reconstruction rather than what was perceived as a deterrent to modernization. But nostalgia can be conceived of in another way. “In its formative understanding,” Mark Crinson contends, “nostalgia was not an avoidance of modernity, but a somatic expression of its tribulations.”83 With this in mind, we may read Casa Loma from its inception (and including its decoration and use) as exemplifying a particular social vision at a time of great uncertainty wrought by modernization. Had the empire survived, or had Canada been a less popular democratic country, maybe Casa Loma would not seem so bizarre. At the time, the idea of creating a comfortable place for itinerate aristocracy to stay while touring a global, imperial regime was not as outlandish as it seems today. As an exercise in nostalgia, Casa Loma employs, to a degree, both forms identified by Svetlana Boym – “restorative” as well as “reflective” nostalgia 84 Restorative nostalgia attempts to create a smooth connection to the past in the present and may be associated with something like “invented traditions.”85 Reflective nostalgia dwells on the fragments of the past, emphasizing the sense of longing. While the goal of Casa Loma may have been more along the lines of restorative nostalgia – that is, attempting to naturalize a social hierarchy through the designed environment – its context in the twentieth century means that reflective nostalgia predominates. The use of spoliated mantelpieces in a building connected to its own coal-fired power plant suggests a desire to physically link a building in Canada to the estates in England, thereby providing a seamless connection to a kind of heritage while providing a fragment on which to reflect. The collection of other antiques likewise promoted an engagement with the patina of the past and evoked a feeling of fashionableness.

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It was thus not a turn away from the past but a productive if conservative embrace of traditional things circulating in the modern world, a longing to “return home” through allusion, collection, and contemporary construction. Like the picture frame discussed at the outset of this chapter, Casa Loma delineated a nostalgic worldview. While as a frame it was evocative, sophisticated, and unique in Toronto, in the end the social picture it was meant to hold never truly materialized. Thinking about Casa Loma as ornament, as a supplement that enhances and relates to something even bigger – in this instance, an Edwardian-era imperial system – allows us to see something of the agency of the building, its furnishings, and its grounds. Always nostalgic – although differently so at first – Casa Loma seems now to have always been destined to be a museum, a semi-public place to host visitors and to prompt curiosity and reflections on a past era.86

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1 Eaton, Memory’s Wall, 108. 2 Ibid., 109. 3 Ibid., 111. Lake Marie Farm was profiled by Lillian Foster in Canadian Homes and Gardens in May 1929. 4 For instance, see Jacques Derrida, Truth in Painting. 5 Picon, Ornament, 37–8. 6 Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 3. 7 MacTavish, “Henry Mill Pellatt,” 118. 8 Myzelev, Architecture, Design and Craft in Toronto, 53. 9 Controversy broke out in 1917 when Sir Hugh Graham, owner of the Montreal Star, was elevated to the status of Lord Atholstan, despite objections from both the governor general and prime minister. The Conservative-Unionist MP for Kingston at that time, William Folger Nickle, introduced a resolution, accepted after debate, that the king should no longer award peerages to Canadians. In 1919, Nickle introduced a new motion asking the king to “hereafter be graciously pleased to refrain from conferring any titles upon your subjects domiciled or living in Canada.” Although neither of these resolutions was officially sent to the king (and neither went to the Senate), they informed policy about these particular honours moving forward. For more, see McCreery, Canadian Honours System. 10 Quoted in Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 18.

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11 Ibid., 46–51. For more on the instrumental use of the Indo-Saracenic style in India, see Metcalf, Imperial Vision. 12 Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 34. 13 Ibid., 122. 14 Picon, Ornament, 124. 15 Grabar, Mediation of Ornament, 193, quoted in Picon, 125. 16 Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, chap. 10. 17 Ibid., 35–6. Pellatt was initially offered a Companion of the Order of St Michael and George, but he pressed for a knighthood instead, believing it would “give me a better standing for business purposes.” 18 Whitney, “Girl Guides of Canada,” 131. 19 For discussion of Toronto’s first company in the years prior to 1912, see Magyarody, “Odd Woman.” 20 Whitney explained that Agnes Baden-Powell, then a middle-aged woman, spoke six languages and played four musical instruments. See Whitney, “Girl Guides of Canada,” 132. 21 Magyardody, “Odd Woman,” 238. 22 Baden-Powell, Handbook, vii and 24, quoted in Whitney, “Girl Guides of Canada,” 132. For more on how the guiding movement evolved yet remained a significant imperial network into the interwar years, see Alexander, “Girl Guide Movement.” 23 Quoted in Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 149. 24 Ibid., 150–1. 25 Ibid., 151–2. 26 “Girl Guides Give Fairy Play at ‘Casa Loma,’” Globe (Toronto), 15 June 1914. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 I use this term to cover the early modern architecture of the Tudor-Jacobean period. For more on the Tudoresque, see Ballantyne and Law, Tudoresque. 30 Adams, “Eden Smith.” 31 Thompson, “I Saw the Castle Grow!,” 3–5, at 4. 32 Ibid., 1. 33 Gibson, Inside Toronto, 44. She noted that Thompson’s son, Tommy Thompson, who grew up here, would become parks commissioner for the City of Toronto from the 1950s to the 1970s. 34 Williams, Landscape Architecture in Canada, 299–300.

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35 Rutledge, “Pellatt the Plunger,” 26; “Flowers and Fruits in Great Profusion,” Toronto Star, 13 November 1912. 36 Williams in Landscape Architecture in Canada, 296–300, cites the examples of Elaine Cameron in Kelowna, bc, as well as Jennie Butchart and Laura Dunsmuir, both on Vancouver Island, as important patrons of contemporary landscape design in this period. Given these examples, it may not be farfetched to consider Lady Pellatt as an important agent in the design of the grounds at Casa Loma. 37 Thompson, “I Saw the Castle Grow!,” 2. 38 Adelaide Mary Plumptre and Mary Reford may have been “elbowed aside” by Lady Pellatt as she rose to chief commissioner of the Girl Guides Dominion Council. Other influential women on the Dominion Council with them included Rosaline R. Torrington, Sophie Flaconer, Mrs H.C. Parker, and May Mason. See Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 149–50. 39 Rutlege in “Pellatt the Plunger,” 26, recounts an anecdote from an agricultural event held at the Pellatt farm outside the city when Sir Henry took great pleasure in pointing out to an Englishman (one of his friends) that these prize-winning horses, which the man had just complimented (“you’d go a long way to find a better looking lot of horses than that”), all came from his farm. Again we see the intersections of cultivation, status, and Englishness. 40 Von Baeyer, Rhetoric and Roses, 4. 41 “Girl Guides at Casa Loma,” Globe (Toronto), 17 March 1913. 42 Foster, “Memories of a Canadian Castle,” 58. 43 Ibid., 60. 44 “Reception for B.-P.’s,” Globe (Toronto), 27 May 1919. 45 Foster, “Memories of a Canadian Castle,” 60. 46 Girouard, Life in the English Country House. 47 Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 125 and 169. 48 Ibid., 161. The Toronto Star reported in 1906 that Pellatt was to be lieutenant governor of Ontario after the retirement of Sir William Mortimer Clark. John Gibson was appointed in 1908 instead. 49 MacTavish, “Henry Mill Pellatt,” 118. 50 John Summerson discussed prodigy houses in his Architecture in Britain, notably in chaps. 4 and 5. 51 Ibid., 31. 52 Coffman, “Casa Loma.” 53 Mackechnie and Urban, “Balmoral Castle: National Architecture in a European Context,” 162.

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54 Lennox’s library included Edmund Sharpe’s The Seven Periods of English Architecture (2nd ed., 1871), Alfred J. Gotch’s Architecture of the Renaissance in England (1894), Davie W. Galsworthy’s Old English Doorways: A Series of Historical Examples from Tudor Times to the End of the XVIII Century (1903), Charles Latham’s In English Homes (1907), and Thomas Garner and Arthur Stratton’s Domestic Architecture of England during the Tudor Period (1911). See the list at the City of Toronto Archives. The books are there and at the Fischer Library at the University of Toronto. Special thanks to Matthew M. Reeve for sharing this information and his insights on this matter. Marilyn M. Litvak convincingly argued that Lennox used sources from Hampton Court and Hengrave Hall, Suffolk, reproduced in Garner’s text, as inspiration for the stables. See Litvak, Edward James Lennox, 59. 55 The pipe organ was ordered from Aeolian Company of New York, and the contract specifies the installation (which was to be completed on or before 1 June 1914) as well as payment instalments (Archives of Ontario, Henry M. Pellatt Fonds, F 253, B287170). Music is an important if still little-studied element of domestic architectural experience. For an example of work on music in an Irish country house, see Mullaney-Dignam, “Useless and Extravagant?” 56 “Casa Loma Open to National Chorus,” Globe (Toronto), 1 February 1918. 57 Ibid. 58 This finely carved mantelpiece appears to have been moved to the Great Hall when the wall between the library and dining room was taken down during the hotel renovations of the late 1920s. 59 Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 163; and Thompson, “I Saw the Castle Grow!,” 7. 60 Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 163. 61 Thompson, “I Saw the Castle Grow!,” 7. 62 “Makers of Electrical Canada.” 63 Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 136. 64 The earliest published reference I have found to a Peacock Alley in Casa Loma is from “Miss Waldie Makes Bow at Lovely Party,” Toronto Daily Star, 29 December 1927. Foster’s article anticipating the opening of Casa Loma as a hotel in Canadian Homes and Gardens (May 1927) did not employ the moniker. The term originally referred to a promenade at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, although it is repeated in reference to other social spaces in hotels elsewhere in Canada. 65 “Sir Henry Pellatt’s Residence,” 59. 66 Star Weekly, 21 June 1924. See also Vattray, chap. 1, this volume, for more information. 67 MacTavish, “Henry Mill Pellatt,” 119. See also Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 25–6.

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68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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Halttunen, “From Parlor to Living Room,” 158. Ibid., 189. Neiswander, Cosmopolitan Interior. The 1924 Jenkins auction catalogue offers a view on the great diversity of things owned by the Pellatts. See Catalogue of the Valuable Contents. Ibid., 13. Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 211–12. Sinclair, foreword, viii in Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt. This same company would auction off the Pellatts’ furnishings in 1924. Harris, Moving Rooms. Ibid., 103. In a note, he explained that “documentation for this acquisition is imperfect.” See ibid., 297. Marchand, “Period Décor,” 25. “Govt. to Buy Casa Loma as War Veteran’s Home,” Toronto Daily Star, 7 November 1923. Oreskovich, Sir Henry Pellatt, 137, noted that Martyn and Company completed the limewood panel overmantel. Quoted in Halttunen, “From Parlor to Living Room,” 188. “Makers of Electrical Canada.” Historian Sally Gibson made this point but did not speculate on why. See Gibson, Inside Toronto, 37. Crinson, “‘Certain Old and Lovely Things,’” 122. Boym, Future of Nostalgia. For example, see Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions.” Giovanni Galli argued that museums “are nothing more than institutionalizations of nostalgia,” and this has particular relevance for Casa Loma, or any house museum, as it trades in a fascination for a home that once was. See Galli, “Nostalgia,” 17.

6 A Modern Castle Medievalism, Chivalry, and Empire at Casa Loma matthew m. reeve

Uncategorizable though it has been for many commentators, Casa Loma derives from a tradition of castle building leading back to the European Middle Ages. Although the architecture of Casa Loma references many later British, French, and German buildings of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, a clear trajectory of influence leads from Casa Loma through a range of post-medieval buildings to the later Middle Ages. Rather than being a work of the Gothic Revival, Sir Henry Pellatt’s castle descends from a Gothic tradition in elite domestic design. As such, it is a production of medievalism, defined by Leslie Workman as “the successive recreation of the Middle Ages by different [and later] generations.”1 Workman’s definition reminds us that medieval imagery was readily untethered from the medieval world – both temporally and geographically – and re-employed to radically different ends in modernity. We might begin by asking what Pellatt was doing employing the forms of medieval and medievalist architecture in modern Toronto. Pellatt’s connection to the medieval past and its many modern significations – aristocracy, empire, a lost chivalrous code elided with a Victorian military tradition, elite status, and social gradation – is complex. Because he appears not to have had serious literary leanings, we know less about his intellectual worldview than we would like. He was born of

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British parents – the Pellatt family had a lengthy history in Sussex, which was articulated in a new family genealogy composed in the 1890s. Frequently interacting with English aristocracy on Canadian and British soil, Pellatt manifestly considered himself within their ranks and felt a nostalgic connection with England and its culture.2 Hailing from Anglo-Scottish ancestry, and on his mother’s side from an English landholding family with a pedigree stretching back to the Middle Ages, Pellatt could with some justification feel that he was an inheritor of a grand familial tradition – some of which was actual and some of which was clearly invented. This chapter explores Sir Henry Pellatt’s own medievalist leanings and how they became manifest in the fabric of Toronto’s greatest home. I begin by considering the myth of medievalism introduced to Canada by European colonization and then turn to the particularly chivalric manifestation of this myth promoted by Henry Pellatt. Pellatt’s medievalism had a broad context in elite culture in North America during the Gilded Age, and Casa Loma would likewise enjoy a place within a flourishing of castle building in North American and Britain. I then turn to consider the design sources for Casa Loma and the place of Casa Loma in medievalist domestic architectural design.

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Medievalism was a pervasive and multifaceted mythology in Canada, as it was in the United States (even if the specific approach to and interpretation of the Middle Ages was sometimes different).3 Medievalism was in fact one of the foundation myths of Canada, at least insofar as its European occupation is concerned. It is writ large across the built environment, from the medieval-inspired early churches, houses, and courthouses of Upper Canada in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century to the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa, the collegiate Gothic architecture of Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, and Romanesque Revival buildings such as Toronto’s Old City Hall and University College. The spread of these medievalizing buildings across Canada was facilitated by the expansion of the British Empire via colonialization.4 They were built upon a land whose very geography was remapped with place names such as Kingston, London, Nova Scotia (New Scotland), York, Halifax, and so forth, all of which of imposed the geography of medieval Britain upon the unruly terrain of Canada.

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So too is our legal code dependent on English medieval precedent, a touchstone being Magna Carta (1215), signed by King John. Much more could be said to gloss this point, but it will suffice to note that medievalism in its many manifestations signals European-Canadians’ perceived sense of filiation with Europe. Particularly when referencing the cultures of France or England within a Canadian context, medievalisms suggest a fugitive attempt at continuity, a leapfrogging of time and geography to carry on a tradition rooted ultimately across the Atlantic. On the one hand, the logic of colonialism facilitated this transfer via a process of longing by British-Canadians to remap Britishness (as in the case of Pellatt and Casa Loma) onto a spectacularly unEnglish territory. But Canada, like Australia, New Zealand, and other colonies, could not reclaim the lost Middle Ages in a literal sense because it never had a “Middle Age.” Rather, colonial medievalisms often aimed to remake on virgin soil a medieval past that had already been lost in Europe. The French Revolution in France and industrialization in Britain meant that the religious, geographical, and physical signifiers of the medieval past had been partially – or in some cases entirely – erased. The reclamation of these medieval worlds in light of social change and industrialization motivated many of the medievalist enterprises of the period, including J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, and Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s nineteenth-century gothicization of Notre Dame in Paris.5 The New World thus offered ostensibly virginal territory upon which settlers could reimagine and even rebuild these lost cultures, however different they may have been from their hallowed origins. A prevalent discourse running through medievalisms in Canada is that Canadians are typological successors to the hearty Northerners – the Goths – from the Renaissance myths of the Gothic by Giorgio Vasari and Raphael. As Daniel Coleman has shown in his study of the literary cultures of mid-nineteenth- through early twentieth-century Canada, “What has come to be called ‘the Northern myth’ was central to this figuration of Canada as a testing and improving ground for effete European manhood. According to this myth, the rigours of life in a stern, unaccommodating climate demanded strength of body, character, and mind while it winnowed away laziness, overindulgence, and false social niceties.”6 The 1890s saw a new interest in a “Viking” history of Canada predicated on the belief that Scandinavians had indeed reached Canada around 1000 (substantiated by the discovery of the medieval settlement at L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, in 1961). In 1896 and 1898, Lady Aberdeen, wife of John Campbell Gordon, governor general

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of Canada, held historical balls in Ottawa and Montreal for “Vikings and Viqueens” and promoted the idea of the foundation of Canada by Scandinavians based upon the account in the Vinland Sagas.7 Canada’s placement in the north meant that, by a process of social Darwinism, over time its population would shed all overbred, aristocratic European delicacy as well as repel southern “lassitude and hedonism.”8 This myth was efficacious in Canada not only because of the country’s northern position in North America but particularly because the myth rhetorically polarized the heartiness of Canadians against the apparently supine hedonism of the United States (a transposition of the Renaissance myth that polarized France and Germany with Italy). These very mythologies informed the critical reception of what has been understood as the first national school of painting in Canada – the Group of Seven – and its leading light, Tom Thomson, in particular. Considered a northern monkartist who spent time meditating in the natural cloister of the forest, Thomson was mythologized along the lines of a medieval artist traversing the North. Thomson’s early work referenced medieval manuscripts – via an Arts and Crafts aesthetic – such as his 1906 Burns’ Blessing (fig. 6.1) or his 1908 landscape of a knight in front of a castle (featuring a passage from the symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck).9 In his famous essay “Canadian Gothic,” R.H. Hubbard commented on the continuation of a Romantic spirit in Canadian Gothic architecture, which he extended to the “Gothic” artists in the Group of Seven.10 Under Arthur Lismer, the Ontario College of Art would hold a medieval ball for which Lismer and his wife would dress in medieval guise in garments based as much on medieval clothing as on representations thereof in Pre-Raphaelite paintings.11 Medievalism in Canada demanded crucial historical distortions to facilitate a colonial myth of Canada’s medieval genealogy. In her account of Australian medievalisms – which applies well to Canada – Louise D’Arcens argued that “medievalism is a hermeneutic rather than a forensic practice; for while it acknowledges the historical existence of the medieval period, it does not seek to reconstruct and thereby recover the original ‘presence’ of the Middle Ages … The modern (and colonial) traces we study … do not point to a pure origin but to a complex, internally divided origin, to which we cannot have unmediated access and of which we cannot take full possession through historical knowledge.”12 Such distortions were, to be sure, central to colonialism and to medievalism as one of its signal productions, and we find many echoes in Pellatt’s Casa Loma.

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Figure 6.1 Tom Thomson, Burns’ Blessing, 1906. Watercolour, gouache, and ink on paper.

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A biographer of Pellatt around 1910 could effortlessly opine, “He is of English descent and while he prides himself on being a thorough Canadian, his bone and blood is English, and his patriotism is for Canada first, but he advocates Imperial connection, the development of an Empire, the binding together of the colonies

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with the Mother country into an Imperial Union, by which he claims the AngloSaxon race will dominate the world.”13 For Michelle Warren, the importation of the Middle Ages into the New World is inherent in the very structures of colonialism, which “offered one path to integrating ‘new’ nations into global history.” Warren continues, “This path, however, led European-identified elites to overlook or explicitly deny the ways in which Amerindian populations also possessed history. Recourse to medieval European history thus facilitates colonialist denials of ‘coevalness’ … to Indigenous peoples. In the Americas, then, nationalist medievalisms occupy a complicated ideological ground that includes fragmented identifications with European imperialism, colonial oppression, the prestige of ancient histories, and the cachet of self-invention.”14 Put differently, such medievalisms had to confront pre-existing First Nations populations who posed a challenge to historical continuity, venerability, or even the legal right of European foreigners to remain on Canadian soil. As Pellatt’s biographer suggested, the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxons was the dominant founding narrative that justified and defined an Anglo-Saxon presence in the country.15 Others, including the Group of Seven, altogether erased Canada’s First Nations from their imagery, severing the land from its natural inhabitants or denying their existence altogether in favour of creating a “Canadian” school of landscape painting.16

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Because medievalism is a complex and variable myth, it is useful to begin by exploring the specific terms of Pellatt’s medievalism and the cultural and social factors that informed it and aspects of the design of Casa Loma. Pellatt’s medievalism was shaped by one of the great periods of chivalric revival in the English-speaking world. This period, described by Mark Girouard in The Return to Camelot, promoted a new and specific association between the medieval past and the modern present as a result of the First World War and its overt revival of chivalric codes, which were buoyed up more generally by the myths of English imperialism.17 Chivalry – as a mythology that bound men and women to a common social and spiritual objective – was one of the ways in which imperial expansion was sold to, and subsequently maintained by, Canadians. Chivalry became part of the lingua franca of elite culture in the empire, and its performance served to emphasize Canada’s role within it.

Figure 6.2 Left Medievalizing corbel from upper hall at Casa Loma. Figure 6.3 Right Medievalizing corbel from upper hall at Casa Loma.

Many later commentators have minimized Pellatt’s chivalric and medievalist orientations as foppishness, horsiness, bloody-minded anglophilia, or even racist imperialism, all of which strike contemporary readers as anachronistic if not overtly distasteful in a postcolonial context. For John Bentley Mays, Casa Loma’s medievalism was “a flight into fantasy into a chivalric past to retreat the reality of modernity.”18 There was indeed much that was overtly fantastical and carnivalesque about Pellatt’s conception of the Middle Ages, manifest, for example, in the repeating corbels of four designs of jesters, maidens, drunken friars, and knights on the second floor of Casa Loma (figs 6.2 and 6.3) around the upper parts of the Great Hall, which suggested a bawdy, comical, and whimsical approach to the Middle Ages. While theatricality and performance were significant to Pellatt’s own self-image and to the design and function of Casa Loma as a “show house,” such a perspective fails to understand the gravity of Pellatt’s own sense of chivalry, his role in re-energizing Canada’s imperial movement, or the interconnection of medievalism, imperialism, and elite business that influenced patrons across North America. Chivalry and medievalism were not an escape from the present: they were fundamental to modernity itself as Pellatt understood it.19 Although Pellatt was not – officially at least – a member of the military, he nonetheless located “soldiering” at the centre of his life. His engagement with the military was principally through the Queen’s Own Rifles of

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Canada, a reserve regiment that helped to facilitate Pellatt’s greatest honour – being knighted by King Edward VII in 1905. Pellatt would thus proudly display the heraldry of the regiment in an elegantly carved blazon atop the remarkable Casa Loma stables in the same year (fig. 6.4). Pellatt’s knighthood also facilitated future exchanges between himself and the monarchy, and the creation of a home that could house visiting monarchs was certainly one influence in the construction of Casa Loma. Pellatt’s most ostentatious display of military prowess, benefaction, and status was financing and leading the entire six-hundred-man regiment (including its horses) to England for military training to mark Queen’s Own Rifles’ fiftieth anniversary, which resulted in a personal invitation from the newly crowned George V to visit Balmoral Castle.20 The invitation not only signified recognition of Sir Henry’s service to the Canadian militia abroad but also meant a new point of entry into the monarchy via a newly crowned king. Balmoral Castle in particular, and the Scottish Baronial style in general, were important influences on the design of Pellatt’s future home. Further military orders followed. He became Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (cvo) in 1910, then a knight of grace, courtesy of the Order of St John of Jerusalem in England in 1915 – Lady Pellatt was made lady of grace contemporaneously – and from 1911 to 1923, knight principal of the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor. A small but telling manifestation of Pellatt’s chivalric pretensions (as much as those projected upon him) is the 1912 Imperial Society of Knights trophy (fig. 6.5), with the following inscription: “Presented to Sir Henry Pellatt Knight Bachelor and Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, President of the Imperial Society of Knights by his Fellow members of the degree in recognition of his conspicuous service to the Society. His valued work on behalf of their Ancient Order and in commemoration of the signal mark of the Royal Favour conferred on the Society by His Majesty King George V.” There seems something overtly farcical about this image, particularly in contrast with the wellfed portliness of its apparent referent who never saw battle, much less the tilt yard. But the trophy was typical of its type and kind; it serves as an allegorical figure for Pellatt’s constructed self-image as a knight of the empire, a position based self-consciously on late medieval precedent. While Pellatt’s military aspirations can be explained in part by his jockeying for social position and general arrivisme, it would be a mistake to suggest this was his

Figure 6.4 Top Queen’s Own Rifles heraldry, the stables, Casa Loma. Figure 6.5 Bottom Imperial Society of Knights trophy presented to Sir Henry Pellatt, 1912.

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only motivation. Much of Pellatt’s military, entrepreneurial, and even building activity amounted to a concerted campaign to ally Toronto (what Carl Berger famously called Canada’s “most Imperialistic city”), and Canada more broadly, with the empire.21 In his account of Pellatt’s life, Newton MacTavish cited W.R. Lawson’s Canada and the Empire (1911), which described Pellatt’s 1910 display of the Queen’s Own Rifles in England as “the seed of a new Imperial movement … It has given fresh impulse to the cause of Imperial unity, the cause which is struggling so high in the teeth of political luke-warmness and discouragement. Of all His Majesty’s subjects, the Canadians are at present doing most to promote it.”22 Pellatt was thus understood by many as reviving what was already a waning imperial unity with Britain. While Pellatt’s own anglophilia and his nostalgia for British history is clear, it is significant to recall, as Berger reminds us, that capitalism was the most important feature of imperialism.23 Pellatt was first and foremost a Canadian empirebuilder, and he was profoundly aware of the immense power of Canada and the financial and cultural benefits of interdependence with the broader empire. As such, imperialism was, paradoxically, one variety of Canadian nationalism – an awareness of nationality that rested upon a certain understanding of history, the national character, and the national mission.

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Pellatt’s medievalism shared some ground with that of North America’s elite financiers and industrialists, what Kathleen Davis has called “Tycoon Medievalism.”24 Typical of many elite patrons of architecture of North America’s Gilded Age, Pellatt understood himself as an inheritor of a grand European aristocratic tradition, and his medievalism was a prism through which he viewed the present. Casa Loma is one example of medieval or medievalist castle building by elite patrons between about 1880 and 1920 on both sides of the Atlantic.25 Many North American nouveau riche patrons acquired castles and stately homes in Britain, or occasionally France or Italy (frequently transforming or altogether rebuilding them). The period also saw the wholescale dismantling of European medieval and Renaissance buildings, which were shipped and rebuilt in North America, a phenomenon given comic treatment in the 1935 Hollywood movie The Ghost Goes West (dir. René Clair) in

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which a dismantled Scottish castle is re-erected in America but not without the ghost that haunts its walls. Finally, like Pellatt, many built castles anew on North American soil. Most of these homes were the result of the extraordinary economic boom that gave rise to the era of the plutocrat. Indeed, it might be suggested that in a time when the meanings of elite status and aristocracy shifted from family inheritance to the new wealth of the Gilded Age plutocrat, the castle was the ultimate symbol of this changing tide. Patrons acquired them principally because they could (at a time when the hereditary aristocracy could not acquire new grand properties, much less maintain the ones that they had) but also because they signified a profound elevation of status to aristocratic living. Among the North American patrons who acquired castles in Britain, Andrew Carnegie, “the Scoto-American Plutus of Pittsburgh” purchased Skibo Castle in the Highland County of Sutherland in Scotland and substantially rebuilt it in the fashionable Scottish Baronial style from 1898 (fig. 6.6).26 A few years later, William Waldorf Astor purchased Hever Castle in Kent and set about an extensive campaign of renovation and expansion between 1904 and 1908.27 Astor’s work at Hever had, at best, mixed reviews, and his destruction of Tudor stables to reuse the timber and his combination of Rhode Island opulence with a medieval castle carried the unpleasant whiff of New World American tastes for many British critics. He nonetheless aimed, where possible, to replicate historical rather than using modern techniques in the recreation of a late medieval residence. The trend continued in the 1920s, when Willian Randolph Hearst famously sent a telegram stating, “Want buy Castle in England,” which resulted in his acquisition of St Donat’s Castle, in Glamorganshire, Wales. Hearst seldom visited but lavished considerable sums on restoring and expanding St Donat’s, including acquiring timber and other later medieval Tudor and Jacobean spolia from different sites in Britain for the rebuild. George Bernard Shaw quipped, “This is what God would have built if he had the money.”28 To this brief list should be added the remarkable, newly built Castle Drogo in Devon (begun 1911), home of the mercantile adventurer Julius Drewe, designed by Edward Lutyens (who had recently restored Lindisfarne Castle in Northumbria). One of the most magnificent British buildings of its era, Castle Drogo made a series of calculated allusions to medieval and early modern castle architecture while being unapologetically a new and technologically avant-garde home. Much like Casa Loma, Castle Drogo had the most current technologies

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housed within its medievalist frame, including a central vacuum system, an electric system powered by a turbine house built and designed by Lutyens, and a suite of eighteen internal telephones. Newly built castles flourished in North America during the same years. In Canada, a handful of substantial mansions or “castles” in a version of the Scottish Baronial style preceded Casa Loma’s construction. In Victoria, British Columbia, Craigdarroch Castle was built for the Scottish-Canadian industrialist Robert Dunsmuir in 1887–90. Dunsmuir made his fortune from coal on Vancouver Island. Precociously early among these buildings, Craigdarroch was a hybrid of a prevalent Richardsonian Romanesque Revival mode with aspects of the Scottish Baronial. Dunsmuir’s son, James, commissioned Samuel Maclure to construct Hatley Castle from 1908 in a rusticated Scottish Baronial style as a second substantial medievalist mansion on Vancouver Island (fig. 6.7). Closer geographically and conceptually to Casa Loma was Boldt Castle, located on Heart Island on the St Lawrence River in Upstate New York. Built by George Boldt, the general manager of the Waldorf Astoria in New York, Boldt Castle was begun in 1900 as an extraordinary island mansion for a leading millionaire proprietor from New York. Its construction was famously halted by the death of Boldt’s wife in 1904, for whom he had built the castle in the first place, and the estate was never completed. Also in New York State, just above New York City, Bannerman Castle was a substantial castle on the Hudson River built for Francis Bannerman (1851–1918), a Scottish-born dealer in munitions. Designed as a show house for his collection of arms and armour (a “Museum of the Lost Arts”), his intention was not dissimilar to what Sir Henry Pellatt would claim a few years later.29 Also like Pellatt, Bannerman referenced his own Scottish ancestry in the fabric of his home, which would, like Casa Loma, blend features of the Scottish Baronial style with other features of European castle architecture. Bannerman died in 1918, and the explosion of his powder store defenestrated the house in 1920. We can also chart a history of medievalist castles in North America after Casa Loma. Charlford Castle in Colorado is a little-known example. It was built between 1924 and 1926 by the Denver architect Burnham Hoyt, who, typical of many patrons of grand domestic architecture of the Gilded Age including Henry Pellatt, imported an entire workforce of European (in his case Scottish) builders, craftsmen, and masons.30 In this sense, Charlford and Casa Loma are examples of a well-established

Figure 6.6 Top Skibo Castle, Scotland. Figure 6.7 Bottom Hatley Castle, Victoria, British Columbia.

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tradition during the Gilded Age of hiring and importing European labour – a connection to the mores and manufacture of European great homes. There is something extraordinarily self-confident in the fabric of these buildings, and it is difficult not to see them as being far more than simply the products of aping the mores of a dwindling European aristocracy. As Warren suggests, “The Gothic offered a path to cultural equality with Europe, in which [North] Americans could claim to understand the European Middle Ages better than modern Europeans” did.31 Concurrent political and sociological theory supported the connection of financiers’ medievalism with their roles as builders of Gothic piles. Thorstein Veblen’s famous Theory of the Leisure Class usefully backgrounds Pellatt’s (and his fellow plutocrats’) economic medievalism as “lord of the manor.” Veblen read the architectural and social landscape of neo-medieval North America around 1900 as signs of the renewed surge of the leisure classes’ conspicuous consumption. He believed that Gothic buildings were inappropriate, expensive, and ill-suited to modern needs, and he understood that the castellated buildings of medieval barons created the mould for those of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. In Veblen’s view, the robber barons, like their medieval predecessors, exercised their prerogative to exploit labourers in the vain creation of ostentation Gothic homes, thus closing the loop with medieval baronial traditions.32 Although there is no reason to think that he knew Pellatt, or vice versa, Veblen’s theory nonetheless provides a perceptive gloss on Pellatt’s medievalism.

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Turning now to Casa Loma, some comment should be made on its design and design process, since both naturally inform its meaning. As Sharon Vattay explores in chapter 3, Pellatt considered himself an amateur architect and claimed to have designed a long list of buildings, including many for his friends. Although not a stitch of Pellatt’s authorship for any of his friends’ homes survives, his control of the design of Casa Loma is suggested in contemporary sources. As chapter 3 notes, he claimed in a Toronto Weekly Star article that Casa Loma was the result of his personal and firsthand study of European architecture, which led to his creating something of “an architectural museum, something absolutely unique, as it were, of the fortress architecture of all ages.”33 Here, Pellatt invited his listeners or readers

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to walk through a grand sweep of European architecture, which was doubtless intended to impress as much as to record actual relationships between Casa Loma and its European sources. Initially, Pellatt’s quasi-scholarly account of the house is difficult to square with the house itself. Casa Loma lacks the sense of obvious quotation manifest, for example, in Georgian Gothic architecture, in which the connection between specific motifs and their historical sources is pronounced – such as the replication of the tower at Batalha, Portugal, in Lee Priory or Fonthill Abbey or the copying of medieval tombs for fireplace surrounds at Strawberry Hill and elsewhere.34 If we take Pellatt literally, we find few direct connections between the castle architecture of the Rhine and Casa Loma: with the eye of faith, the Mouse Tower (Mäuseturm) in Bingen am Rhein provides a distant parallel to the central tower over the main entrance. The so-called Eagle Tower from the city fortifications of Rüdesheim might, at a push, represent a model for the round tower at Casa Loma, since both translate to square, corbelled-out bastions at the top. But one could find these features in various parts of Europe, and Pellatt’s breezy allusion to “some ancient Schloss upon the Rhine” should not be taken literally. It is of interest here that the Hudson River in New York was referred to as “the Rhine” or “the American Rhine” during Pellatt’s lifetime, a sufficiently picturesque setting for a collection of medievalizing homes and villas. These surely, or the intermediary sources in books that informed their patrons about the Rhine, such as Amelia M. Murray’s Pictorial and Descriptive Sketches of Odenwald and Robert L. Batty’s Scenery of the Rhine, would likely have been as influential for Pellatt as the original European homes. Understanding that quotation was manifestly not literal in each case, and that Pellatt’s ideas were likely sifted and transformed into workable designs by Lennox and his office, surely goes some way toward obscuring and synthesizing some of the more obvious “sources” that Pellatt felt underlay the castle as a whole. But there is thus no reason to doubt that he exercised considerable control over the design. Indeed, in elite circles around 1900, there was an established tradition of military men studying and even designing castles.35 We may never know if Pellatt and Lennox travelled to Britain together to study architecture in preparation for Casa Loma’s design – a kind of Romantic plein air sketching tour that has a sense of legend about it. Nevertheless, we can profitably follow aspects of the design in the house and in the libraries of both men. Both Pellatt and Lennox (naturally) had libraries of pattern and design books, builder’s

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manuals, and historical accounts of world (and particularly British) architecture upon which to base their designs for Casa Loma.36 For example, the tightly drawn grid of plasterwork designs on the library ceiling, with quatrefoils framing heraldic motifs joined at each corner to squares, were common enough in Elizabethan and later architecture, but they have a particular source in the King James Drawing Room at Hatfield House (though the Casa Loma designs did not feature the hanging pendants). A likely source for this design was Charles Latham’s In English Homes, which Lennox owned.37 Latham’s book may not have been the only source for the design, but Lennox’s choice to mark this page in Latham’s book is suggestive. Various elements of Casa Loma can be traced to Lennox’s books, including the exterior sculpture of a lion and unicorn, possibly based on the heraldic imagery at Hampton Court, which Lennox knew from Thomas Gardner and Arthur Stratton’s Domestic Architecture in England during the Tudor Period (1911), a copy of which Lennox owned and marked up.38 Other forms also suggest clever re-employment from pattern or picture books, including the curvilinear forms on the rooflines terminating in finials, which recall a long line of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses, such as Stanway (Gloucestershire), or their reemployment in any number of later Victorian homes. Here, too, the long gallery – or picture gallery – was common in Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture, although no singular source can be cited.39 As noted in chapter 3, Dendy and Kilbourn claimed that Pellatt handed Lennox a “sheaf of sketches and photographs illustrating his ideas about castle architecture” – the patron’s brief that Lennox transformed into Casa Loma. While they offer no evidence for this claim, and nothing substantiates the claim in the documentary record as it is now known, their suggestion may not be far off the mark.40 Casa Loma was, as Horace Walpole described Strawberry Hill, a “paper house,” meaning that it was compiled from images in books, from drawings on paper – some made on the sites of historical buildings, others simply imagined de novo, and in Pellatt’s case, from photographs. Pellatt and Lennox had a long friendship, and we can imagine their sharing images, selecting and discarding designs over a lengthy design process. The recognizable quotations in the house amount to a form of conspicuous consumption in and of themselves. Based in the logic of an aspirational aristocrat, Casa Loma might be defined by an acquisitional aesthetics – “I want one like that!” – not only in the selection and replication of parts of historic houses (without necessarily replicating their meanings) but also in the literal selection and

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repurposing of the historical fabric of these homes, in, for example, the many spoliated fireplaces Pellatt purchased from the burgeoning salvage trade.41

a rch i te c t u re a n d e m p i re While Casa Loma has often enough been reduced to convenient clichés of nouveau riche tastelessness, faux medievalism, and other Gatsby-esque tropes of the Gilded Age, none of these adequately explain why the house was built or why it looks the way it does. It will be clear that I see Casa Loma as a complex expression of its patron’s own anglophilia and of his own staunch nationalism. It was to Pellatt that Lawson attributed the responsibility for Canada becoming “the keystone of the imperial arch,” a reading that glosses the deeper intent of the program of Casa Loma. I want now to look more closely at the sources for the house as Pellatt understood them – sources both formal and conceptual – to articulate the complex range of historical references that informed it. We might begin by noting what contemporaries thought of it. One author in the Contract Record and Engineering Review for 1912 noted, “The style of architecture of the residence is French Baronial which is a combination of the Scotch Baronial and French Chateau, the climate of this country making this combination desirable” – thus referring to the myth of the Gothic as a style of the northern peoples noted above.42 In the context of a comical rant on Toronto’s apparent Americanism, an essay in the Canadian Courier, “Recent Scenes in Yankee Toronto” (1916), opined, “Were you ever up at Casa Loma? Did you ever see anything like Sir Henry Pellatt’s place in Yankeeland? That’s the real English touch – ‘cloudcapt towers and gorgeous palaces.’”43 Here, Casa Loma’s overt Englishness offers the rebuttal to those claiming Toronto to be an “American” city. In emphasizing the Englishness of the house, the Canadian Courier author references The Tempest, although he could have hardly known that the illusory nature of such architectural fantasies in Shakespeare’s passage would preface Casa Loma’s own fate. Such commentaries could readily be multiplied, but the overt Britishness of the castle was hardly in doubt for contemporaries. While Casa Loma does not copy any specific medieval or medievalizing home in its totality, it is clear that both patron and architect had their broad tradition in

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Figure 6.8 Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Horace Walpole, 1756. Formerly at Casa Loma. Oil on canvas, 50” x 40 1/2”.

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mind in the creation of the house. Two significant paintings point in this direction: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Horace Walpole (1756), builder of Strawberry Hill, and J.M.W. Turner’s View of Fonthill Abbey (figs 6.8 and 6.9).44 Referencing the two most famous Gothic houses of the Georgian period (figs 6.10 and 6.11), these pictures stand out among the many significant paintings that Pellatt owned; both, as it happens, were positioned on the now-lost screen that divided the library and dining room. As Joan Crosbie first noted, the prominent position of these important paintings provided some sense of Pellatt’s taste not only in art but also in architecture.45 Pellatt considered Casa Loma to descend from a heritage of great British homes built by literary gentlemen, antiquaries, and scholars. Here, surely, is a case of creative self-fashioning if ever there was one. As Peter Coffman noted, “architecturally speaking, Casa Loma became an orphan when the two paintings were removed

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Figure 6.9 Joseph Mallard William Turner, View of Fonthill Abbey, ca. 1800. Formerly at Casa Loma.

from its walls [in 1924], causing an identity crisis from which its public image has never recovered.” At Casa Loma as elsewhere, the positioning of images and objects within great homes could establish associations between themselves and other buildings or patrons that are divorced from what we now consider “style.” Coffman went on to suggest that Casa Loma is not the “illegitimate child of the medieval castle but the legitimate child of the Gothic imagination.”46 While Beckford, and particularly Walpole, offered an influential template to subsequent patrons of elite Gothic homes, it was one that was readily adapted, changed, and reimagined in different contexts. In formal terms at least, there is far more that divides Casa Loma from this tradition than unites it. Strawberry Hill (fig. 6.10) was an enormously significant building that cast a lengthy shadow over the history of architecture in England, its colonies, and further afield. Aspects of the style of Strawberry Hill were disseminated in the building within Walpole’s circle of a handful of prestigious Gothic homes from the 1750s through the 1790s, each referring back to Strawberry in one way or another through its ornament or picture hangs. Although Beckford’s Fonthill (fig. 6.11) was clearly informed by Strawberry Hill, he claims to have had little love for Walpole or his

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Figure 6.10 Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, London, built by Horace Walpole, 1747–97.

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home.47 These buildings would remain influential for later North American builders: in the middle years of the nineteenth century, a neo-medieval home called Strawberry Hill would be built in Irvington, New York, in homage to the English original, and a Fonthill Castle in Riverdale along the Hudson would likewise be based loosely upon Fonthill Abbey.48 While we cannot know precisely what Pellatt knew of Walpole, Beckford, or their famous homes, his appraisal of these men and their homes was probably made via antiquarian prints and engravings. (Fonthill was ruinous by the time Pellatt was born, and Strawberry Hill was in different hands.) Pellatt likely assessed these buildings as part of a grand English history of aristocratic architecture into which he hoped to insert Casa Loma as Toronto’s greatest home.

Strawberry Hill, Fonthill Abbey, and related buildings established what Clive Wainwright has called “the Romantic Interior” – a fashion for wedding historical art collections to neo-medieval and other historicist settings in British architecture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see also chapter 5).49 Typical of this tradition, the various rooms of Casa Loma were each ornamented with a different language of design – Gothic, Tudor, Palladian, baroque – and contemporary documentation confirms that Pellatt purchased lots of historical furniture and fittings from England, including the aforementioned marble fireplaces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was the case of a patron inventing a familial genealogy via acquisition (rather than inheritance) of historical furniture, which would, in turn, be located within a new Gothic mansion. Figure 6.11 Fonthill Abbey, View of the west and north fronts, from John Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill, London, 1823.

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I have noted already that for most viewers of the home, including Pellatt, Casa Loma’s nationality, its signification of a particular national heritage through its sinuous forms, was central to its meaning. Scottish, French, English, American, and Canadian significations have been read in the fabric of the house, suggesting as much about the nationalist prejudices of its commentators as they do about the house itself. Indeed, it is significant that the house was built during a period of heightened awareness of the national character of architecture in architectural writing in Canada. The passages in the Canadian Courier and the Contract Record and Engineering Review cited above about the house’s apparent stylistic hybridity are in any case not far from the mark. While French and English sources abound on the interior, the majority of forms and motifs on Casa Loma’s exterior derive from the Figure 6.12 Balmoral Castle, Scotland.

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dominant Scottish Baronial style that proliferated in Scotland from the early nineteenth century and would represent a significant export to Canada and elsewhere via English and Scottish colonials in the later nineteenth century. This robust style was defined by crow-stepped gables and variegated rooflines crowned by heavy crenellations; bartizans (frequently with faux machicolations); elaborate portes cochères; and oversized ornamental military features, such as arrow slits and crenellations. Drawing principally from Scottish late medieval and Renaissance architecture, and freely adapting features from English, Netherlandish, and French architecture, the Scottish Baronial was a fluid and malleable mode of design. In addition to its fashionability, this style may have specifically spoken to Pellatt as a man born of a father from Glasgow and who would visit Scotland on several occasions. The most frequently cited source for Casa Loma is Balmoral Castle near Aberdeen, rebuilt for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (fig. 6.12). As Pellatt was invited to Balmoral in 1910 as guest to King George V, there is no doubt that he was aware of the house. However, Lennox’s early drawings of Casa Loma confirm that the plans for the house were by then well advanced, which may limit the influence of Pellatt’s Balmoral visit upon Casa Loma, at least upon the house’s footprint. It is of course entirely possible that Pellatt and Lennox knew Balmoral from published imagery in texts such as R.W. Billings’s Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland (1845–53) or that one or both of them had previously visited Balmoral. In any case, the design of Casa Loma loosely reflects some of the royal house’s features. The Gothic porte cochère at Balmoral could be understood to anticipate that at Casa Loma, while the exterior of the Balmoral ballroom, itself possibly based on the Garden House at Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, provides a convincing analogue for the Casa Loma conservatory (figs. 6.13 and 6.14). These points aside, few if any sources can be cited as direct parallels. Indeed, aspects of Casa Loma like the twolevel polygonal bay windows on the southern front would seem to reflect Old Balmoral, built 1834–39, which Victoria and Albert had rebuilt well before the time Pellatt would have seen it. But style is only one way to understand connections between these great homes. As Aonghus Mackechnie and Florian Urban have suggested, the Scottish Baronial style was a suitable vehicle to explore various strains of nationalism. The complex blending of Scottish and English features in the design suggested a figurative proposal for “built unionism” that underscored the unity of Britain via combined traits of Englishness and Scottishness.50 Balmoral was a romantic and nostalgic building

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Figure 6.13 Top Balmoral Castle, Scotland. Figure 6.14 Bottom Casa Loma, Toronto, showing the exterior of the conservatory or Palm Room.

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that, following from Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, helped popularize a range of ideas and images often referred to as Highlandism: “These ideas and images bridged a contradictory attitude about Scotland that Victoria and Albert shared with many of their English subjects. On the one hand, they wholeheartedly embraced the aesthetic experience of the Scottish Highlands. On the other hand, they

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Figure 6.15 Pellatt family arms on the south façade of Casa Loma.

showed little political interest in their newly adopted region other than stressing, through action rather than verbal statements, its position as an inseparable part of the British nation-state.”51 The second design at Balmoral (1852) juxtaposed emblems of Scotland and England throughout the house, including pairing the thistle and the rose, but nowhere more obviously than on the western façade, which has a relief of St Hubert (the patron saint of hunting) in the centre flanked on either side by St Andrew of Scotland and St George of England, thus unifying Balmoral’s function as a sporting retreat literally framed by the patron saints of both nations. Even if Balmoral is less convincing as a dominant source for Casa Loma than has been previously suggested, it nonetheless embodies a related form of “built unionism,” a rhetoric that Pellatt understood informed the Scottish Baronial style. Throughout the house, its architecture and ornament structured a narrative of family honour, martial vigour, and commitment to empire. This is evidenced in the appearance of the Pellatt arms on the stables, on the decorative plasterwork ceilings of the library, and most obviously, atop the south- or city-facing façade in a grand blazon looming over Pellatt’s “subjects,” the citizens of Toronto (figs 6.15 and 6.16).52 To either side are grand displays of carved Union Jacks amid a shield,

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Figure 6.16 Carved military decoration with Union Jacks on the south front of Casa Loma.

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axe, and breastplate. Unfortunately, much of the carved ornament clearly intended for the house was never finished, and we can only imagine what the unworked stones atop gables and doors might have featured. Nonetheless, the sculpture of the southern façade as it now stands explicitly linked the Pellatt family and Toronto with Britain. But the southern façade’s heraldry should also be read in concert with the northern façade’s imagery. Facing east and west are two monumental, more than lifesized figures of a lion and unicorn, the traditional emblems for England and Scotland and, collectively, of British unity. Significantly, Pellatt had employed the same imagery on the stables a few years previously, positioning two shield-holding unicorns (whose horns are now mostly lost) with garters on the stables and two shield-holding lions on the gatehouse (figs 6.17 and 6.18). In a Canadian context, such images grandly framed Pellatt as an inheritor of an imperial legacy and the keeper of that legacy in what he considered Canada’s greatest city. As we have seen in chapter 4, such connections ran through the display of art and objects in the house, including an oak chair given to Pellatt by Queen Victoria and an equestrian bronze statue of Edward VII by Remington Clarke (see fig. 4.6).53 Thus, Berger’s

Figure 6.17 Left Unicorn statue on exterior of the stables at Casa Loma. Figure 6.18 Right Lion statue, on exterior of the stables at Casa Loma.

195 conclusion that, in the minds of Canadians in the years before the First World War “imperialism, military preparedness, and militarism, or the admiration and exaltation of the martial virtues, were inextricably bound together” finds much support in Pellatt’s cultural output.54 So much is clear, but it is also significant, following another line of Berger’s argument, that such affiliations with empire were completely consistent with a developing Canadian nationalism, which Pellatt had in abundance. It is thus hardly a surprise that the castellated Scottish Baronial style of Casa Loma would be appreciated as a distinctively Canadian style of architecture from the first decade of

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the twentieth century (even if it was also employed in the United States).55 As noted, this view was based in an older understanding of the Gothic style as a specifically northern mode that distinctively expressed a developing sense of Canada in contrast to the dominant classicism of the United States. Here we are aware of the rhetorical nature of nationalist critiques: the Gothic and the myth of the Middle Ages had an equally important place in American culture during the period defined by T.J. Jackson Lears as “antimodern.”56 Arguably its greatest contemporary American practitioner, Ralph Adams Cram, not only offered a cogent theory on the Gothic but practised in Canada and the United States and was even hired by Pellatt in 1913 to complete the unfinished cathedral of St Alban the Martyr on Howland Avenue in Toronto, close to Casa Loma. (Funds quickly ran out and the project was never realized.)57 Wilfred Campbell could nonetheless speak of the European Gothic sources of the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa thus in 1907: “For while we speak of them as Canadian, every tower and arch, every buttress and carving, every groin and bastion, every window and doorway is an evidence of the spirit and ideal of the spirit of our Celtic, Saxon, and Norman forefathers. In these buildings we have as a people, both French and British … epics in stone, revealing to us not only universal beauty and inspiration but emblematic of our common ideal, our common artistic sense, our common ancestry, and our common Christianity.”58 A version of the Scottish Baronial style would be applied to the so-called railway hotels, the Château Laurier, Château Frontenac, and others, which would likewise be read as distinctively Canadian buildings. Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, Christopher Thomas, Kelly Crossman, and others have paid careful attention to the development of nationalism in the historiography of Canadian architecture. We need not rehearse these ideas here, except to note the prevalence of them from about 1900 through to their zenith around the centenary of Confederation in 1967.59 However, it is significant that this nationalist tradition would be short-lived: modern building technologies and global communications made any search for national identity in or through architecture obsolete in the later years of the twentieth century.60 But in understanding the “Canadianness” of Casa Loma in Pellatt’s lifetime, we might borrow from Thomas’s reading of the Houses of Parliament in asserting that Casa Loma was both British and Canadian, depending on one’s definition. Pellatt’s worldview was essentially Victorian in believing that being Canadian was to live as a Briton abroad, a supporter and defender of Canada’s ties to her greater empire.61

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This view found considerable support in the writings of leading theorists and practitioners of architecture in Canada during these years, including Percy Nobbs and Cecil Scott Burgess. Between 1909 and 1912, Burgess advised careful study of English architecture, firsthand when possible, and promoted the increased use of “portable technologies” such as plaster casts to make British architecture available to architects within Canada. Burgess allegorized architectural practice as a military endeavour: adhering to British traditions in architectural design (i.e., “taking part in the good fight”) was a way of allying Canada as a nation with “the great forward movement of the human race,” by which he meant colonial expansion.62 This rhetoric is encapsulated in what must be one of the most bizarre productions from the world of Casa Loma: a Cobalt silver statue, ca. 1915, of the house (29 ⫻ 29 cm), created by the jeweller William Nassau McKendry, who owned a jewellery store at Yonge and College Streets (fig. 0.15). This statue is actually a careful study of Casa Loma’s southern façade, down to the replication of the fieldstone retaining wall with its distinctive ribbon pointing. Unfortunately, we know nothing about the patronage of this work, less still of where it would have been displayed in the later 1910s, although we do know it was exhibited at the Applied Arts Building in Toronto. It may or may not have been a Pellatt commission – Pellatt notably owned large shares in Cobalt silver mining, which would make his patronage doubly appropriate. However, the fact that the statue remained in the hands of McKendry’s family indicates that it may have been laudatory and commemorative, a costly tribute to Toronto’s greatest home. In any case, the sculpted house is set within a Gothic frame wreathed with maple leaves and crowned by a beaver. Here is an argument in silver (rather than stone) for Pellatt’s Anglo-Scottish castle being an indigenously “Canadian” building.63 And yet, for Pellatt, the relative Canadianness or Englishness of the house would have been a perplexing question; they were, from his perspective, much the same thing: to be Canadian meant to be a British subject devoted to king and country, transplanted to Canadian soil. This chapter complicates as much as clarifies a reading of Casa Loma vis-à-vis the medievalist and nationalist orientations of its patron. Built by a leading financier and imperialist, its grandeur, scale, and stylistic heterogeneity were grounded, on the one hand, in the extraordinary optimism of Toronto as a great modern metropolis connected to its British roots. On the other hand, Casa Loma embodies Pellatt’s (and Canada’s) apparent power to acquire European fashions (often literally) and

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to rethink and reshape them to their own subjective ends. But the world of Casa Loma that I have briefly sketched here was not to last. Not only was the house sold in 1924 but the years between the First World War and the Depression signalled the end of many of the narratives that ran through the house, including the overly chivalrous medievalism that Pellatt personified and promoted. The house and its collection were quickly out of fashion and thus out of step with a rapidly developing urban culture. Casa Loma would be a casualty of the broader process that Christopher Armstrong has defined as making Toronto modern64 – the once-great house variously became a hotel, a dance hall, and a tourist destination, and today is leased to an entertainment company to be a setting for films, tourism, and weddings (as Joan Coutu and Marcella Torres discuss in chapters 7 to 9). After a lengthy history of Toronto being “saddled” with Casa Loma and much hand-wringing about what to do with the building, it now stands as a comfortable anachronism, a reminder of Toronto’s Gothic past without which the city could never have become modern.

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1 See Verduin, “Founding and the Founder.” 2 Phillips, “Pedigree and Genealogical Memoranda.” 3 See Brush, Mapping Medievalism; Ryan, “Medieval New World”; Toswell and Czarnowus, Medievalism in English Canadian Literature; cf. Clark, American Discovery of Tradition. 4 See Magrill, Commerce of Taste. 5 See Camille, Gargoyles of Notre Dame. 6 Coleman, White Civility, 24. 7 Cooper, Magnificent Entertainments; Wawn, Vikings and the Victorians. 8 Coleman, White Civility, 24. 9 See Brush, “Reframing Canada’s ‘Wilderness’ Icons,” esp. 150, 152. 10 See Hubbard, “Canadian Gothic”; Hubbard, “Modern Gothic.” 11 Grigor, Arthur Lismer, 70–2. 12 D’Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land, 15–16. 13 Archives of Ontario, F253, file 46. 14 Warren, “Medievalism and the Making of Nations,” 288. 15 See, in general, Moyles and Owram, Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities. 16 Dawn, “How Canada Stole the Idea of Native Art.” 17 See Girouard, Return to Camelot; see also Goebel, Great War and Medieval Memory. 18 John Bentley Mays, “Sir Henry’s Retreat from Reality,” Globe and Mail, 29 January 1992.

Medievalism, Chivalry, and Empire

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45

Roberts, “Pellatt, Sir Henry Mill.” See also O’Brien, “Manhood and the Militia Myth.” See Mouriopoulos, “‘Serious Piece of Business.’” Berger, Sense of Power, 5. MacTavish, “Henry Mill Pellatt,” 112. See also Lawson, Canada and the Empire, 16–18. Berger, Sense of Power, 7. See Davis, “Tycoon Medievalism, Corporate Philanthropy, and American Pedagogy.” See most recently, Aslet, Edwardian Country House; De Moubray, Twentieth-Century Castles in Britain. Aslet, Edwardian Country House, 9, 172–5. For a useful summary, see de Moubray, Twentieth Century Castles in Britain, 48–61. Ibid., 136–43. Jane Bannerman, “Pollepel – an Island Steeped in History,” History of Bannerman Island, accessed 22 November 2022, https://bannermancastle.org/history/. Our thanks to Piere du Prey for discussions of Charlford Castle and for accompanying images. Warren, “Medievalism and the Making of Nations,” 296. See Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, quoted and discussed in Ziolowski, Juggler of Notre Dame, 271–4. Reeve, Gothic Architecture and Sexuality, 64–80, 171. See Reeve and Lindfield, “‘Child of Strawberry.’” See Stocker, “Shadow of the General’s Armchair.” For a recent account of pattern books in the Canadian Gothic Revival, see Magrill, Commerce of Taste. Latham, In English Homes, 122. See Garner and Stratton, Domestic Architecture of England, plate 140. The volume is now in the Archives of Ontario, Lennox Collection, no. 39, box mu1431. See Coope, “‘Long Gallery.’” Dendy and Kilbourn, Toronto Observed, 181. Thompson, “I Saw the Castle Grow!” This contemporary account from R.S. Thompson, who worked on the castle as it was being built, is now in the Casa Loma archives. On the salvage trade in general, see Harris, Moving Rooms. “Sir Henry Pellatt’s Residence,” 59. Church, “Recent Scenes in Yankee Toronto,” 5. See Adams and Lewis, “Portraits of Horace Walpole”; Cundall, “Turner Drawings of Fonthill Abbey.” See Crosbie, “Casa Loma.”

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62

200 63 64

Coffman, “Casa Loma and the Gothic Imagination,” 8. See Reeve, Gothic Architecture and Sexuality, 185–8. Zukowski, “Castles on the Hudson,” 73–92. See Wainwright, Romantic Interior. See Mackechnie and Urban, “Balmoral Castle.” For a recent study, see Glendinning and Mackechnie, Scotch Baronial. Mackechnie and Urban, “Balmoral Castle,” 176. I am grateful to Darrel Kennedy of the Canadian Heraldic Authority for his assistance with the Pellatt arms. See John Sewell, “Chair a Gift from Queen Victoria,” Toronto Star, 24 November 2007; also Catalogue of the Valuable Contents Casa Loma, 27, no. 387. Berger, Sense of Power, 233. See Liscombe, “Nationalism or Cultural Imperialism?” Lears, No Place of Grace. On Ralph Adams Cram, see most recently Clark, American Discovery of Tradition, esp. chap. 3; on Cram in Canada, see Macdonnell, Ghost Storeys. Campbell, Canada, 104–5. See Liscombe, “Nationalism or Cultural Imperialism?”; Thomas, “‘Canadian Castles?’”; Crossman, Architecture in Transition, esp. 109–35; Spasoff, “Building on Social Power”; Carr, “Indices of Identity.” McMordie, “Question of Identity.” See Thomas, “Slippery Talk of Parliament’s Architecture.” “In order that we too may take hold of great traditions a broad and liberal knowledge and understanding of history is necessary lest we forget, and lest, instead of taking part in the good fight, we straggle from the line of march of the great army and as a nation take no part in the great forward movement of the human race”: see Burgess, Architecture, Town Planning and Community, 28. See John Sewell, “Model of Casa Loma a Canadian Gem,” Toronto Star, 13 January 2009. See Armstrong, Making Toronto Modern.

7 “Pellatt’s Folly” Casa Loma, 1920–1930 joan coutu

With its vigorous castellated profile and almost precarious perch on the crest of Davenport Ridge, Casa Loma stood out above the city spread out below. This was entirely consistent with Sir Henry Pellatt’s vision of his house as a stage for his aristocratic pretensions of outré display and chivalric philanthropy (see chapter 5).1 Such egregiousness matched Pellatt’s aggressive business tactics but was utterly alien both to the reserve of Toronto’s well-to-do and to the strait-laced conservativism of the city’s Orange Order–dominated bourgeoisie. Known both as the “Belfast of Canada” and “Toronto the Good,” the city exuded a public face of moral righteousness that embraced temperance, financial frugality, and clean-living conformity.2 There was little room for deviance, which meant Pellatt and his house were generally regarded with suspicion and, at times, downright animosity. In this regard, Casa Loma was a heterotopia, a term coined by the philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault to define distinctive “other” spaces that exist within larger spaces, yet are disruptive to them.3 After Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt moved from the house in 1923 and Pellatt’s financial situation deteriorated, he and his partners came up with a number of plans for what to do with the castle, from trying to sell it to operating it as a veterans’ home to running it as an élite hotel.4 This chapter explores these various plans for Casa Loma and the accompanying debates, as Casa Loma continued to be a heterotopic space that did not “fit in.” Newspaper reports serve as the

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primary source material as they provide not only chronological – sometimes even hourly – updates but are also barometers of the social and economic time.5

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The relationship between Pellatt and city officials over Casa Loma was fractious from the start. The city was not predisposed to grant Pellatt any favours and in fact threw several obstacles in his way. Taxes were the weapon of choice. At the time, buildings were assessed separately from the property on which they were built and according to how much they might increase the value of the property. After Pellatt built the castle, the city assessed it at $500,000, a figure he deemed excessive because it was far higher than the amounts his neighbours paid (although still less than half of what he had spent to build it). Pellatt appealed, and the judge sided with him, assessing the building at $100,000 on the grounds that large houses were often assessed much lower than their actual cost since they were out of keeping with their surroundings and thus would be more difficult to sell. The city countered with its own appeal to increase the building assessment to $200,000, arguing that there were now more millionaires who could potentially purchase the house at that price.6 The appeal was successful, prompting Pellatt to launch another appeal. By the time it came to court in December 1922, he was in such financial difficulties that his solicitor argued the house should not be assessed at all, saying it was an encumbrance on the land given that it was unfinished and would cost more than $100,000 to tear down.7 The county judge seemed to consider this argument somewhat valid by the terms of the tax act and ruled a reduction in the assessment back to $100,000. This was much to the chagrin of Toronto’s controller, who then planned to bring a motion to city council to ask the provincial legislature to amend the assessment act to assess buildings at their actual value rather than in relation to the land on which they stood.8 Evidently, city officials saw this amendment as a valid way to add revenue to the city coffers and made something of an example of Pellatt. The vehemence with which they pursued the issue was likely driven as well by Casa Loma’s neighbours, who included not only some of Toronto’s wealthiest and most distinguished citizens but also upper middle-class professionals, some of whom had publicly grumbled

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

about the comparatively low rate that Pellatt had been granted.9 As these people were key members of the electorate in the annual municipal elections, city officials were no doubt eager to cultivate their vote. Pellatt also evidently considered subdividing the property and selling the large parcel of land that surrounded the castle. That plan too failed, stymied by the Ontario Railway and Municipal Board, which controlled zoning restrictions in Toronto. As the Pellatts were moving out of the castle in 1923, the board forbade the sale of Casa Loma and its property for subdivision in order to “protect this first class residential district from invasion by undesirable houses.” Furthermore, the board insisted that city council’s consent would be required for its use as anything other than a private residence – again, to “protect” the neighbourhood.10 The ruling had significant ramifications. It made selling Casa Loma almost impossible. As Sir Henry had already stated, hardly anyone could afford to buy it, and no buyer could afford to finish it at an estimated additional cost of $500,000.11 The ruling also meant that the city would be implicated in the sale of the house. What ensued was more than a decade of acrimonious wrangling pitting Pellatt and his partners against city officials and residents of Davenport Ridge, with the future of the castle hanging in the balance. A succession of city officials was convinced that the castle would be used for what they deemed undesirable and inappropriate purposes, and for more than thirty years regular calls rang out for its demolition. This drastic action was avoided simply because the building was too expensive to tear down. Likewise, even before the Pellatts left, rumours began circulating about possible uses for the building, none of which conformed to the Ontario Railway and Municipal Board ruling. At the same time, Pellatt also began to weave his own narrative about the reasons why he had built the castle and why he and his wife were moving out. In November 1923, newspapers reported that serious negotiations were underway with the federal government to turn Casa Loma into a hospital for disabled Great War veterans, with an accompanying war museum.12 This idea appealed immensely to Pellatt, the anachronistic old gentleman-soldier, who until his death many years later would insist that he had always intended to live in the castle for only a few years before turning it into a veterans’ home and/or military museum.13 Ironically, he blamed the war for preventing this from happening, implying that it had led to his financial ruin.14 That the veterans’ home never came to be likely had

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something to do with the costs of running a building that had five thousand electric lights and needed six tonnes of coal a day to heat. Many other schemes were posited. Pellatt himself said he had gathered estimates to move Casa Loma stone by stone and rebuild it on his country estate in King Township north of the city. He had made a mistake by building it where the taxes had become so high, he peevishly pointed out. Such a concept is as implausible as Casa Loma itself, so perhaps it was not beyond Pellatt’s imagination. Others suggested turning Casa Loma into a high school, a palace for a king, a railway station for the “tubes and underground railways which Toronto must sooner or later devise,” an apartment hotel, and a millionaires’ club.15 Mary Pickford, the Torontoborn Hollywood film phenomenon, apparently considered staging plays there.16 The Toronto Star was especially intrigued by the rumour that an order of priests would use Casa Loma as a monastery, given that “the castle dominates, in its position, the most Orange city in America.”17 Not long after, the Orange Order did in fact approach Pellatt to purchase the castle for use as its new Canadian headquarters. That plan also came to naught.18

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Finally, in November 1925, a small but tantalizing announcement appeared in the press, stating that a syndicate had signed an option to purchase Casa Loma for approximately $500,000, although the syndicate’s plans for it were not yet ready to be revealed.19 More details soon emerged. Pellatt had formed the syndicate with William F. Sparling, a Toronto-based architect – whose reputation had recently soared for having built Toronto’s Metropolitan Building, the tallest building in the British Empire – and another unnamed party from New York City who provided the financial backing.20 Their plan was to turn Casa Loma into a highclass residential apartment hotel on the scale of the grand Canadian railway château hotels.21 To make this plan viable, the syndicate proposed a ten-storey, three-hundredsuite discrete addition to the west of the existing castle, connected by an enclosed ground floor hallway. (Figure 7.1 shows a slightly scaled-down version at seven storeys.22) The heavy stone walls, small windows, crenellations, and higher central block with offset tower all tie in with the castle’s design, although the largely rec-

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

Figure 7.1 William Sparling, design for addition to Casa Loma, 1926.

tilinear character of Sparling’s addition (consistent with the monolithic railway châteaux) lacks the effervescence and animation of E.J. Lennox’s original. Taken together, however, the two parts are reminiscent of the oblique view of the famous Neuschwanstein Castle, built in the Tyrolean Alps by King Ludwig II of Bavaria in the 1870s (fig. 7.2). Designed in homage to Richard Wagner’s operas, with battered walls, small windows, and soaring towers, Neuschwanstein is a playbook of the nineteenth-century idea of a castle: theatrical, liminal, and almost ethereal. Although the new Casa Loma Hotel overlooked Toronto instead of the Bavarian plains, it too was the epitome of castle. This, combined with the anticipated glamorous and extravagant guest experience as described in a promotional piece in the May 1927 issue of Canadian Homes and Gardens, would ensure that Casa Loma remained a Foucauldian heterotopia entirely apart from mainstream Toronto.23 Opposition to the concept of a hotel, high end or not, was immediate and vigorous. Since demolishing the castle was not financially feasible and since the purchase of it for single-family use remained remote, there had been grudging support for conversion to a multi-unit structure, since this was more acceptable to both Casa Loma’s neighbours and members of city council than the hulking derelict it seemed otherwise destined to be. However, the neighbours complained that the proposed addition was too high and too close to the road and out of keeping with the residential nature of the district. Additional concern was raised by the fact that the proposed addition was a separate structure, fuelling neighbours’ suspicions

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Figure 7.2 Christian Jank, Ideal Design for Neuschwanstein Castle, 1869. Gouache.

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that the original castle might be used for something other than residential suites, such as a dance hall or restaurant – uses that would be thoroughly offensive since they would bring more traffic and outsiders into the district.24 Notably, the strongest opponent was E.J. Lennox who, having built a comparatively restrained home called Lenwil on Austin Terrace (see chapter 1), was Casa Loma’s nearest neighbour to the west. Relations between Pellatt and Lennox had clearly become strained. Pointedly, it was Sparling rather than Lennox who was working with Pellatt on the hotel scheme and, in the hearing of the property subcommittee that had been established to hear deputations from all sides, Lennox used particularly strong language: “Sir Henry has exploited many things before – why should he exploit the neighbourhood?”25 Lennox and the others who opposed the scheme presumably believed that they had a strong chance of success since the passing of so-called Restricted Area bylaws was commonplace in Toronto from the early years of the century as a way for city councillors to ingratiate themselves with

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

their electorates.26 The subcommittee procrastinated, prorogued, reconvened, heard more deputations, deferred, and procrastinated again until finally coming to a decision in November 1926 – in favour of Pellatt and Sparling.27 The prolonged process effectively slowed Pellatt and Sparling’s plans, pushing them to compromise. After scaling down the addition to seven storeys (as shown in fig. 7.1), they reconceptualized the entire structure by replacing the proposed single addition on the western side with two three-storey wings jutting out southwest and southeast from the main building, visually diminishing the autonomy of the building while keeping it discrete. They also reoriented the main entrance so that access would be from the commercially zoned Davenport Road running along the base of the hill below and south of the castle, therefore turning the face of the hotel away from the residential district and limiting disruption to the neighbourhood from traffic and outsiders. The hotel lobby would be entered from a circular drive off Davenport and then via a tunnel and elevator.28 City council accepted the subcommittee’s recommendation that the new complex be designated an apartment house rather than an apartment hotel so that nobody would think a dance hall or commercial restaurant would be acceptable: “If you grant a license for a hotel, that very innocent word repeals the restrictions on a cigar store, a garage, a dance hall, and all those things.”29 In early January 1927, the Ontario Railway and Municipal Board agreed with the city and authorized the repeal of the bylaws to allow the apartment house.30 Although Pellatt and his collaborators did not break ground for the hotel extension pending the outcome of the deputations, they spent the time converting the twenty-eight upper rooms of the original castle into luxurious suites, installing state-of-the-art kitchen appliances, repairing the heating system and water-damaged woodwork and floors, replacing hundreds of broken panes of glass, removing the wall between the dining room and library, inserting reinforcing iron girders and posts on the main floor, making former pantries into private dining rooms, and finishing the grand staircase (figs 7.3 and 7.4).31 The first occupants were able to move in on 28 March 1927, and the official opening was set for 16 April, complete with a grand ball. This is when Pellatt and Sparling ran into trouble again. It seems the concerns Lennox and his neighbours had about dancing at Casa Loma were not misplaced. Pellatt and Sparling had employed numerous tactics to get approval for amusement licences from City Hall for dances, teas, bridge parties, and other private events,

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Figure 7.3 Casa Loma Hotel from the north, 16 February 1928. Note sign above the porte cochère.

and Sparling feigned horror when ten days before the hotel was set to open, approval was denied. He implied it was the city’s fault that he had come so far and spent so much, only to find out too late that he “could not hold dances, run a restaurant, sell tobacco, or in fact operate any of the various activities which I had relied upon as my chief source of revenue.”32 He and Pellatt had also tried to sidestep the issue by having two university fraternities rent Casa Loma for the opening dance rather than hosting it themselves.33

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

Figure 7.4 Guest room, Casa Loma Hotel, 1927.

A few days before the opening, Sparling stated that he had secured a temporary licence but the “students’ dance” had been cancelled pending a review by the board of police commissioners after he had been served with a letter to desist, courtesy of the solicitors of Casa Loma’s neighbours.34 Two days later, on the morning of the opening, the meeting of the police commissioners had not yet occurred, but Sparling was still hopeful, anticipating approval at a special meeting that afternoon. By this point, Mayor Thomas Foster, who did not support the granting of a licence, had also weighed in, expressing concern as to why a temporary licence had been issued in the first place. It also transpired that the two fraternities were entirely fictitious, dreamed up, a mother said, by her nineteen-year-old son who was enrolled at nearby St Michael’s High School so he could obtain a licence to hold the dance to “make a little [money] to help pay his way through school.”35 By the afternoon, the charade

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had collapsed. Sparling implied that he had been misled and that he had just learned from the school board that the dance was not officially sanctioned, consequently agreeing with the board that the dance should not take place. He added, “It has also been stated that this was an opening dance. I wish to correct this statement, it was merely an informal dance to which I agreed as I was anxious to oblige the students.” He then announced the official opening would be put off until the following Tuesday and expected a grand ball would be held at a future date “timed in accordance with a promised visit from a prince and princess of one of the royal houses of Europe” – likely in reference to the impending visit of the Prince of Wales and Prince George later in the year (although neither was married).36 Such a promise also bears the hallmark of the royalty-smitten Pellatt. Although the official opening ball was cancelled, a dance ultimately did happen on the evening of 16 April. Claiming it was a private affair for which a licence was not needed, Sparling’s wife hosted a dance for four hundred of their closest friends.37 Lennox was evidently furious, and two weeks later, representing “himself and all other ratepayers,” took out a writ against Sparling and Pellatt, restraining them from using Casa Loma “as a dancing hall, restaurant or place of amusement, or from advertising Casa Loma as such.”38 Sparling, meanwhile, courted city councillors, pointing to the lack of noise and traffic at his wife’s private dance and citing testimonials from many neighbours, including Mrs Eaton’s representative for Ardwold, who appreciated that the castle was being used and was lit up at night instead of remaining the dark deserted shell it had been for several years.39 For Sparling and Pellatt, the stakes were high, since they needed the revenue from hosting dances and events, having a restaurant, and selling tobacco. This time Sparling was successful in winning over most city councillors, seemingly on the basis that the castle would otherwise revert to a ruin, a prospect deemed even less desirable than a hotel. His victory was bittersweet since the city, determined to get its piece, doubled the assessment on the castle on the rationale that its use had changed. Sparling and Pellatt were also required to redesign the planned addition so that it would be recessed eighty and seventy-five feet (approximately 24.5 and 23 metres) from Walmer Road and Austin Terrace, respectively, to appease the neighbours.40 Lennox pursued his opposition at the Ontario Railway and Municipal Board where, in a hearing that lasted more than two weeks in July 1927, he was defeated on the basis that operating Casa Loma as an apartment house only was not viable

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

and that a hotel was a better solution than leaving it empty.41 At this point, Pellatt’s involvement seems to have dropped away, as Sparling insisted that he was now the “sole person interested in the present venture at ‘Casa Loma,’” for which he was seeking Canadian capital. This statement was evidently an attempt at refinancing at a time when Pellatt’s personal finances continued to falter.42 Sparling was also willing to redesign the addition to conform with the setback demands. The new plan was for a seven-storey, two-hundred-room, L-shaped extension on the western side of the building, with no addition on the eastern side.43 The virulent nimbyism of Lennox, one of Toronto’s most prominent Orangemen, was underscored by his straitlaced demeanour.44 His battle with Sparling was also likely more shrilly pitched because it played out just as the repeal of Ontario’s Prohibition Law came into effect. Although no one advocated the selling or imbibing of alcohol at Casa Loma, several who opposed the hotel saw the venture as the thin of the wedge. One councillor feared the worst, proclaiming that as the United States was still dry, Americans would be renting rooms for “liquor parties.” Reverend Ben Spence, a prominent dry crusader, stridently protested that “guests go in[to Casa Loma] with leaky baggage and come out with much less than they took in,” adding that “money and morality do not go together … and the idle rich who go there make the district quite undesirable.” Casa Loma was “strictly a dance hall and hotel scheme,” Spence claimed, “and the evils of drink and all-night dancing together make it a dangerous proposition for a residential district.”45 In Foucault’s terms, for the naysayers, Casa Loma was among the most deviant of heterotopias. They held their ground and appealed the Ontario Railway and Municipal Board’s decision, but that was also ultimately rejected in late September 1927.”46 Although the court battles caused Pellatt and Sparling and then Sparling alone to delay construction of the extension, they vigorously promoted opportunities for luncheons, teas, dinners, supper dances (every evening), wedding receptions, private parties, and other forms of (dry) entertainment. People were lured with the announcement that the head chef, Auguste, was the former head chef at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria.47 On Saturdays, dance music was broadcast on chic – radio being all the rage – and the Casa Loma Symphony Orchestra played every Sunday evening.48 By September, Sparling had managed to secure first Jean Goldkette’s Blue Room Orchestra and then his Orange Blossoms Orchestra, both satellites of the famous bandleader’s Book Cadillac Hotel Orchestra in Detroit (fig. 7.5).

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The Orange Blossoms was the forerunner to the eponymous Casa Loma Orchestra later led by Glen Gray, which would go on to rival Benny Goodman in the United States during the Big Band era (fig. 7.6).49 Among the hotel’s distinguished guests were Arthur Currie and his wife, recorded as “Sir Arthur and Lady Currie” in an announcement published in the Toronto Daily Star, probably written by Pellatt, whose own aristocratic aspirations underlay his opposition to the Nickle Resolution of 1919 that resolved such titles not be bestowed on Canadians. As such, Pellatt was likely also flattered that British prime minister Stanley Baldwin stayed at Casa Loma while the Prince of Wales and Prince George stayed at Chorley Park (the lieutenant governor’s house) during the state visit in 1927.50 An elaborate masque ball marked the sixtieth anniversary of Confederation, and in November a glittering debut ball with 450 guests was held for Marjorie Mulock, granddaughter of the venerable Sir William Mulock who, as chief justice of Ontario and chancellor of the University of Toronto, was of the highest echelon of Canadian society. He was also Pellatt’s neighbour in King Township.51 On New Year’s Eve, despite fears of drunken debauchery, the dance at Casa Loma was reported as “a wow” with “joy and gingerale,” although only a third of the expected five hundred guests braved the foul weather and slippery drive up the hill.52 The hotel’s financial situation remained perilous, however. In July 1927, a small note in the Toronto Daily Star at the end of a report about the visit of Baldwin and the princes stated that one of the three largest hotel operators in the world would shortly take over the running of Casa Loma. By late December, Theresa Small, widow of Toronto theatre impresario Ambrose Small (whose disappearance and presumed death in December 1919 had caused a huge sensation), had become a joint owner with Sparling in the newly formed Casa Loma Holding Company Ltd.53 This announcement was quickly followed by a writ issued against Sparling by the financially savvy Small on 5 January 1928 over a false promissory note.54 By 10 January, Sparling had secured financing through the architects Lockwood, Green, and Company of New York City to build the new wing, with Roy Carruthers of Detroit’s Book Cadillac Hotel serving as the new hotel manager. By 7 February, the sale of the hotel to an unnamed man from Detroit had been confirmed, and on 8 February, the Casa Loma Holding Company went into receivership.55 By the end of the month, Sparling revealed that the buyer was the recently created Casa Loma Club Ltd, organized by Miles Knowles of Detroit, and that the interim receivership would be removed. Knowles planned to continue running Casa

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

Loma as a hotel while converting it into a millionaires’ club.56 Knowles’s plans included the largest indoor swimming pool in Canada, a new ballroom to be added to the eastern end, a pipe organ, badminton courts, bowling alleys, billiard rooms, bowling greens, tennis courts, a miniature golf course, and a rifle range.57 Pellatt, who was not, at least on record, involved in any of these financial gyrations, approved of Knowles’s ambitious schemes.58 However, the financial road was just as rough for Knowles as it had been for Pellatt. In an attempt to finance his plans, he sold off the old kitchen garden across Walmer Road for development as duplexes in March 1928. Evidently, subdividing the property was no longer an issue for the city. By early June, however, Knowles’s company was in receivership, and the hotel closed its doors at the end of the month.59 Sparling tried one more time. He found a new financial backer in W.B. Moseley of New York City and launched yet another plan for yet another new addition with two hundred rooms at an estimated cost of $500,000 (fig. 7.7).60 This time the addition was on the eastern side of the castle, and the entrance had swung back to the north. With its profusion of turrets, multiple spires, larger windows, and pronounced bays, the profile was far more fanciful and buoyant than the sombre baronial pile proposed two years before. This profile, combined with the building’s location on the crest of the hill at the edge of the city, makes it a lighter, updated

Figure 7.5 Left The Orange Blossoms on the bandstand in the Dining Room, Casa Loma, 1927. Figure 7.6a, b Right Glenn Gray promotional photo, with Kenney Sergeant, Glen Gray, and Pee Wee Hunt outside Casa Loma, 1939.

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Figure 7.7 Sparling, Martin, and Forbes design for new east wing for Casa Loma, 1928.

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version of the Neo-Gothic contemporary collegiate and church architecture of Henry Sproatt and Ernest Rolph (Hart House at the University of Toronto being the finest example). It is also a direct descendent of the Canadian railway châteaux hotels, particularly the Château Laurier and the Château Frontenac, both of which also have a commanding presence on prominent urban sites.61 Ultimately, however, after two multi-day auctions to sell off the contents of the earlier hotel, nothing came of Sparling’s renewed efforts. He declared personal bankruptcy in January 1929, having not been able to recover the $140,000 of his own money that he had invested in the project.62 Although the Casa Loma Hotel was proving to be a financial disaster, partially due to the long delays in building the hotel extension caused by pushback from the city and neighbours, the number of references to Casa Loma in the society pages of the newspapers shows that this glamorous venue was filling a need, or at

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

least a desire.63 Some of the reports, particularly those about high-profile visitors such as the Curries and Prime Minister Baldwin, suggest that they were planted by Pellatt and Sparling, but the volume of notices about teas, bridge parties, dances, and receptions – as well as who was attending what and when – indicate that the hotel had indeed become a successful high-status venue. This claim is corroborated by the improbable but true tale of Theodora d’Alvarez, who implicated the Casa Loma Hotel in one of Toronto’s more audacious cases of fraud in the 1920s. D’Alvarez was a tall blonde Australian who had retained her Spanish husband’s surname after their divorce. In March 1928, she rented one of the grandest suites at Casa Loma for $650 a month. Claiming to be a Spanish portrait painter, she entertained Toronto’s wealthier ladies with “quiet but luxurious parties” in her suite while dabbing at a couple of nearly finished oil portraits. Charmed, the women gave her down payments for their own portraits. As events transpired, d’Alvarez did not know how to paint and had bought the two portraits at Britnell’s Bookshop on Yonge Street. The ruse was discovered after her cheques bounced for taxi fares, hotel bills, and flower purchases. By this point, Knowles was running the hotel, and instead of pursuing the charges, he laughed and let her walk free, perhaps grateful for the publicity she had brought.64 Her success at flattering members of Toronto’s well-to-do points to their desire for the accoutrements of high European culture, particularly such dignified definers of class as portrait paintings.65 Despite the lure of Casa Loma for the affluent, its fusty neighbours had succeeded in getting the hotel closed. However, this ironically resulted in one of their worst nightmares coming true. In May 1929, nearly a year after the hotel had closed and while the United States was still dry, Moseley, who still owned the hotel, rented it for a week to Austin Lidbury, president of the Oldbury Electrochemical Company of Niagara Falls, New York. Lidbury was in Toronto for the American Electrochemical Association convention. According to Toronto’s bylaws, if a property was rented for at least a week, it could be designated a residence. On 28 May, Lidbury entertained three hundred of his friends “at home” and provided them with his personal supply of beer. He returned to New York State the next day. When news of the party broke, the acting chairman of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario vehemently denied that such a loophole existed in the relatively new Liquor Control Act.66 As it turned out, the life of Casa Loma as a hotel was not yet over. As Sparling slid from the spotlight in 1929, Pellatt came forward. On 4 June 1929, he confirmed

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that Casa Loma was to reopen as a hotel, with an intended three-hundred-room addition, and that it would be run by the same syndicate that had operated it in 1927, minus Sparling but with some local interests.67 At the end of the month, a year less a day from when Sparling had published his last design, a drawing of Pellatt’s intended addition was published in the Toronto Star, designed by the Cleveland-based architect A.W. Harris (fig. 7.8, which also contains a photo insert of E.G. Borden, the new managing director).68 Now containing 350 rooms, it was very similar to Sparling’s design although a little more restrained, with fewer turrets and much larger ground-floor windows, presumably corresponding with dining rooms and lounges. The announcement came six days before the opulent Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto opened its doors for the first time. The new Royal York, combined with the nearby stalwart King Edward Hotel, meant competition would be stiff, but it also suggested there was room in the Toronto hotel market. The popularity of the city for American business conventions while the United States remained dry was likely incentive enough. Opening day for Casa Loma was set for 1 August. This time Pellatt was solely at the helm, and characteristic of his penchant for pomp and luxury, he spared no expense:

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Casa Loma hotel will take on an enhanced glory on its opening day. The waiters will more nearly resemble navy officers than the stereotyped meal server, for they will be clad in smart white drill uniforms with plush and gold epaulets. At the entrance doorway an imposing bewigged butler with buckled shoes, silk stockings and the picturesque costume of 1750 will greet the guests while tea will be served on the terrace and [in the] Empire room by real Chinese girls in national dress. An old-fashioned “Tally-ho!” with coachmen and footmen in the appropriate livery of a bygone era is to meet the trains and convey the guests to the castle.69 The interiors had been completely redone by Gordon Galleries of Toronto, new carpets had been specially woven, and new furniture was supplied by J. Armstrong of Guelph, Ontario. The head chef and kitchen staff came from Paris, complete with a translator. From Pellatt’s King Township estate came fresh vegetables, flowers, fruit, cattle, sheep, and poultry. Pellatt had already installed incubators there that could hatch three thousand chicks a week. Furthermore, he planned to trans-

Figure 7.8 A.W. Harris, design for new east wing for Casa Loma, 1929.

port his hotel guests to King Township and place at their disposal a “five-acre area surrounded by a gargantuan skunk fence in which a great colony of [exotic and enormous] Belgian hares has flourished for years.”70 Dancing was planned at the hotel for every evening with the Gilbert Watson Orchestra, which brought some of the first jazz to the city.71 Billed as “The Most Unique Place on the North American Continent to Dine, Dance and Entertain,” it “breathed” nobility, “lordly magnificence,” “refinement and old-world charm” of European castles, along with the luxury of modern comfort (figs 7.9, 7.10, 7.11).72 The experience was to be profoundly extravagant and indulgent, on a scale perhaps exceeding that of when the Pellatts lived in the castle. Typical of Pellatt, this was a huge and very risky investment. By linking his country estate to the project, he was putting everything he had on the line. A steady stream of press reports appeared throughout the late summer, stating that many

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Figure 7.9 Opposite Advertisement for the second iteration of the Casa Loma Hotel. Figure 7.10 Left Guest room, Casa Loma Hotel, presumably from the second iteration. Note the up-to-date Art Deco styling, compared to figure 7.4.

reservations had been received from Cleveland, Buffalo, Montreal, and Detroit, and by 12 September the hotel was apparently almost filled. Noted guests included relations and friends of Pellatt such as Miss I. Cawthra, niece of Sir William Mulock, and (not without some irony, given Lidbury’s alcoholic “at home” a few months previously) Sir Henry Drayton, chairman of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. John Harvey Kellogg of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes had also taken rooms. Likewise, the society pages were filled with notices about events at Casa Loma hosted by various groups and societies, including the Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire, a suitably august imperial organization for which Lady Pellatt, who had died in April 1924, and then Pellatt’s second wife, Catherine Merritt, whom he had married in March 1927, served as patrons. Family members of the Christies of Christie’s bakery, Birks the jewellers, the Gooderhams of Gooderham and Worts Distilleries, the Dows of the chemical company, and the venerable Massey family also entertained there.73 Notices about the impending start of the hotel extension also appeared, and the number of planned rooms grew from 350 to 400.74 In early October, an

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announcement was published about a new ballroom in the basement that would be the largest in Canada, a full 1,000 square feet (approximately 300 square metres) larger than that at the Royal York.75 On the same page, a small article pointed out that the Austin Terrace district had been revived with the reopening of the hotel and that Israel Cohen, president of Regent Tailors, was going to enhance the district further by building a $75,000 home.76

Figure 7.11 Lady Pellatt’s suite transformed into a billiard room.

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

the end of an er a Then, on 29 October 1929, the stock market crashed in New York City. The new ballroom, if it had been started, was not finished, and the four-hundred-room addition was never begun. The social whirl of teas, dining, and dances continued, but the guest accommodation was discontinued. The public restaurant and nightly orchestra closed in early December, and by the middle of the month, the whole venture once again slid into bankruptcy. The castle stayed open in its reduced form for a few more events and then completely shut down after the New Year’s Eve dance.77 Amidst all this, Pellatt once again experienced deep personal loss with the death of his second wife, Catherine Merritt, on 19 December 1929. Three weeks later, another immense auction was held at Casa Loma, the fourth in six years.78 The cultural peculiarities of Toronto may also have hastened the decline of this last iteration of the Casa Loma Hotel. According to a report published in the Toronto Star in late January 1930, the recent closure of both the Casa Loma Hotel and the Embassy nightclub – the latter having a special swinging dance floor imported from England – meant that the Mayfair Club was the only nightclub that remained in Toronto. This was in stark contrast to London where, the report claimed, there were 1,823 nightclubs, and New York City, where there were almost as many.79 This discrepancy is particularly curious given that dancing had become very popular in Toronto with the jazz craze of the Roaring Twenties. In addition to the annual New Year’s Eve dances at the major hotels in Toronto, regular dances at, for example, the Palais Royale and the Club Esquire at Sunnyside were extremely popular.80 However, the nightclubs for Toronto’s more well-to-do were unable to retain clientele. The issue was evidently less about dancing than about the perceived nature of clubs. The managers of the Mayfair Club and the Embassy, both of whom had extensive prior experience in the London upper-class club scene, blamed the “small-townish” attitude of wealthy Torontonians, complaining that when they travelled, they happily went to clubs, but when they returned, they became “small-townish again” and stayed at home.81 Perhaps this small-townishness had to do with Toronto’s public face of respectability. With the exception of Pellatt, Toronto’s well-heeled establishment was the epitome of reserve. Their integrity and dignity were beyond reproach, and they endeavoured to stay out of the public eye. Furthermore, high-end clubs presumably suggested a segregated ostentatious elitism that was evidently too much

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for a city that emitted unrelenting, almost trenchant, conformity, especially in the alcohol-wary immediate post-Prohibition era. The Casa Loma Hotel teetered on the precipice. While it exuded a stately glamour that would ultimately attract the well-to-do, Toronto’s dominant prudish bourgeoisie saw it as a non-conforming and disruptive space. The constant setbacks that inhibited the construction of the guestroom addition and the collapse of the economy in 1929 meant that the “nimbys” and parsimonious city officials had got their way. As far as they were concerned, Casa Loma was never going to fit in. Or was it?

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1 Some examples include Lady Pellatt hosting the Girl Guides (“Girl Guides at Casa Loma,” Globe [Toronto], 17 March 1913; “Social Events,” Mail and Empire [Toronto], 6 September 1913; “Society,” Toronto Daily Star [hereafter Toronto Star], 7 March 1921; Oreskovich, Casa Loma, 147–55); and a carnival held on the grounds of Casa Loma in 1921, hosted by the Normal Model Old Boys Association to raise funds for a war memorial for the Normal School (see “To Hold Carnival,” Toronto Star, 15 June 1922). For one of the events hosted by the Pellatts for Toronto’s well-to-do, see the description of a tea for 150 people: “Social and Personal, Tea at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 22 January 1912. For the Pellatts’ general philanthropy, see an editorial published just after Henry Pellatt’s death, “Creator of Casa Loma Passes On,” Toronto Star, 10 March 1939; Roberts, “Pellatt, Sir Henry Mill.” 2 C.S. Clark coined the phrase “Toronto the Good” in his book Of Toronto the Good, published in 1898. For the prominence of the Orange Order in Toronto, see Smyth, Toronto, the Belfast of Canada. By way of example, seventy-nine Orange Order lodges were operating in the city by 1920 (Smyth, 111), and between 1836 and 1955 every mayor was a practising Orangeman. 3 These are worlds within worlds and are as varied as gardens, cemeteries, hospitals, prisons, theatres, and hotel rooms. See Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.” 4 Casa Loma and the land on which it was built was technically owned by Lady Pellatt, likely an investment decision made by Henry Pellatt. However, Pellatt conducted all of the negotiations for the house and property on behalf of his wife. When Lady Pellatt died in April 1924, sole ownership passed to him. For a detailed account of Pellatt’s business career and ultimate financial collapse, see Roberts, “Pellatt, Sir Henry Mill.”

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

5 The Toronto Star is the primary newspaper resource for this chapter. Articles and notices in the Globe (Toronto) and other newspapers mostly parallel those in the Toronto Star. 6 “Casa Loma and Its Assessment,” Toronto Star, 2 May 1921; “The Courts and the ‘Castle,’” Toronto Star, 5 May 1921; “Cheap Distinction,” Toronto Star, 11 November 1922; “Casa Loma Assessment Confirmed on Appeal,” Toronto Star, 15 November 1922. See also Oreskovich, Casa Loma, esp. 130, 172–9. 7 “Say Land Worth More If Castle Were Gone,” Toronto Star, 16 December 1922. 8 “Foster Would Boost Casa Loma Valuation,” Toronto Star, 6 January 1923. 9 “Cheap Distinction,” Toronto Star, 11 November 1922. 10 “Must Keep Casa Loma a Private Residence,” Toronto Star, 23 April 1923. 11 “Say Land Worth More If Castle Were Gone.” 12 See “Govt. to Buy Casa Loma as War Veterans’ Home” and “Govt. Buy Casa Loma for War Veterans,” Toronto Star, 7 November 1923; “Pellatt Is Anxious to See Veterans Living in Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 10 November 1923; Gregory Clark, “What Is to Become of Sir Henry Pellatt’s Castle? The Empty Substance of a Gorgeous Dream,” Toronto Star Weekly, 8 December 1923; “Casa Loma Question Comes Up To-morrow,” Toronto Star, 14 September 1926. 13 See, for example, Clark, “What Is to Become of Sir Henry Pellatt’s Castle?”; “Casa Loma Question Comes Up To-morrow,” Toronto Star, 14 September 1926; “Can’t Reach Decision on Casa Loma Plan,” Toronto Star, 27 April 1926; “Sir Henry, Casa Loma Guest Weeps amid Scene of Past,” Toronto Star, 13 August 1937. See also Foster, “Memories of a Canadian Castle.” 14 Clark, “What Is to Become of Sir Henry Pellatt’s Castle?” 15 For quote and proposals, see ibid. 16 For Mary Pickford’s proposal, see “Pellatt Is Anxious to See Veterans Living in Casa Loma.” 17 Clark, “What Is to Become of Sir Henry Pellatt’s Castle?” 18 Smyth, Toronto, the Belfast of Canada, 107. See also “Rumour Denied That Orange Order May Purchase Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 29 April 1924; “Consider Castle Purchase,” Toronto Star, 23 July 1924; “Didn’t Discuss Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 24 July 1924; “L.O.L. Not to Buy Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 3 October 1924. 19 “May Sell ‘Castle,’” Toronto Star, 6 November 1925. 20 Hill, “Sparling, William F.” Sparling’s son, Rand Sparling, also wrote a brief biography of his father with a particular focus on Casa Loma. This was published in Litchfield, Casa Loma Hotel and the Casa Loma Orchestra, 17–25.

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21 Sparling reported to the Toronto Star that Canadian National Railway officials had told him that if the layout warranted, they would feature Casa Loma in their list of hotels and offer the same advantages as those offered at their own hotels. See “Action Is Deferred on Pellatt Castle,” Toronto Star, 13 April 1926. 22 “Perspective Drawing of ‘Casa Loma’ – New Style,” Toronto Star, 1 May 1926. 23 Foster, “Memories of a Canadian Castle.” 24 The Toronto Star reported that a petition signed by 90 per cent of neighbourhood residents, presented at the property subcommittee hearing in October 1926, stated that the residents were willing to have Casa Loma converted to an apartment house but objected to the separate buildings. See “Again Defer Action on Pellatt’s ‘Castle,’” Toronto Star, 22 October 1926. 25 Ibid. Their deteriorating relationship was also alluded to in a letter published in the Toronto Star on 26 June 1924, written by Pellatt to correct misleading information that had appeared in a Star Weekly article on 21 June, suggesting that Lennox was not the sole architect of Casa Loma. See “No Equal Anywhere to Casa Loma Wine Cellar,” Toronto Star Weekly, 21 June 1924; “Sir Henry Wants Credit Given Castle’s Architect,” Toronto Star, 26 June 1924. 26 Armstrong, Making Toronto Modern, 117–18. 27 The progress was carefully tracked in the press. See “Damaging Castle: Opposition on Foot to Remodeling of Casa Loma into Apartments,” Toronto Star, 8 April 1926; “Oppose Using Casa Loma as an Apartment Hotel,” Toronto Star, 12 April 1926; “Action Is Deferred on Pellatt Castle,” Toronto Star, 13 April 1926; “The Case of Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 14 April 1926; “Put Casa Loma to Work,” Toronto Star, 17 April 1926; “Utilize Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 23 April 1926; “Water Causes Damage to Palatial Residence,” Toronto Star, 24 April 1926; “Can’t Reach Decision on Casa Loma” and “Names of Committee Settling Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 27 April 1926; “The ‘Castle’ Should Be Utilized,” Toronto Star, 29 April 1926; “Get On With Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 30 April 1926; “Perspective Drawing of Casa Loma – New Style,” Toronto Star, 1 May 1926; “To Open Casa Loma for Public to View,” Toronto Star, 25 August 1926; “Casa Loma Question Comes Up To-morrow,” Toronto Star, 14 September 1926; “Speed the Casa Loma Plans,” Toronto Star, 17 September 1926; “Casa Loma Issue Gets Another Hoist,” Toronto Star, 8 October 1926; “Casa Loma as an Apartment Hotel Approved by Residents’ Committee,” Toronto Star, 21 October 1926; “Again Defer Action on Pellatt’s ‘Castle,’” Toronto Star, 22 October 1926; “The Blockers of Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 23 October 1926; “Castle Question Up,” Toronto Star, 4 November 1926; “Casa Loma Settled,” Toronto Star, 16 November 1926; “Council to Put Radials Under Control of T.T.C.” [Report of City Council Meeting], Toronto Star, 30 November 1926. At the

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41

42 43 44

last minute, one councillor insisted that the new wings be faced in a similar material and colour as the original castle, but this was deemed inadmissible given the potential cost and that too much time had already been expended on the Casa Loma matter. “Casa Loma Settled,” Toronto Star, 16 November 1926. “Casa Loma Gets Another Hoist,” Toronto Star, 8 October 1926. “Again Defer Action on Pellatt’s ‘Castle.’” “Railway Board Passes Casa Loma Apartment,” Toronto Star, 6 January 1927. “Castle on the Hill Being Transformed,” Toronto Star, 14 March 1927. “Casa Loma Plans Strike Real Snag,” Toronto Star, 7 April 1927. Ibid. “To Dance or Not to Dance – That Is Vexing Question,” Toronto Star, 14 April 1927. “On with the Dance Is Architect’s Hope,” Toronto Star, 16 April 1927, morning edition. “Cannot Conduct Dance in Casa Loma To-Night,” Toronto Star, 16 April 1927, second edition. “Will Open ‘Casa Loma’ to Public Functions Despite City’s Edict,” Toronto Star, 18 April 1927, 1, 28. “Casa Loma Dance Case Goes to Osgoode Hall, Lennox Issues a Writ,” Toronto Star, 25 April 1927. “Will Open ‘Casa Loma’ to Public Functions Despite City’s Edict”; “Many Contend Casa Loma Distinct Asset,” Toronto Star, 27 June 1927. Mrs Eaton’s representative and then executor was J.J. Vaughan, vice-president of Eaton’s department store. In 1931, he would build a lovely Gothic Revival house on Bayview Avenue, now part of the Sunnybrook Hospital grounds. “Will Open ‘Casa Loma’ to Public Functions Despite City’s Edict”; “May Run Castle on Hill as Apartment Hotel,” Toronto Star, 3 May 1927; “Casa Loma May Now Be Used as an Hotel,” Toronto Star, 17 May 1927; short untitled notice urging “promoters to do their utmost to conserve the high-class character of the district in which [Casa Loma] is located so as to cause the least possible disturbance to residential conditions,” Toronto Star, 17 May 1927. “Says By-law Repeal Not in Best Interests,” Toronto Star, 28 June 1927; “Spence Assails Casa Loma Plan as Wet Paradise,” Toronto Star, 6 July 1927, 1, 29; “Judgement Reserved in Casa Loma Matter,” Toronto Star, 7 July 1927; “‘Casa Loma’ to Continue as an Apartment Hotel,” Toronto Star, 16 July 1927. “200-Room Extension for Pellatt Castle,” Toronto Star, 17 May 1927. Ibid. Smyth, Toronto, the Belfast of Canada, 106, 174.

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45 “Casa Loma May Now Be Used as a Hotel”; “Spence Assails Casa Loma Plan as Wet Paradise,” Toronto Star, 6 July 1927. 46 “Court Upholds Use of Castle for a Hotel,” Toronto Star, 30 September 1927. 47 “Casa Loma Masque Ball,” Toronto Star, 27 June 1927. 48 Some examples of the advertisements can be found in the Toronto Star, 5 May 1927, 13 September 1927. 49 The Orange Blossoms played at Casa Loma for eight months, led by Henry Biagini. The name was changed to the Casa Loma Orchestra when it was incorporated in New York in 1930, after it had played at Casa Loma. See clippings scrapbook, “Glenn Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra. 1936–1954,” City of Toronto Archives, fonds 471, series 2225, file 16; Litchfield, Casa Loma Hotel and the Casa Loma Orchestra. 50 On the Curries, see “Social and Personal,” Toronto Star, 16 May 1927. On Baldwin and the princes, see “Plan Many Functions in Honor of Prince,” Toronto Star, 21 July 1927; “Prince Will Attend Memorial Service in Exhibition Park,” Toronto Star, 22 July 1927; “Premier and Party Stay at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 22 July 1927. This visit also marked the opening of the Princes’ Gates at the eastern end of the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. 51 For the masque ball, see advertisement, Toronto Star, 27 June 1927; “Casa Loma Masque Ball.” For Marjorie Mulock’s debut, see “Debut of M. Mulock Marked by Brilliant Ball,” Toronto Star, 5 November 1927. At the last moment, a different band had to play at the Mulock debut because Goldkette’s orchestra, led by Henry Biagini, was fined by the American Federation of Musicians Union for playing at private functions in contravention of their status as a hotel-only band. See “Casa Loma Orchestra Not Allowed to Play,” Toronto Star, 5 November 1927; “Provides Protection for Local Musicians,” Toronto Star, 5 November 1927; Litchfield, Casa Loma Hotel and the Casa Loma Orchestra, 39–41. Sir William Mulock, who would go on to serve as acting lieutenant governor of the province in 1931–32 at the age of nearly ninety, lived on an enormous estate in Newmarket, Ontario. 52 “Sabbath Day Sobered Toronto’s Welcome to New Year of 1928,” Toronto Star, 3 January 1928. 53 “Premier and Party Stay at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 22 July 1927. See also “Autumn Building Program Will Keep Things Humming,” Toronto Star, 9 September 1927. For Theresa Small’s involvement, see “Theatre Owner’s Widow Buys Share Casa Loma Hotel,” Toronto Star, 24 December 1927. 54 “Mrs. Small Asks Court to Upset Hotel Agreement,” Toronto Star, 5 January 1928. 55 “Casa Loma to Get a $1,000,000 Addition,” Toronto Star, 10 January 1928; “Report Casa Loma Sold to Detroiter,” Toronto Star, 7 February 1928; “Casa Loma Not to Close but May Be Sold,” Toronto Star, 7 February 1928; “Appoint Receiver for Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 8 February 1928.

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56 57 58 59

60

61 62

63 64

65

66

“Palatial Club Plan Outlined for Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 25 February 1928. Ibid. “Castle Club Plans Nearing Completion,” Toronto Star, 1 March 1928. On the duplex development, see “Residents Undecided on Duplex Question,” Toronto Star, 18 May 1928; “Allow Duplexes Near Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 23 May 1928; “High Class Duplexes to Be Built,” Toronto Star, 25 May 1928. There was little opposition since the duplexes were considered high end. On bankruptcy, see “The Bankruptcy Act,” Toronto Star, 19 June 1928; “Humphrey Colquhoun Casa Loma Trustee” and “Appoint Custodian for Casa Loma Co.,” Toronto Star, 28 June 1928. “New Wing Planned for Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 29 June 1928; “Casa Loma Is Sold to New York Buyer,” Toronto Star, 27 July 1928; “Casa Loma Sale Approved,” Toronto Star, 3 August 1928. Although this is conjecture, W.B. Moseley may have been related to Carlos Moseley, who went on to become president and chairman of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. France Gagnon Pratte, “Château Frontenac,” in Chisholm, Castles of the North, 131–41, and Chisholm, “Château Laurier,” in Chisholm, Castles of the North., 41, 175–85. For the auctions, see “Charles Henderson Is Ill,” Toronto Star, 15 November 1928; advertisements for auction, Toronto Star, 16 and 19 November 1928; “Casa Loma Contents Will Be Auctioned,” Toronto Star, 19 November 1928; “Casa Loma Furnishings to Be Auctioned,” Toronto Star, 20 November 1928; “Good Prices Realized,” Toronto Star, 21 November 1928; “Casa Loma Fittings Sold,” Toronto Star, 23 November 1928; advertisements for auction of Oriental Rugs from Casa Loma, Toronto Star, 27 November 1928, 1 December 1928; “ Another Great Art Sale at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 12 January 1929; advertisements for the “Casa Loma Galleries,” Toronto Star, 11 February 1929 and 4, 5, and 11 April 1929. For Sparling’s bankruptcy, see “Claims $140,000,” Toronto Star, 9 January 1929. The Toronto Star’s regular society feature was called “Over the Teacups.” “Spanish Artist at Work in Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 24 March 1928; “Mlle. Alvarez Pleads Guilty Remand to 30” and “‘These Pictures All Bunk’ Confesses Mlle. Alvarez,” Toronto Star, 26 March 1928. D’Alvarez had already run afoul of the law in Montreal where she had worked under a different name. She had also failed to pay her bills at the King Edward Hotel earlier in the year, but a “kind patron” helped her out. D’Alvarez was evidently the inspiration for the con-artist/mother supporting character Nora Amory, played by Wendy Crewson, in the cbc series Frankie Drake Mysteries, which ran for four seasons from 2017 to 2021. “Wanted Home Here Hired Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 29 May 1929; “Casa Loma Cannot Be Used for Massed Legal Drinking,” Toronto Star, 6 June 1929; “Yankee Thwarts Canada Rum Law by Hiring Hotel,” Chicago Tribune, 30 May 1929.

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67 It is unclear if Moseley was part of that syndicate. See “To Reopen Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 4 June 1929. 68 “Casa Loma Hotel Re-opens August 1st,” Toronto Star, 28 June 1929. Nine days earlier, Sparling was discharged from his bankruptcy based on the claim that he could not provide for his wife and children since he had been unable to obtain work owing to the bankruptcy. “Bankruptcy Discharge Granted W.F. Sparling,” Globe (Toronto), 19 June 1929. I am grateful to Mark Osbaldeston for directing me to Harris’s design. Osbaldeston has published a synopsis of the Casa Loma Hotel in Unbuilt Toronto 2, 104–6. 69 “Casa Loma Will Ensconce Imposing Universal Touch,” Toronto Star, 26 July 1929. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Advertisement for Casa Loma Hotel, Toronto Star, 30 July 1929. 73 For some notable guests, see “Sir Wm. Mulock Is Host to Triangle Association,” Toronto Star, 6 August 1929; “Casa Loma Hostelry Is Well Patronized,” Toronto Star, 9 August 1929; “Liquor Board Chief Guest at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 30 August 1929. For Sir Henry Drayton and family and Miss Cawthra, Toronto Star, 13 September 1929; for Miss I. Cawthra, “Visiting Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 14 September 1929; for reference to Mrs Melville Gooderham, “Social and Personal,” 21 September 1929; for Mrs W.J. Christie hosting a luncheon, “Social and Personal,” Toronto Star, 23 September 1929; for Mr Earl Birk entertaining at dinner, “Social Notes,” Toronto Star, 28 September 1929; for Mrs James Dow entertaining at a tea dance for her daughter Jean, “Social and Personal,” Toronto Star, 3 October 1929; for Mr and Mrs Denton Massey at dinner, “Social and Personal,” Toronto Star, 4 November 1929; “Tea Dance for Miss T. Grant,” Toronto Star, 16 November 1929. 74 “Visiting Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 13 September 1929. 75 “New Ballroom to Be Largest in All Canada,” Toronto Star, 11 October 1929. 76 “Austin Terrace Is Site of New $75,000 Home,” Toronto Star, 11 October 1929. 77 “Casa Loma Again Fails as Hostelry,” Toronto Star, 3 December 1929; “Casa Loma Operates on a Different System,” Toronto Star, 4 December 1929; “The New Year’s Ball of the First Battalion Canadian Machine Gun Corps Will Be Held as Arranged at Casa Loma on Dec. 31,” “Social and Personal,” Toronto Star, 5 December 1929; “Casa Loma Bankrupt,” Toronto Star, 13 December 1929; “The Bankruptcy Act,” Toronto Star, 18 December 1929; “Casa Loma May Echo to Feet of Dancers, Toronto Star, 24 December 1929; “Willie’s Neck Wasn’t the Only Part That Pained – by a Six-Bit Critic,” Toronto Star, 4 January 1930. 78 See advertisements for auction, Toronto Star, 17, 20, and 22 January 1930; “Casa Loma Again to Echo ‘How Much Am I Bid?’ Cry,” 17 January 1930; “Buyers Fill Halls of Stately Castle,”

Casa Loma, 1920–1930

Toronto Star, 23 January 1930; advertisements for auction of oriental rugs, Toronto Star, 30 January 1930, two editions. 79 “Say People Small-Townish and Don’t Like Good Cooking,” Toronto Star, 25 January 1930. The Mayfair Club, at the northeast corner of Yorkville and Bay streets, had opened only four months before; see “New “Mayfair Club” Opens Next Week,” Toronto Star, 13 September 1929. 80 For a general cultural history of Toronto in the 1920s, see White, Too Good to Be True. James Lemon, Toronto since 1918, 19–79, is an excellent economic and social overview. For historic photos and a brief history of Sunnyside, see relevant publications by Doug Taylor in Historic Toronto (blog), accessed 13 September 2021, https://tayloronhistory.com/. See also Filey, I Remember Sunnyside; Derek Flack, “What Sunnyside Looked Like before the Gardiner Arrived,” BlogTO (blog), 18 April 2012, accessed 13 September 2021, https://www. blogto.com/city/2012/04/what_sunnyside_looked_like_before_the_gardiner_arrived/. 81 “Say People Small-Townish and Don’t Like Good Cooking.”

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8 “Toronto’s White Elephant” and “Canada’s Famous Castle” Casa Loma, 1930–1970 joan coutu

The collapse of Pellatt’s hotel scheme precipitated Casa Loma’s darkest era, literally. For nearly a decade it sat abandoned, slowly deteriorating. What for some had been a place of pleasurable distraction and for others a disruptive nuisance was now a monstrous liability. The city became the reluctant owner of Casa Loma in 1934, and in 1937 the castle began a tentative new life as a tourist attraction, managed by the West Toronto Kiwanis service club. The first part of this chapter tracks Casa Loma’s ongoing waxing and waning presence in Toronto’s public psyche and then explores its place in the city’s emerging tourist industry at mid-century, at a time when city officials were promoting Toronto on the world stage. Moving from the public to the private, the chapter concludes with a consideration of the tourist’s experience of Casa Loma. In turn, the focus on the castle is set within a broader context of the rise of heritage tourism in the modern era, both in Canada and abroad. In tandem with these three themes, the primary sources used consist of newspaper reports about the castle, in line with those used in the previous chapter, as well as radio and promotional films, guidebooks, and souvenirs.

Casa Loma, 1930–1970

“ i d on’t kn ow w hat to d o w i th i t” (toronto propert y commissioner da n i e l ch i s h o l m , 1 93 4) 1 After the doors of the Casa Loma Hotel closed once and for all, the castle’s rapid fall from prominence paralleled that of Pellatt. Over the course of the 1930s, he lost his estate in King Township and his house in Rosedale and was ultimately reduced to sharing his former chauffeur’s one-bedroom apartment in Mimico in the years before his death in 1939.2 He had been unable to find a purchaser for Casa Loma. Prospects, extremely slim in the best of times, evaporated in the Depression. He stopped paying the building and property taxes, and as a result the city had to purchase Casa Loma in February 1933, along with many smaller houses on which the owners had defaulted, in accordance with Toronto’s tax act. The price equated to the tax arrears: $27,305 for the castle and $3,163 for the stables. Then, in a most ironic turn of events, again according to the terms of the tax act, the city became the outright, if unwilling, owner of the castle a year and a day later, as no buyer had been found to claim the building for that price plus 10 per cent.3 A new round of suggestions erupted about what to do with the castle. Demolition was again initially high on the list. Board of Control member George Ramsden, nicknamed the “Treasury Watchdog,” saw Casa Loma as nothing but a liability and lost no time in calling for demolition, immediately prompting a call for tenders.4 Pellatt reasserted that it would be a “formidable task” to tear it down, nor could it be easily burned down, but Marvin Teperman, owner of the now venerable eponymous wrecking firm, announced he was up for the challenge: “I am prepared to pay a substantial sum for the wrecking of it right now. I will take a chance on making a profit for the wrecking of Casa Loma would be a great pleasure for me.”5 However, reactions to the prospect of demolition were swift. Some of the commentary aligned civility with architecture, advising city council to consider that “civilized nations all over the world are proud of their architectural masterpieces and have grieved much when some have been destroyed in war.”6 Others, perhaps fed up with Toronto’s small-townish sensibilities, warned against the pitfall of mediocrity: “Casa Loma is one of the most interesting things in Toronto. Without Casa Loma and the colourful atmosphere emanating from such an imposing, inspiring structure, Toronto would sink back to the dead level of any other large monotonous city.” The author then observed that if England could preserve hundreds of castles,

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Toronto could surely maintain one and also remarked that it would be shameful to demolish the castle during the city’s centenary year.7 Another writer strove to reconcile Casa Loma’s lavishness with a good Christian’s disapproval of anyone “possessing much greater wealth than others or dwelling in a much costlier or luxurious home.” He further wrote, “Let no one suppose Christianity is against beauty or stateliness or even wholesome luxury, when they are open to all,” and encouraged city officials to look to the future and find a good purpose for the castle.8 Several small-town Ontario newspapers took great delight in Toronto’s dilemma. Among these was the St Thomas paper, which suggested Toronto should issue a postage stamp of their white elephant, just as St Thomas was honouring Jumbo the Elephant.9 The Milverton Sun unhelpfully suggested that the city should “let it become a ruin. And what a nice Old World air that would give this young sprig of a centenarian city! What’s needed is an owl or two and a well-authenticated ghost and a stream of prowling tourists at so much per prowl. But even if the building does not become a ruin, Toronto may yet be ruin’ [i.e., rueing] the day she acquired it.”10 Finally, Toronto’s architects, who were the purveyors of aesthetics and whose sensibilities were slowly turning toward the modern, were horrified by the prospect of keeping the castle. H.H. Madill and Eric Arthur, director and professor respectively at the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto, said Casa Loma was “a freak” and “a joke”; other architects called it “an anachronism,” a “Medieval Mongrel,” a “hodge-podge,” “not in a good style,” and a “romantic affectation.” There was “no use for [Casa Loma] to-day for hot lead and boiling oil are things that belong to another day.”11 In hindsight, the architects’ criticisms seem rather overstated since their idea of modernism was for the most part little more than streamlined classicism.12 The cost of demolition was prohibitive, and the prospect of dereliction was unpalatable. So the way forward seemed to be to make use of the building somehow. Professionals and businessmen proposed a range of solutions, including using the castle for the centralization of Toronto’s medical and social work offices or for the permanent display of Canadian manufactured goods, in the tradition of the great empire and international exhibitions.13 Others suggested running the castle as a tourist attraction. However, Mayor William James Stewart, with characteristic city parsimony, stated that he was not inclined to support another civic enterprise. He also noted that he had been approached by a wealthy individual to purchase the

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castle on behalf of an order of nuns.14 Perhaps a little too much for the “Belfast of Canada,” that proposal also came to nothing, and the castle continued to sit empty. More suggestions emerged: a veterans’ home, an art gallery, a war museum, an annex for the Royal Ontario Museum, a movie studio for Tudor-era films. The next mayor, James Simpson, considered retrofitting it and turning it into apartments that would then appeal to a developer. However, nothing was done, and by the end of 1935, with Casa Loma shuttered and brooding on the crest of the hill, Madill’s worst fears were being realized: it was “fall[ing] into ruins so it can be even more admired.”15 Casa Loma’s plight was no doubt aggravated not only by the Depression but by the rapid succession of mayors in the mid-1930s. Municipal elections ran on an annual basis, and Toronto had a new mayor every year for 1935, 1936, and 1937. Such a rapid turnover would have constrained any significant movement on such a millstone as Casa Loma. Finally, in 1937, Mayor William Robbins, who as a councillor three years earlier had opposed Ramsden’s call for demolition, sought to deal with the city’s largest real-estate problem.16 A.E. LePage, founder of the eponymous real estate agency, which had taken on trying to sell Casa Loma, organized a tour of the building for city officials so they could see firsthand both the extravagance and the deterioration of the interior.17 A few days before that tour, on 23 March 1937, Claire Wallace, the intrepid broadcaster of Teatime Topics for cfrb radio, toured the castle with LePage. Wallace walked Toronto’s listeners through the grand stateroom, the glass-topped conservatory, the shower that sprayed perfumed water, the richly panelled library, the Romantic towers, the secret passage from Pellatt’s ornate office, and the mysterious tunnel to the stables. She also commented on the decay: plaster hanging from the ceilings and walls, water-damaged wood panelling, pooling water on the floors, and 2,500 broken panes of glass.18 The broadcast sparked new cries of outrage from the few people who feared demolition, with the usual accusations that Toronto lacked Old World civility.19 These were joined by an outpouring of nostalgia, although invested with a convoluted ambivalence. An author of an editorial in the Toronto Star pointed out that Casa Loma, Biltmore, and other such mansions were the tangible legacies of the age of the great industrialists. The essence of the author’s argument was that these buildings referred to the great castles of the feudal past, and although the feudal past was often regarded with horror, those castles were not destroyed, so why pull down the industrialists’ castles? The author claimed the coming new “socialistic” age would have its own great but different architecture; thus, Casa Loma should

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not be destroyed since it marked an age that is near its end.20 This reasoning mirrors the contemporaneous issue of the fate of hundreds of British stately homes at a time when their owners’ wealth was drying up, a problem compounded by ever more crippling death duties imposed by successive governments that were increasingly ambivalent about patrimony.21 After the city officials’ tour, Mayor Robbins emphatically announced that the castle would not be demolished. However, like his predecessors, he was not motivated by nostalgia or aesthetics; rather, he felt sure that “we could get rid of it and not be the loser,” adding that even if “we wanted to tear it down, we would have to blow it to pieces first [and] I don’t believe we would be able to salvage much.”22 To this end, he was reviewing two offers.23 Press notices suggested a home for disabled veterans (again), a war museum (again), a mental-health hospital, or an annex for the overcrowded Hospital for Sick Children.24 These ideas were matched by the usual range of facetious ones, including a home for two white elephants from Tanganyika (then British East Africa), a place to sell cigarettes on Sundays, and a jail of sorts for those who politically offended Ontario Premier Mitchell Hepburn.25 One new suggestion, abhorrent now but seriously considered in 1937, was Councillor Percy Quinn’s proposal to house the Dionne quintuplets in Casa Loma for eight months of the year and charge a nominal fee to anyone who wished to see them. The Quints, by then almost three years old, had been shamelessly promoted by Hepburn to reap economic profit at the height of the Depression. By 1937, they had become one of the world’s great tourist attractions, with over a million people having already made the trek to Callander near North Bay to catch a glimpse of them. Quinn was convinced his scheme would not only benefit the city but also wipe out Canada’s national debt within twenty years, and, if the scheme proved feasible, he thought the rest of Casa Loma could be rented to restaurants, shops, and film companies, with the whole becoming “the greatest tourist attraction in Canada.”26 The plan gained enough traction that city officials proposed it to the babies’ guardians. Dr William Dafoe, the Quints’ physician, responded with a definitive no: they “belong to the north,” he said, adding (ironically, given his own exploitation of the Quints), “the babies are not a peep show.”27 Two weeks after Dafoe’s reply, a North Bay city councillor thought it might be a good idea to move Casa Loma to Callander so the Quints could live in it there.28

Casa Loma, 1930–1970

the kiwanis compromise, 1937 While Quinn’s Quints scheme was under discussion, a much more prosaic plan was presented to city council by William A. Bothwell, president of the West Toronto Kiwanis service club. Having heard Wallace’s radio broadcast, he devised a proposition whereby the club would run Casa Loma as a tourist attraction during the summer months. A twenty-five-cent admission fee would be charged, with 75 per cent of the proceeds going to Kiwanis to help underprivileged children and the other 25 per cent reserved for the city. Such a low-risk yet civic-minded plan, which also accrued some financial benefit, evidently struck the right chord, and city councillors were quick to approve it as an interim measure until a better use for the castle could be determined.29 After a busy month of cleaning and superficial repairs, the castle opened on 29 May 1937 (fig. 8.1).30 Figure 8.1 Casa Loma open for tours, ca. 1937.

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While Bothwell might be the hero of this story, it was radio, by then present in most Canadian middling and upper-class homes, that was the catalyst. When Casa Loma was the home of Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt, soldiers, Girl Guides, and other working- and middle-class Torontonians had been invited at the Pellatts’ philanthropic discretion, but when the castle operated as a high-end apartment hotel in the late 1920s, it was reserved for Toronto’s élite or wealthy visitors. Following the closure of the last iteration of the hotel in 1929, no one could access the building except the occasional vandal. However, Wallace’s broadcast reinvigorated the castle’s reputation by bringing its glamour, romance, and mystery (as well as its decay) into the homes of regular Canadians. In contrast to the descriptions published in the press, the reading of which was usually a singular act, radio broadcasts told the story to families and whole communities. Thus, the castle became less remote to a wider public, and at the same time more tantalizing.31 Despite the perennial parsimony of the municipal government and the earlier grumblings of Casa Loma’s neighbours, a sense that the castle belonged to and in Toronto was beginning to take hold. Bothwell’s scheme was remarkably successful. Within the first hour of opening, two hundred people had entered, and within three weeks over eleven thousand people had visited.32 On 24 June, after laying two and a half miles of wire, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc) broadcast live from the castle, giving its listeners a fulsome virtual tour before closing with a description of the beautiful sunset as seen from the terrace.33 Two thousand people were admitted on Dominion Day, 1 July 1937.34 Kiwanis enticed more visitors with elaborate plans for the official opening on 10 July. Trumpets blown from the turrets and martial music heralded the arrival of Dr Herbert Bruce, lieutenant governor of Ontario, who rolled up in a suitably monarchical barouche made in the mid-nineteenth century for James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (no relation to Dr Bruce), then governor general of the Province of Canada (fig. 8.2). Inside the castle, Herbert Bruce and other visitors were greeted by wax statues of the current British monarchs, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Dancers, opera singers, a comedy troupe, and an art show filled the rest of the day’s program.35 Such regal imperial pageantry no doubt heightened the appeal, and visitors continued to pour in.36 In mid-July, the influx prompted Kiwanis to introduce controlled access by group tour; too many acts of petty vandalism had occurred, mostly by young men scratching their names in the woodwork and stealing knobs from the furniture.37 By 3 August, the total number of visitors

Figure 8.2 Lieutenant Governor Herbert Alexander Bruce (third from left) with his wife, Angela (née Hall), at the opening of Casa Loma, 1937.

since opening day had risen to fifty thousand (fig. 8.3).38 When the first season closed in mid-October, 126,000 adults and 8,041 children had paid their respective twentyfive and fifteen-cent entrance fees. The city’s share was $8,189. Not surprisingly, council voted to have Kiwanis run Casa Loma again the following year.39 Kiwanis was quick to recognize the potential for more revenue. Within two weeks of opening, the organization had asked the city’s property commissioner for licences to run a tea room with dancing and to operate a concession stand, including the selling of tobacco. The commissioner agreed, on the condition that everyone paid admission so the city would get its cut, and, to deflect potential criticism from the neighbours, insisted the city would strongly object to anything that resembled a general public or commercial dance hall.40 Kiwanis supplemented the visitor experience by promoting picnics on the grounds, hosting ghost tours, and displaying art and curiosities, including a collection of eighteen thousand butterflies, a miniature of Titania’s palace from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a collection of dolls of famous people made by a local enthusiast. In one exhibition, a life-size nude figure in a painting called The Fall of Nineveh caused quite a stir; the matter was settled by the mayor, who allowed the painting to remain on view.41 The year 1938 and most of 1939 proved to be as successful as 1937, augmented by teas, bridge parties, wedding receptions, and other private functions. The city continued to insist that everyone pay the admission fee. After war broke out, tourist

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Figure 8.3 Visitors gaze at fireplace in Great Hall, ca. 1937.

numbers dropped, as might be expected, but attendance at dances grew significantly.42 In addition to regular Saturday night dances, Kiwanis introduced Wednesday and Friday night dances. The club directed its portion of the admissions to the war effort, while the city kept its portion. Themed dances were especially popular, including at Halloween, with skeletons and ghosts in the tunnel, and a blackout dance in 1941 that had “exhibits of dud bombs, shell fragments, [and] fuses,” accompanied by a new blues number called “Blackout at Casa Loma.”43 On 1 September 1942, the club hosted a huge Kiwanis Karnival that included the usual fortune-

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telling, bingo, and amusement rides. There was also a chamber of horrors in the basement, where “under eerie lights you’ll discover all sorts of spooky characters [and you …] may even run head-on into the ghoulish Himmler and his heinous henchmen” before walking through the tunnel to the stables-cum-zoo with “honest-to-goodness elephants, camels, donkeys and all the rest of the menagerie.”44 Such playful and lowbrow activities, previously considered frivolous, gained valuable currency during wartime both as respite from a world gone awry and as part of the war effort. Other charitable groups including the Women’s Auxiliary and the Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire did their part by hosting fêtes and teas to honour regiments, raise funds, and collect items for the dispossessed.45 Alcohol, however, remained anathema; the suggestion of a beverage room, raised in a city council meeting in December 1941, was quickly and roundly rejected.46 This was enjoyment, and dryness, with a purpose.

tour ism and the repackag ing of toronto’s castle Who were the dancers and tourists who came to Casa Loma? The dancers were for the most part middle-class young adults engaging in harmless good fun with a social benefit. In the prewar years, Kiwanis tracked tourist numbers and points of origin. Figures published in the Toronto Star two months after opening day show that an estimated 70 per cent were from out of town, with 35 per cent of the total number coming from the United States; a quick survey of licence plates indicated twenty-two different American states. Kiwanis also eagerly noted visitors from “every part of the world,” including Hong Kong, Singapore, Germany, France, and Tanganyika.47 Many of these visitors would have availed themselves of the fleet of taxis the club had secured to transport guests from downtown hotels.48 Although overseas tourists were rare after the outbreak of war, American visitors continued to come in substantial numbers until the United States entered the war in December 1941.49 While overseas visitors were undoubtedly quite wealthy, given the distances they had travelled, the overwhelming majority of tourists to Casa Loma were middleclass Canadians and Americans who had driven there. With the coming of the automobile and the concurrent scramble to build and pave roads, tourism was no

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longer solely the purview of the upper class. In the 1920s, Canada ranked second to the United States in per-capita car ownership, and although car production slipped in Ontario at the beginning of the 1930s, it rebounded with alacrity, and by 1937 production and ownership exceeded pre-Depression levels.50 Thomas B. McQuesten, minister of highways and public works and chairman of the Niagara Parks Commission in Hepburn’s government, was a prodigious builder of roads, bridges, highways, and parks and recognized the economic benefits of automobile tourism. His largest scheme was the construction of the Queen Elizabeth Way linking Niagara, and thus the United States, to Toronto.51 Middle-class families took to the road for day trips, weekend getaways, and even two-week vacations, and in Ontario the favourite destinations were Casa Loma, the Dionne quintuplets, Niagara Falls, and the Toronto birthplace of Mary Pickford.52 A levelling of culture also came with this democratization of tourism. Regular middle-class people could now access places that had previously been the realm of only the well-to-do. A comparable example is the decision by the British National Trust to open its country house properties to tourists. In a society that was increasingly ambivalent about patrimony, yet paradoxically retained a level of deference to the aristocracy, the act of touring such places let visitors feel the elegance of the grand spaces and sense what it was like to live on the other side, even if they were herded from room to room and made to stand behind a rope.53 The same could be said for Casa Loma. For some American visitors, whose appreciation for royalty and aristocracy was heightened simply because they did not have any, the allure of Casa Loma was particularly captivating since some thought Canada’s king lived in the castle, as the Toronto press gleefully reported.54 (The Americans almost got their wish when it was proposed in 1938 that the castle become the residence of the British royal family and posited that Toronto might become the heart of the British Empire, given Britain’s vulnerable position in times of war. More prosaically, it was suggested that King George VI and Queen Elizabeth could stay at Casa Loma during their first visit to Canada in 1939.55) The very conception of a castle had also evolved. Highbrow studies of history situated castles as historic artifacts within the teleology of human (i.e., Eurocentric) civilization. This idea was consistent with the few outraged voices who argued that demolishing Casa Loma was an uncivil act. Such an approach was complemented by fairy tales, gothic novels, theatre, Wagnerian operas, and early horror films that positioned castles as intensely Romantic (and Foucauldian) “other” spaces.56 By

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the early 1930s, North American audiences would be enthralled and transported to gloomy castles in Transylvania and the Alps with Universal Pictures’ Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, and Frankenstein, the top-grossing film of 1931, starring Boris Karloff.57 Then came the more family-friendly version, with Walt Disney’s 1937 adaptation of the Grimm brothers’ classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in Canada in early 1938, coincidentally between Casa Loma’s first and second tourist seasons. This first-ever full-length animated feature film, populated with caricatured dwarfs, a beautiful princess, a handsome prince, and a stately but evil queen, was set in a glorious white soaring castle on a hill. Snow White immediately became the top-grossing box office film of 1937, and for two years was also the topgrossing sound film, until it was displaced by Gone with the Wind in 1939.58 Although Toronto was not Transylvania nor the Alps nor some faraway magical kingdom, it did have a real castle, and although there were no Frankenstein monsters, singing dwarfs, or evil or charming royalty (except maybe at the Halloween dances), visitors could still discover the secret passage or walk through the spinetingling tunnel. Casa Loma was often called “Canada’s Famous Castle” or “North America’s Only Castle,” not because it was the only one but because it was the only one open to the public. Anyone could wander into this fairy-tale palace – including Walt Disney, who came in the 1960s.59 Kiwanis, under the watchful eye of Toronto’s city council, played to a stalwart middle class looking for good clean fun. The club resisted the idea of a beverage room and the potential for vacuous lowbrow entertainment. Although it hosted the occasional ghost tour and the one-off Karnival, the castle was normally not filled with creepy phantoms lurking behind half-closed doors. Notably, when a suggestion that Casa Loma become a second Tussaud’s wax museum was mooted, the idea was that it would be a way to teach young people about the history of Britain and Canada and would not include a chamber of horrors.60 Similarly, the script for the Kiwanis tour guides – university students who were paid in tips only – consisted of fifty-one points that emphasized the tangible aspects of the castle, focusing primarily on the quality and quantity of materials but with the added zest of the full-body surround of the perfume-scented shower, the secret passage, and the long, dark tunnel.61 A castle is also often about who built it and who lived in it: a king, a queen, a duke, a duchess, or a fairy-tale princess. Although Pellatt was a knight, he did not have quite the same cachet, and he was also a failed business tycoon. However,

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Kiwanis did its best to rehabilitate his image. Early guidebooks referred to him as “very successful in business” and a noted philanthropist; there is no reference to his opposition to making hydroelectricity a public utility just after the turn of the century or to his dubious business scruples and subsequent financial decline.62 His knighthood came in handy, not to present him as a knight in shining armour but to emphasize his ardent British imperialism. Initially the guidebooks did not contain an image of him, but when it was included, it showed him as a younger man in the Queen’s Own Rifles uniform astride his favourite white horse (fig. 8.4).63 Likewise, John Wycliffe Lowe Forster’s painted portrait of Pellatt, hanging in the castle, depicts him standing at ease in his brigadier-general’s uniform.64 (Fig. 0.12 in the introduction shows the older Pellatt standing beside this portrait at the time of his visit to Casa Loma in August 1937.) Meanwhile, Lady Pellatt was presented

Figure 8.4 Photograph of Henry Pellatt in Kiwanis brochure Casa Loma, Canada’s Famous Castle, 1957.

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as a patron of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire and first commissioner of the Girl Guides in Canada. These dignified imperial personae were later enhanced by a museum on the third floor dedicated to the Queen’s Own Rifles – fulfilling Pellatt’s dream – and a display of Girl Guide uniforms and related paraphernalia in Lady Pellatt’s suite on the second floor.65 The Pellatts had been rendered tame, reserved, and just a little bit boring, perfectly recast for Toronto the Good. The portrayals of the Pellatts ultimately parallel the narrative that Pellatt himself composed. As he grew older, he consistently reiterated that he had built Casa Loma to be a veterans’ home and/or war museum after he and Lady Pellatt had finished living in it, and he increasingly dwelt on his military career and his athletic prowess as a youth. An interview published in the Toronto Star on the occasion of his seventieth birthday appeared just days after the closure of the second iteration of the Casa Loma Hotel in 1929. No mention was made of the hotel’s collapse; rather, he was described as a “financier, promoter, constructor, president of much and director of more.”66 There was also no mention of the recent death of his second wife. In addition, the interview made much of his being a gentleman farmer in the tradition of the British aristocratic élite. In August 1937, he told his tale again at a special invitation to Casa Loma by the Kiwanis Club (fig. 8.5). He was fêted at a luncheon, and the press characterized him as a humbled old man, now seventyseven years old and seventy pounds lighter, visiting his house for the first time in nearly a decade. He sat at the head of the table and wept silently during the singing of “God Save the King.” He used his speech to emphasize his crucial role in the history of electricity in the city, describing how he had brought the first electric power to Toronto from Niagara – used to boil a pot of tea for him and a few others in a small conservatory on the Casa Loma property – and noted that his knighthood was for his work in hydroelectricity. He then told his story of Casa Loma and once again blamed city officials for the massive tax hike that had caused him to “walk out the front door.” He also chastised the city for letting the castle fall into disrepair and expressed his pleasure that the Kiwanis Club was now looking after it and “revealing it to the public.” On the subject of the castle as a military museum, he contradicted himself by stating first that it was already a museum and a few minutes later that he was “confident it will be a museum.” 67 His confidence was likely grounded in the fact that three weeks earlier he had had his secretary send 350 Boer War era rifles to the castle.68 Blending magnanimity with personal satisfaction, he

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stated that he had a “great deal more pleasure out of [this place] than any pain it has caused me. I am happy I built it.” And twice he insisted, “It cost me nothing.”69 As scholars of memory have explored, we are very good about expunging certain aspects of events and massaging the character of noted people of the past. This is especially true in heritage tourism.70 In Pellatt’s case, he received a homogeneous makeover orchestrated by Kiwanis, the press, and of course himself. However, a curious dissonance remained. Unlike the strong personalities of mad King Ludwig or of the British aristocracy whose homes were also open to view, both Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt were comparatively evanescent presences at Casa Loma. The paucity of furniture – almost all of it sold at auction – might have been a contributing factor, but it may also have been ongoing ambivalence about the man and the castle. Notably, when Kiwanis invited Pellatt to the castle, he was not introduced to the tourists swarming through it, even as he was guided through.

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Despite the Kiwanis Club operating Casa Loma very successfully, city council had not given up trying to sell it. In late July 1937, a rumour circulated that Henry Ford was in secret negotiations with city officials to purchase the castle and turn it into a “gigantic Canadian museum,” although Mayor Robbins denied any knowledge of such discussion.71 In 1939, two months after Pellatt’s death, his old partner William Sparling resurfaced and approached the city with a renewed bid to run the castle as a hotel. He insisted he was the castle’s true owner, having bought it from Pellatt back in 1928, saying the deed was lying in his solicitor’s office. He claimed that with the first iteration of the hotel, “certain obstacles were in my way … that could not even be published … I found out that certain interests were working tooth and nail against me.” Even the hotel employees were apparently trying to bring him down by serving stale bread rolls.72 While his shrillness hinted at conspiracy, Sparling’s claims were not without some justification given the resistance he had encountered from the city and the Davenport Ridge neighbours. However, his proposed financing for the new scheme – $20,000 cash and $8,000 a year for ten years – was much too meagre for city officials. Sparling died prematurely a short time later.

Figure 8.5 Sir Henry Pellatt signing the guestbook during his visit to Casa Loma at the invitation of the Kiwanis Club, August 1937.

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In 1941, an unnamed potential buyer represented by a Toronto real-estate agent offered a down payment to run Casa Loma as a residential hotel. Councillors baulked. Some, caught up in wartime xenophobia, were suspicious of an unknown buyer, and all feared a beverage room. The councillors were equally nervous of the offer from William Beasley, who had owned Club Esquire at Sunnyside from 1936 to 1939, fearing the castle would become a “super Club Esquire” that could become a little too popular for the neighbourhood’s taste.73 Meanwhile, several people proposed ideas about how else the castle could serve the war effort. Reverend Colonel Steachy of Ottawa suggested in all seriousness that both the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury could live at Casa Loma for the duration of the war: “Once in Canada, they could continue to exert their influence over the whole world in a way that would not otherwise be possible.”74 Someone else suggested a lottery of $250,000, the winner getting Casa Loma, with all proceeds going to the war effort and to the city.75 More reasonably, the city offered Casa Loma to Ottawa to use as a military hospital, but that proposal was also not taken up.76 In October 1946, several newspapers reported that Casa Loma had functioned as an assembly plant for U-boat detectors, called asdic s (after the Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee). William E. Corman, president of a Toronto engineering firm, revealed that his company had been given the task by the British Admiralty after the Nazis had bombed the plant in Brighton, England, where the asdic s had previously been made. Corman selected the basement of Casa Loma because of the large unobstructed space necessary for assembling. City officials apparently knew nothing of the project, and only two senior members of the Kiwanis Club were privy to this covert operation. Twenty of Corman’s employees had staggered shifts so as not to arouse suspicion, and parts were brought in by private car, all while tourists and dancers filled the rooms upstairs.77 When news of the clandestine operation broke in the postwar days of heady patriotism, it likely added yet another layer to the mystery and mystique of the castle.

surv iv ing toronto p ost war moder nit y From 1937 to 1942, the city annually renewed the Kiwanis lease and in May 1942 announced that the club would run Casa Loma for the next ten years. In 1946, it finally removed the castle from sale and gave Kiwanis a twenty-one-year lease (fig. 8.6).78

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The city had a sweetheart deal: it was getting revenue with no expenditure while Kiwanis did all the work. However, the castle still had its enemies. The most vociferous was Kenneth Gillies who, as building commissioner in 1944, served Kiwanis with a summons for running Casa Loma as a dance hall for five years despite its failure to conform to fire regulations. The action came just after Gillies had been pressured into approving minimal financing over a three-year period for muchneeded repairs at the castle. Councillor Robert Hood Saunders responded by saying it was ridiculous to serve a summons after such a long time, that Gillies was not serving summonses to other fire traps in the city, and that everyone knew that anyone could step out of a window onto the terrace at Casa Loma in the event of a fire. Gillies peevishly responded that he did not consider windows to be proper exits.79 Figure 8.6 Visitors in the Grand Hall at Casa Loma, ca. 1949.

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Figure 8.7 “Civic Neglect,” January 1952.

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Gillies tried one more time. In 1953, after years of the city spending next to nothing on the castle, the building required some costly repairs. Gillies’s solution was to close the castle as soon as possible “to protect the public” and then demolish it over a ten-year period. Several newspaper articles featured numerous photographs of damaged roof tiles and crumbling sculptures and walls, while a cartoon showed the ghost of “Civic Neglect” wafting above fallen tiles and bricks (fig. 8.7).80 But the resistance to demolition was far more vocal than before. Now that Casa Loma was generating revenue, many, including members of the Kiwanis Club, voiced concern about losing funding for philanthropy. Several city councillors also expressed alarm about the loss of revenue to the city, especially since the city’s annual portion from admissions now significantly surpassed what was needed to cover the taxes. The West Toronto Weekly noted the substantial financial spinoff to mer-

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chants from the thousands of tourists who came to Toronto expressly to visit Casa Loma.81 After a thorough tour of the building, ironically conducted by Gillies, who pointed out some of the worst damage, city councillors announced that the castle would not be demolished and that the city would seek funding to cover the repairs, their cost considered to be half of what Gillies had estimated.82 Once again city council was swayed by the economic argument, although this time it was about the potential income the city might lose as much as it was about the expense of demolition. However, a new tone of appreciation was beginning to creep in. In response to Gillies’s report advocating demolition, Councillor Nathan Phillips stated, “It seems almost sacrilege speaking of the demolishing of Casa Loma.”83 The use of the term “sacrilege” is important since it denotes a certain cultural value that Casa Loma had come to hold. At one level, this was about the castle having become “an excellent location for the youth to dance under the best supervision and ideal [i.e., dry] conditions” (fig. 8.8). But it also implied that this place of harmless pleasure was finally being woven into the fabric of the city as an endearing, as well as financially beneficial, idiosyncrasy.84 Pellatt was also being embraced in the process. Commenting on Gillies’s report, Councillor William Dennison stated, “We are fortunate that we had an eccentric millionaire in Toronto at one time,” and lamented that “we don’t seem to have any more of them.”85 Time and the recasting of Pellatt had softened the more controversial aspects of his personality. Toronto itself was also changing. In the postwar boom, with the significant influx of immigrants from parts of Europe other than the United Kingdom, the grip of British imperialism on the city was, almost imperceptibly, beginning to weaken. Likewise, although the Orange Order would continue to suffuse municipal (and provincial) government and culture for years to come, the dominance of the order had begun to waver. One telltale sign was Torontonians’ rejection of the interim incumbent mayor Leslie H. Saunders, a particularly vitriolic Orangeman, in the 1954 municipal election. Saunders’s fierce sectarianism alienated not only Catholics, Jews, and other non-Protestants but also liberal and more pragmatic Protestants and Orangemen. Running on the ticket “Leslie Saunders, Protestant,” he was ultimately narrowly defeated by Nathan Phillips who, being Jewish, had definitely been in the minority on city council throughout his previous thirty years as a councillor. Phillips was the first mayor in over a century who was not a member of the Orange Order. In the year after he took office, of the twenty-three elected representatives

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in Toronto, four were Jewish and four were Catholic. The municipal sectarian barrier had been breached.86 In line with most other major North American cities in the postwar era, Toronto turned toward progress and proactively cultivated an international outlook. Phillips, who, significantly, would serve as mayor for eight years, specifically sought to change

Figure 8.8 Dance competition, Casa Loma, ca. 1960s.

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the city’s public face by successfully advocating for an international design competition for a new city hall, ultimately won by the Finnish architect Viljo Revell. Extraordinarily modern, it was unlike any other civic building in Toronto and placed the city on the world stage of progress, visually cleaving it from its colonial roots. Phillips also fully endorsed sophisticated cultural endeavours like E.P. Taylor’s O’Keefe Centre (now Meridian Hall), a world-class performing arts venue.87 Saunders and some of his more virulent teetotalling Orange cronies were horrified, their outrage exacerbated by the fact the O’Keefe Centre was funded by brewing money. But they could not stop the tide of progress.88 The momentum also permeated contemporaneous tourism films produced by the city and the province, many of them aimed at the business sector to lure conventioneers. These films snap at a rapid pace through views of Toronto, showing modern and international architecture, the fast-moving subway system, and modern urban leisure events like the air show and waterskiing acrobatics at the Canadian National Exhibition. The pace only slows when tourists might want to get away to the Muskokas or enjoy a break by sunbathing on the Toronto Islands, scenes filled with a large number of close-up shots of young women in bikinis.89 Within a very few years, the tenor of the city had fundamentally changed. As Ian Sclanders, Maclean’s Magazine editor in Washington from 1960 to 1964, said when he returned to Toronto, the city had lost its small-townishness.90 Yet there sat Casa Loma, Toronto’s Edwardian fairy-tale castle overlooking all this modernism and progress. Curiously, despite Phillips’s vigorous hand at the helm of the wrecking ball, demolishing the decrepit Ward and much of old Chinatown as well as the 1873 General Post Office, the University Avenue Armouries, Chorley Park (the old residence of the lieutenant governor, to which Casa Loma was often compared), and, almost, Old City Hall, he never took aim at Casa Loma.

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a liv ing history site? Notably, other than Casa Loma, the only times the past was highlighted in postwar Toronto tourism promotion were in references to the Royal Ontario Museum and the living history sites of Fort York and Black Creek Pioneer Village. The Royal Ontario Museum had been established in 1912, in line with the turn-of-the-century Eurocentric infatuation for ethnographic and archeological museums. It soon

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gained international stature under the vigorous leadership of archeologist and Egyptologist C.T. Currelly, and the collection grew to include natural specimens and Indigenous objects from Canada and the world over, as well as historical European artifacts. Among the latter were several period rooms from town and country mansions in Europe that had been disassembled and then reassembled in the museum, literally bringing the “Old World” to the “New.”91 The living history sites came later and were more emphatically wrapped up with car tourism.92 Fort York, a War of 1812 military site, was the earlier of the two, restored in 1934 as part of Toronto’s centenary celebrations. Black Creek Pioneer Village, a fictive village set in the 1860s on the eve of Confederation, was built on a newly created floodplain in northwest Toronto after Hurricane Hazel barrelled through in 1954.93 Both sites were part of the second wave of living history sites that peaked in the postwar era, paradoxically celebrating regional and national historical identities at a time when internationalization, globalization, and modernity were the bywords of progress.94 In both, costumed interpreters role play: soldiers march in formation and fire cannons at Fort York, and at Black Creek men work in the printing house, apothecary, and carpenter and blacksmith shops while women bake and sew. Casa Loma sits somewhere along the same continuum as the Royal Ontario Museum and the living history sites. But there are distinct differences. A comparison of the three types sheds light on the experience of visiting Casa Loma. The Royal Ontario Museum and the Fort York and Black Creek sites were about education, grounded in the recognition of the importance of material culture.95 The museum was a place of dignified serious study and observation, where objects disassociated from their original contexts could be seen but not touched. It also tracked the Eurocentric/imperial teleological evolution of progress and civilization. The living history sites were fundamentally more lowbrow, examples of the quintessential postwar white middle-class family day outing, in which children, Mom, and Dad could try out the tools, roll the dough, snack on a holiday treat, and ride in a horsedrawn wagon.96 The teleological imperial narrative was likewise strong. Fort York laid the foundations by telling the story of resistance and ultimate victory of York/Toronto/Canada over anti-British Americans. Black Creek, set on the eve of Confederation, was a very Anglo, very Protestant, and very middle-class place, with no Roman Catholic churches, idle rich, or ethnic immigrant ghettos to be seen. This, in turn, perpetuated the Orange Order bourgeois idea of Toronto the Good.

Casa Loma, 1930–1970

In contrast, Casa Loma could not claim to be about education, nor did it fit well within the teleology of progress and civilization. Although it could be situated within the nation-within-an-empire narrative because of Pellatt’s ardent imperialism, its aristocratic, “civilized” bearing was undermined by its obvious extravagance and excess, further destabilized by Pellatt’s in sotto financial ruin. The spaces of Casa Loma might have rivalled and even surpassed the period rooms in the Royal Ontario Museum, but they were displaced at the apex of civilization by their stunning excess yet failed grandeur evidenced by the lack of furniture and objects that once filled the rooms. In promotional materials, the awkwardness of this disenfranchised existence was simply avoided by presenting “Canada’s Famous Castle” with no context at all, or when more detail was given, focusing instead on the pretty female guides (fig. 8.9).97 A similar tension with the past, coupled with the entrenched Anglo social hierarchy, also distinguished Casa Loma from the living history sites. While the latter revelled in a fully immersive experience of time travel, the key to Casa Loma’s success was that while visitors might test the experience of being ostentatiously wealthy by walking through the rooms or standing (fully clothed) in the full-body-surround shower, they could never really transcend the economic or social chasm separating them from the those who had actually lived in the castle (fig. 8.10). They were left marvelling about how the other half had lived. However, the gap between past and present dissipated with the dances at Casa Loma, which stood outside the tourist experience, since, like the pretty young guides, they were all about the present. To this already complex picture should be added the idea of authenticity. The decontextualized objects and period rooms at the Royal Ontario Museum, inaccessible behind glass, were meant to be reverently viewed and admired, enveloped in an aura of authenticity while time travel was emphatically kept at bay. Meanwhile, the success of the living history sites depended on that sense of time travel and the surreality of the authentic experience. Both, of course, were utterly fictitious. Ironically, in contrast to the museum and the living history sites, Casa Loma was, and is, the most authentic, with its truthful tale of disenfranchised splendour. Nevertheless, the Royal Ontario Museum, Fort York, Black Creek Pioneer Village, and Casa Loma were all antidotes in the postwar era to the anxieties of the Cold War, the atomic bomb, and the frenetic pace of mass consumerism. There was something comforting in the teleology that unfolded in the museum. Likewise,

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Figure 8.9 Opposite Casa Loma tour guides, ca. 1960s. Figure 8.10 Left Two children, Anne Winters and Kevin Bothwell (presumably the grandson of William A. Bothwell, who came up with the plan to open Casa Loma to the public in 1937), in the full-body-surround shower, 1963.

255 Fort York harkened back to when war was about straightforward physical engagement between soldiers, and Black Creek offered a seemingly simpler way of life that offset genuine concern about the loss of the handmade in the unprecedented modern world.98 Casa Loma, meanwhile, was a world of glamour, wealth, and extravagance, as well as a fancy place for dancing, teas, and wedding receptions. While the first three offered reassurance, Casa Loma was all about diversion. For decades, such was Casa Loma’s complex and ambivalent relationship with the past.

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Two more aspects of the tourist experience are relevant to Casa Loma. The postwar tourist experience embraced photography, and the popularity of the Kodak snapshot camera evolved simultaneously with the democratization of tourism. A photograph works to authenticate the experience of having been there, while also anchoring that experience in time. Yet in the very act of freezing time, the snapshot allows the experience to live on into the future, rather more palpably than solely in human memory. Kodak’s slogan, “Let Kodak keep the story,” implied that Kodak memory was superior to fragile human recall.99 At Casa Loma, the tourist photograph typically involved and continues to involve a ritual: people turn their cameras vertically and take the time to ensure that the turrets and crenellations are in the frame, since these features define a castle. They also tend to wait for people to walk out of the frame as the aura of the castle would be sullied by the presence of other tourists. Likewise, they often take two photographs, one with the family and one without. In just the same way, this ritual is carried out at stately homes and in front of great natural monuments. The photograph with the family proves that they were there; the photograph without the family emphasizes the grandeur of the place. The photographs also contribute to the illusion of the democratization of the sites: everyone can visit, though they will never truly be about or for them. The souvenir, too, is a constituent part of the tourist experience. Like photographs, postcards are often about the grandeur and uniqueness of the site seen, and they prompt the tourist’s memory about having been there. Postcards of Casa Loma accentuate its castle-like qualities, through aerial views or shots taken from low viewpoints emphasizing the castle’s vertiginous height on the hill (figs. 8.11 and 8.12). However, these pristine views devoid of people again suggest that the visitor also does not really belong. Other versions of Casa Loma could and can be purchased: a keychain, snow globe, medal, pin, spoon, patch, beer stein, teacup, bracelet charm – even a sandcastle (fig. 8.13). With such purchases, the tourist “owns” a piece of Casa Loma, but, again, not really. These Casa Loma souvenirs are also miniatures. In her seminal book On Longing, Susan Stewart explored our relationships with the miniature (her focus was the dollhouse) and the gigantic (large sculptures and monuments, vast landscapes, and the like). The miniature is about balance, proportion, and control, while the gigantic is about disproportion, disorder, and envelopment.100 The latter is certainly

Figure 8.11 Top Postcard of Casa Loma, aerial view, ca. 1949. Figure 8.12 Bottom Casa Loma, southern exposure.

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Figure 8.13 A selection of mid-twentieth-century souvenirs from Casa Loma.

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true of Casa Loma, but by miniaturizing the monumental, as the souvenirs of Casa Loma do, the castle is domesticated and controlled. However, this miniaturization also makes the castle more remote, because we cannot enter it. Here again, the tourist never fully belongs; there is always a gap that can never be fully bridged. This relationship with the object ultimately alludes to Thing Theory, as articulated by the mid-twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, specifically the role that things play in producing or reinforcing social worlds. Like the experience of visiting Casa Loma or living history sites, the souvenir thing bought and brought home blurs reality and surreality (i.e., liminal ulterior spaces) while also sharply delineating them, as it does the temporal boundaries of past, present, and even future.101 The gap that renders the spectacle (the castle as monument, the experience of visiting it, its eccentricity) coherent but not quite attainable is an integral and piquant component of the sense of nostalgia that has progressively enwrapped Casa

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Loma from the postwar era on. This belongingness underscores how we look at Casa Loma today. With the turn toward heritage at the end of the twentieth century (discussed in the next chapter), Casa Loma became a little embarrassing in yet another way. Visibly in need of repair, it looked a bit shabby. Torontonians chastised the city for letting this happen to a beloved and venerable building that had become so much a part of Toronto’s history. The castle had also become an overwhelming enterprise for the Kiwanis Club to operate. Today it is leased and operated by Liberty Entertainment Group, which is committed to the castle’s restoration and history. Heritage and entertainment are now soulmates in Toronto as elsewhere in the western world, exemplified by Medieval Times dinner theatre, escape rooms, television series such as Downton Abbey, Murdoch Mysteries, and Antiques Roadshow, and so much more. With Casa Loma, perhaps Toronto has finally fully embraced its Castle on the Hill. As Nathan Phillips said, it would have been sacrilege to tear it down.

notes 1 Quoted in “City Takes Over Casa Loma but Baffled by Ownership,” Toronto Star, 28 February 1934. 2 “Sir Henry Pellatt Sells Rosedale Home,” Toronto Star, 22 November 1935; “Toronto Loses a Colourful and Romantic Figure, Sir Henry Pellatt,” and “Romantic Canadian Sir H. Dies,” Toronto Star, 9 March 1939. See also Oreskovich, Casa Loma, 235–6. 3 “Having Home ‘Sold’ for Taxes Cheaper than Borrowing Money” and “Maple Leaf Stadium Taken Off Tax Sale,” Toronto Star, 1 February 1933; “City Raises $48,338 in Tax Arrears Sales,” Toronto Star, 15 February 1934; “City Takes Over Casa Loma but Baffled by Ownership,” Toronto Star, 28 February 1934. 4 “Demolish Casa Loma, Ramsden Suggests,” Toronto Star, 13 March 1934; “No Difficulty in Wrecking Casa Loma Says Contractor,” Toronto Star, 16 March 1934. For the “Treasury Watchdog,” see “Treasury Watchdog George Ramsden Dies,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 29 December 1948. 5 “Doubts If Wreckers Can Destroy Castle,” Toronto Star, 15 March 1934; “No Difficulty in Wrecking Casa Loma Says Contractor,” Toronto Star, 16 March 1934. 6 Letter signed “A.E.G.,” “Act of Vandalism,” Toronto Star, 23 March 1934. 7 Letter signed “M.S.T.,” “Future of Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 29 March 1934. 8 “Casa Loma for Public Use,” Toronto Star, 17 March 1934. This letter refers to another

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9 10

11 12 13

14 15

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published in the Mail and Empire, objecting to the prospect of demolition. See also “Take Care of Casa Loma,” Globe (Toronto), 14 March 1934; “Toronto Can Tear Down Casa Loma Only Once, but If It Does So It Can Wish It Back a Hundred Times in the Next Twenty Years,” “Note and Comment,” Toronto Star, 17 March 1934. Reported in “A Little of Everything,” Toronto Star, 12 September 1935. Reported in “A Little of Everything,” Toronto Star, 10 March 1934. Other satirical commentary includes a facetious proposal (in poetic form) for Prime Minister R.B. Bennett to purchase Casa Loma to live in after his anticipated defeat, in “A Little of Everything – Now What?,” Toronto Star, 1 March 1934; “Hail! White Elephant!,” in “A Little of Everything,” Toronto Star, 22 March 1934; “Casa Cold Feet,” in “A Little of Everything,” Toronto Star, 26 March 1934; another proposal for Bennett to use it as a home after his defeat, in “A Little of Everything,” Toronto Star, 24 October 1934; and parallels with the king of Bulgaria’s inheritance of three elephants in “A Little of Everything,” Toronto Star, 20 December 1934. On a serious note, the venerable artist Wyley Grier decried demolition and thought there should be a contest for the best idea for the use of Casa Loma. See “Suggest $10,000 Cash Prize for Casa Loma Solution,” Toronto Star, 21 March 1934. “Think ‘Casa Loma’ Is a ‘Freak’ Building,” Toronto Star, 28 September 1934. On resistance to modernism, see Armstrong, Making Toronto Modern, 100–33. “Routley Supports Casa Loma Proposal,” Toronto Star, 17 March 1934; “Suggest Casa Loma as Exhibition Hall,” Toronto Star, 19 March 1934; “Casa Loma Scorned as Refugee Camp,” Toronto Star, 10 April 1934. “Demolish Casa Loma Ramsden Suggests,” Toronto Star, 13 March 1934. “Ladies on Casa Loma Job,” Toronto Star, 30 May 1935; “Veterans Want Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 25 June 1935; “Museum of Rare Art Wanted Badly Here,” Toronto Star, 24 August 1935. For quote by Madill, see “City Hall, Queen’s Park Jolt Architecture Expert,” Toronto Star, 22 November 1935. Newspapers also reported on a concurrent related discussion about road access to the expanding subdivisions north of Casa Loma. One solution proposed by the landscape architect/planning team of Carl Borgström and Humphrey Carver was to build a two-thousand-foot road tunnel under Casa Loma as an extension of Spadina Road – an early precedent for the Spadina Expressway plans of the 1960s. See “Suggest 2,000-Foot Tunnel to Extend Spadina Road,” Toronto Star, 4 October 1935. The drawings associated with this proposal were recently deposited in the Archival and Special Collections of the University of Guelph. “Demolish Casa Loma Ramsden Suggests,” Toronto Star, 13 March 1934.

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17 For A.E. LePage, see “Our Story,” Royal LePage, accessed 13 September 2021, https://www. royallepage.ca/en/realestate/about-us/our-story/. 18 The transcript for the radio broadcast is in Teatime Topics, cfrb, 1–21 March 1937, 23 March 1937, radio broadcast transcripts, Claire Wallace fonds, Special Collections, University of Waterloo Library, WA16, series 3: Scrapbooks, file 38. 19 Letter signed “E.A.R.,” “Future of Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 27 March 1937. 20 “Casa Loma a Great Asset,” Toronto Star, 1 April 1937. 21 On the afterlife of the English stately home, see Mandler, Fall and Rise of the Stately Home. 22 “Casa Loma Stands Controllers State,” Toronto Star, 30 March 1937. 23 Ibid. 24 “Use Casa Loma as an Hospital Con. Day Urges,” Toronto Star, 27 March 1937; “Casa Loma Stands Controllers State,” Toronto Star, 30 March 1937; letter, Peter McAndrew, “A Veterans’ Home,” Toronto Star, 30 March 1937; “Children’s Hospital May Get Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 30 March 1937; “Disabled Veterans May Take Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 30 March 1937; letter, Otto Playter, “Casa Loma Suggestions,” Toronto Star, 9 April 1937. 25 Letter, Otto Playter, “Casa Loma Suggestions,” Toronto Star, 9 April 1937. 26 “Quinn Urges Using Casa Loma as Dionne Quintuplets’ Home,” Toronto Star, 16 April 1937. 27 “Won’t Let Dionnes Live in Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 17 April 1937. 28 “Moving Casa Loma to Quints Proposed,” Toronto Star, 4 May 1937. 29 “Casa Loma Scheme Suggested by Club,” Toronto Star, 6 April 1937; “West Toronto Kiwanians in Charge of Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 28 April 1937. 30 The Kiwanis Club laid out between $1,000 and $2,500 for repairs; the reports vary, and one also said the club built and raffled a house to cover the costs. See “Prepare Casa Loma for Its Reopening,” Toronto Star, 27 May 1937; “Casa Loma Thronged for Tourist Opening,” Toronto Star, 31 May 1937. 31 On the significance and characteristics of early radio in Canada, see the work by Mary Vipond and Anne F. MacLennan, especially Vipond, Listening In; MacLennan, “Learning to Listen”; and MacLennan, “Reading Radio.” See also Edwardson, Canadian Content, 3–50; and Windover and MacLennan, Seeing, Selling, and Situating Radio. 32 “Casa Loma Thronged for Tourist Opening,” Toronto Star, 31 May 1937; “Casa Loma Draws 2,000 on Week-End,” Toronto Star, 21 June 1937. 33 “20 Seconds an Age,” Toronto Star, 24 June 1937. The transcript of the broadcast, by John M. Kannawin, is in Sir Henry Pellatt’s Scrapbook, City of Toronto Archives, fond 471, series 2225, file 11 (hereafter Pellatt’s Scrapbook). The description of the sunset was impromptu

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34 35 36

37

38 39

40 41

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since the tour finished a few minutes before the end of the program. For another broadcast scheduled for the official opening day on 10 July 1937, see “Are You Listening,” Toronto Star, 26 June 1937. “18,000 Visit Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 2 July 1937. “Martial Music to Open Castle,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 10 July 1937. The barouche was built for Lord Elgin and later used by Queen Victoria, King Edward, and King George V. The Globe and Mail also noted that a heat wave attracted many visitors, who sought relief in the cool tunnel that connects the castle to the stables. See “Frantic Fight Waged to Combat Weather,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 9 July 1937. “Rambling at Random Halted at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 17 July 1937; “Vandals at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 3 August 1937. Kiwanis also contemplated creating a nursery in the castle because so many children became separated from their parents. See “Transportation Service to Casa Loma Inaugurated,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 1 July 1937. “Vandals at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 3 August 1937. “Casa Loma Venture Gives City $8,189,” Toronto Star, 9 November 1937. The 100,000th adult to visit, on 12 September 1937, received a $25 antique vase. See “Toronto in Brief,” Toronto Star, 13 September 1937. On the vote to have Kiwanis operate Casa Loma in 1938, see “What Council Did,” Toronto Star, 30 November 1937. “Toronto Insists on Share of Casa Loma Dance Plan,” Toronto Star, 10 June 1937. On the dolls, see “Kings, Queens, Quints, Priests, to Be Seen in Casa Loma Show,” Toronto Star, 18 June 1938. On the Fall of Nineveh controversy, see “Notable Canadian Art Shown at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 27 May 1938; “Much Criticized Painting Will Hang in Casa Loma” (front page), and “Much-Criticized Art to Hang in Castle,” Toronto Star, 10 June 1938; “Nude Painting Stays Mayor Approves it,” Toronto Star, 11 June 1938. The same painting had also caused a stir when it was displayed at the Canadian National Exhibition four years before. The work was painted by Theodore Hilser in the 1890s for Franz Joseph of Austria and was owned by Mr Rathgeb, a Toronto businessman, who loaned it to Kiwanis to display at Casa Loma. It was slated to be shown at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. On butterflies, see “Casa Loma Wonders Are Seen by 41,000,” Toronto Star, 14 August 1939. On an art show in 1938, see “Historical Art Show Limns Early Canada,” Toronto Star, 4 June 1938. On Titania’s palace, see “Casa Loma Becomes a Real Fairy Castle,” Toronto Star, 25 September 1940. “3 New Kiwanis Men Relate Life Stories,” Toronto Star, 5 July 1940; “Ball Game Receipts Will Aid Star Fund,” Toronto Star, 23 August 1940; “Casa Loma Visitors Are Eager to Buy,” Toronto Star, 16 September 1940.

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43 On more dances, see “Casa Loma Proceeds to Boost War Work,” Toronto Star, 12 May 1941. On the blackout dance, see “Over the Teacups, before and after the ‘Blackout,’” Toronto Star, 11 September 1941. 44 “Kiwanians Sponsor Mammoth Carnival,” Toronto Star, 31 August 1942; “Just between Ourselves,” Toronto Star, 2 September 1942. 45 Announcements are peppered throughout the society pages, and much of the funds and clothing raised went to orphans and the homeless. Such fundraising efforts continued after the war. 46 “Says Club Lobbying to Obtain Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 11 December 1941. 47 On American tourists, see “Tourists Bring $15,000 Everyday” and “Toronto Is Summer Mecca for U.S. Tourists,” Toronto Star, 17 July 1937. For quote and non–North American tourists, see “Casa Loma Draws 2,000 on Week-End,” Toronto Star, 21 June 1937. See also “Builder’s Relative Inspects Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 25 May 1939. 48 “Transportation Service to Casa Loma Inaugurated,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 1 July 1937. 49 “Casa Loma Visited by 1,000 U.S. People,” Toronto Star, 30 September 1940. 50 Davis, “Dependent Motorization,” 125–6; Bothwell, Drummond, and English, Canada, 1900–1945, 251. See also Gordon, Time Travel. 51 Coutu, “Drive through Canadian History”; Best, Thomas Baker McQuesten. 52 On the higher car tourist numbers to Toronto, see “Tourists Bring $15,000 Everyday” and “Toronto Is Summer Mecca for U.S. Tourists,” Toronto Star, 17 July 1937. On American tourist numbers and favourite destinations, see “Do Canadians Speak American? That’s What U.S. Tourists Ask,” Toronto Star, 28 May 1937. According to this report, Casa Loma was a favourite destination even before it opened to the public. 53 The results were mixed in the early days of the opening of the houses. See Mandler, Fall and Rise, esp. 265–310. See also Gaze, Figures in a Landscape. 54 “Mistook Casa Loma for King’s Palace,” Toronto Star, 31 July 1929. See also “Casa Loma Scorned as Refugee Camp,” Toronto Star, 10 April 1934. 55 “Will Casa Loma Ever Become Residence of Royal Family?,” Evening Telegram, 30 November 1938; “Fit Up Casa Loma for King Pellatt Urges” and “Fit Up Casa Loma for King, Proposal,” Toronto Star, 12 October 1938; “6,000 Could Greet Royalty on Balcony of Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 2 March 1939. In 1947, a city councillor moved that Casa Loma should become the home of the lieutenant governor and be fitted up in case Princess Elizabeth wished to stay there after her wedding. The motion was defeated. See “City Hall to Decide If Toronto Gets Holiday on Wedding Day,” Toronto Star, 22 October 1947. 56 Horror was an exceptionally early film genre, originating with Georges Méliès’s 1896 threeminute short, Le Manoir du Diable, or The Haunted Castle.

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57 Both Dracula (Tod Browning, dir.) and Frankenstein (James Whale, dir.) were produced by Universal Pictures and released in 1931. 58 For an analysis of Disney castles, including their relationship with Neuschwanstein and the Bavarian Alps, see Burchard, Inspiring Walt Disney, especially 181–7. 59 Photograph of Walt Disney with Donald Duck at Casa Loma, City of Toronto Archives, Kiwanis Club, Banquets, New Year’s and Other Activities, vol. 2, 1937–1986, fond 471, series 2226, file 8. Mickey Mouse also made several appearances in the 1960s and then again in the 1990s as part of the Christmas season programming. 60 “Shall We Import Madame Tussaud,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 1 July 1937; “18,000 Visit Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 2 July 1937. A Chicago impresario thought there should be ghosts, skulls, and a torture chamber. See “Casa Loma Lacks Oomph – Skulls, Etc.” Toronto Star, 15 August 1939. 61 cbc transcript dated 1938, in Pellatt’s Scrapbook. 62 For example, Casa Loma, Canada’s Famous Castle, copy in City of Toronto Archives, Staff Members, Tourists, and Miscellaneous Photos after 1937, fond 471, series 2226, file 5. For details about Pellatt’s business career, see Roberts, “Pellatt, Sir Henry Mill.” For numerous satirical cartoons published in newspapers between 1906 and 1909 about Pellatt’s opposition to Sir Adam Beck’s hydroelectricity scheme, see Pellatt’s Scrapbook. 63 Casa Loma, Canada’s Famous Castle. 64 City of Toronto Archives, fond 1244, item 4014. 65 The Queen’s Own Rifles museum was opened in 1971, and the Girl Guides display was first installed in 1987. I am grateful to Marcela Torres for this information. 66 R.E. Knowles, “Father Time Deals Kindly with Sir Henry Pellatt,” Toronto Star, 7 January 1930. 67 “Sir Henry, Casa Loma Guest Weeps amid Scene of Past,” Toronto Star, 13 August 1937. See also “Pellatt Comes Back to the Halls He Abandoned” and “A Guest Comes Home,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 13 August 1937. 68 “Load of Rifles Jolts Calm of Casa Loma,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 20 July 1937; “Re-Arm Casa Loma but Merely Relics,” Toronto Star, 20 July 1937. Another fifty rifles had been found in one of the secret cupboards in the castle. 69 “Sir Henry, Casa Loma Guest Weeps amid Scene of Past,” Toronto Star, 13 August 1937; “Pellatt Comes Back to the Halls He Abandoned,” “A Guest Comes Home,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 13 August 1937. According to the Globe and Mail, Casa Loma cost Pellatt nothing because he recouped whatever he had lost with the castle through development of the other land he had acquired on Davenport Ridge.

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70 Key texts include MacCannell, Tourist; Urry and Larsen, Tourist Gaze; Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country; Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited; Samuel, Theatres of Memory. 71 “Secret Negotiations on Castle under Way with City Officials,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 28 July 1937. See also “Civic Officials Deny Ford to Buy Castle,” Toronto Star, 28 July 1937. 72 “Again Wants Casa Loma Lost $140,000 Once Before,” Toronto Star, 1 May 1939; “City May Get $50,000 Bid for Pellatt Dream Castle,” Toronto Star, 10 October 1941. 73 Kiwanis also put in a bid at the same time, but it was rejected because it was deemed too low. See “City May Get $50,000 Bid for Pellatt Dream Castle,” Toronto Star, 10 October 1941; “Give Kiwanis Chance to Bid on Casa Loma” and “Prefer Any Kiwanis Bid for Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 22 October 1941; “‘$75,000 Bid’ Plans Casa Loma Hotel,” Toronto Star, 25 October 1941; “$75,000 ‘Mystery Bid’ Made on Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 5 November 1941; “$75,000 to $125,000 Bid for Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 5 December 1941; “Says Club Lobbying to Obtain Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 11 December 1941. For the Club Esquire, see Filey, I Remember Sunnyside, 56. Beasley would go on to build and operate Centreville on Centre Island in 1967. 74 “Suggests Casa Loma as Haven for Pope,” Toronto Star, 8 July 1940. 75 “Sale of Castle by Lottery Vetoed,” Toronto Star, 12 December 1941. 76 “Ottawa Approves Use of Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 30 September 1939. See also “Soldiers’ Wife Club,” Toronto Star, 29 May 1944; “Suggests Castle Could Be Hospital,” Toronto Star, 8 September 1944. The federal government chose instead to use Chorley Park, the former home of the lieutenant governor of Ontario, which had been shut down by Mitchell Hepburn in 1937 in a show of government budget trimming. See Jamie Bradburn, “Historicist: The Saga of Chorley Park,” accessed 13 September 2021, https://torontoist.com/2008/08/his toricist/; Dendy, Lost Toronto, 176–9. In fact, Chorley Park’s uncertain future mirrored that of Casa Loma until the 1950s when, in contrast to Casa Loma, it fell to the wrecking ball. 77 “Cellar Vaults of Casa Loma Housed Secret Wartime Plant Which Helped Beat U-Boats,” Evening Telegram, 15 October 1946; “Casa Loma Cellar Secret War Plant for 3 Years,” undated newspaper clipping in Pellatt’s Scrapbook. More recently, Lynn Philip Hodgson has conjectured – an informed guess – that Casa Loma was Station M, where enemy uniforms and other objects were made for use in espionage activities, essentially constituting a satellite of Sir William Stephenson’s Camp X. See Lynn Philip Hodgson, “Camp-X Official Site,” accessed 13 September 2021, http://www.camp-x.com/camp-xcollection-toronto.html. This conjecture has spun off into the cbc television series X Company and the Station M Escape Room now on offer at Casa Loma.

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78 “Professor E. Pratt Speaks to Kiwanis,” Toronto Star, 8 May 1942; “Casa Loma Kiwanis to Get Long Lease,” Toronto Star, 12 March 1946. 79 “Protest When Casa Loma Is Accused of Fire Breach,” Toronto Star, 21 December 1944. 80 “Casa Loma Said Crumbling” and “Casa Loma Said Crumbling Urge It Be Torn Down,” Toronto Star, 8 January 1953; “‘Tish and Posh’ Official Reacts to Castle Story,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 9 January 1953; “Why Tear It Down?,” West Toronto Weekly, 15 January 1953. These and several other undated [January 1953] and unidentified newspaper clippings are in Pellatt’s Scrapbook: “Urges Wrecking Casa Loma,” “Complete with Ghost,” “City to Seek Funds to Repair Casa Loma,” “Will Not Raze Casa Loma,” “Jellyfish Pile or Casa Loma?,” “Casa Loma” (this last dated 22 January 1953). Between 1944 and 1953, the city had received over $130,000 in revenue; for 1952 alone, it was over $19,000. See “Casa Loma Said Crumbling Urge It Be Torn Down,” Toronto Star, 8 January 1953; “Claims Only $44,000 of Casa Loma $180,890 Given Over to Charity,” undated and unidentified newspaper clipping in Pellatt’s Scrapbook. 81 “Why Tear It Down?,” West Toronto Weekly, 15 January 1953, Pellatt’s Scrapbook. 82 “City to Seek Funds to Repair Casa Loma,” [January 1953], Pellatt’s Scrapbook. Gillies estimated that $75,000 was required for repairs, but an engineer who was a member of the West Toronto Kiwanis Club said the repairs would cost about $30,000. 83 “Urges Wrecking Casa Loma,” newspaper clipping [January 1953], Pellatt’s Scrapbook. 84 “Why Tear It Down?,” West Toronto Weekly, 15 January 1953, Pellatt’s Scrapbook. 85 “Urges Wrecking Casa Loma,” newspaper clipping [January 1953], Pellatt’s Scrapbook. 86 William J. Smyth is especially detailed on the degree of Saunders’s bigotry. See Smyth, Toronto, the Belfast of Canada, 247–55. On the lingering resistance to change, see 256–61. Saunders, too, opposed demolition of the castle. See “Will Not Raze Casa Loma,” newspaper clipping [January 1953], Pellatt’s Scrapbook. 87 For a discussion of the new city hall project and its challenges, as well as discussion of the O’Keefe Centre, see Armstrong, Making Toronto Modern, 218–40, 249–53. See also Phillips’s autobiography, Mayor of All the People. 88 On Saunders’s resistance, see Smyth, Toronto, 254. 89 Copies of several of these films, such as Ontario for Jane, Wonders of Ontario, Toronto the Queen City, The Meeting Place, and Toronto, are in the Archives of Ontario. 90 Ian Sclanders, “Hello Toronto, My, How You’ve Changed,” Maclean’s, 6 February 1965. 91 The trade in period rooms was vigorous in the early- to mid-twentieth century as estate owners struggled to deal with changing social and economic times. Downton Abbey, for example, is premised on these changes. The Royal Ontario Museum had three period rooms by 1930. The oldest, the Elizabethan Room, was installed in 1911–12. (John Harris says it

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92

93

94 95

96 97

98 99 100 101

was the oldest period room to enter a North American collection in the early twentieth century.) The Queen Anne Room was purchased in the 1920s, and the Georgian Room was a gift of the T. Eaton Company in 1927. See Harris, Moving Rooms, 165–66 and passim; also author’s email correspondence with Pater Kaellgen, Corey Keeble, Robert Little, and Brendan Edwards, all of the Royal Ontario Museum, March 2020. The concept of the living history site originated in Sweden in the late nineteenth century with Skansen in Stockholm, but the impetus for the Canadian sites would have been Williamsburg, Virginia, built in the 1920s and 1930s. Early examples in Canada include Fort George and Fort Henry in Ontario, both developed in the 1930s; later postwar sites include Louisbourg and King’s Landing in Nova Scotia; Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park and the Ukrainian Cultural History Village in Alberta; Ste Marie-among-the-Hurons, Doon Heritage Village, and Upper Canada Village in Ontario; and Fort Steele and Barkerville in British Columbia. See Gordon, Time Travel. The creation of flood plains along the Humber River, Don River, and Rouge River basins was the result of immediate improvements to flood-water management after eighty-one lives and an entire residential street were lost during the hurricane of 1954. Most of the structures at Black Creek Pioneer Village were brought from other sites, including some that had been drowned, as part of the new-flood management plan. This is a key theme explored by Alan Gordon in Gordon, Time Travel, 13–16, passim. Both are evolutions of collecting practices in the nineteenth century and on the object lesson, which was a dominant form of Victorian and Edwardian pedagogy. It advocates the handling of small objects to learn via sensual experience. Elizabeth Mayo’s Lessons on Objects, first published in 1830, ran through many editions (over twenty by 1865) throughout the nineteenth century in Britain and North America. I am grateful to Andrea Korda for this citation. See Janet Shepherd, s.v. “Mayo, Elizabeth (1793–1865),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004, https://www.oxforddnb.com. The family experience is another theme that ripples through Gordon, Time Travel. For news reports on the female guides, see “Castle’s Faded Glory,” Weekly Globe and Mail (Toronto), 31 August 1967; “They Steer the Curious through Casa Loma,” and “Their Dream of Castle Is Reality in Toronto / Pretty Casa Loma Guides Attract Many Tourists,” undated and unidentified newspaper clippings, Pellatt’s Scrapbook. Gordon, Time Travel, esp. 13–16. Urry and Larsen, Tourist Gaze, 170–80. Stewart, On Longing, esp. 37–103. Heidegger, “Thing”; Brown, “Thing Theory”; Boetzkes and Vinegar, Heidegger, esp. 1–30.

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9 Casa Loma, 1970 to the Present marcela torres

From the late twentieth century onward, cultural heritage institutions have experienced a radical transformation resulting from various social, political, and economic factors. The museums of the past tended to be exclusive and elitist – their role was to elevate, educate, and promote culture – but today the intent of many cultural and heritage institutions is to become more dynamic, creating an active dialogue with its audiences. Besides their role as stewards of cultural heritage – preserving heritage, caring for collections, and communicating histories – cultural institutions have turned their focus to a participatory and audience-centred experience,1 incorporating elements of entertainment encouraged by the development of new technologies. Conceiving of the visitor as a “cultural consumer”2 has led museum professionals to shift the focus of their collections toward the needs of museum visitors. We can readily recognize many of the transformations and struggles that cultural organizations experience in Casa Loma’s recent history (fig. 9.1). Casa Loma has always been a site of spectacle, and this has only been heightened in more recent years. But so too has its heritage status. This chapter charts the management of Casa Loma as both heritage asset and spectacular tourist attraction over the past fifty years.

Figure 9.1 View of south façade of Casa Loma, with upper and lower terrace, 2008.

from her i tage house to “e dutainment” cent re As Joan Coutu explored in the previous chapter, the West Toronto Kiwanis Club – a charity – began operating Casa Loma in 1937. Taking charge of an abandoned building, the club aimed to recreate the splendour of the house during the Pellatts’ time. Kiwanis searched for and collected original Pellatt artifacts and furniture to reconnect the house with its dispersed objects. They also acquired modern reproductions of period furnishings to recreate the idea of a luxurious house of the Gilded Age. In this way, Kiwanis operated Casa Loma as a conventional house museum, albeit one on an unusually large scale and with a legacy of controversy in the city. Casa Loma was centred on the narrative of a “great man” and implicitly celebrated patriarchal power and affluence. In 1971, it also became home to the

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Regimental Museum of the Queen’s Own Rifles. Henry Pellatt was, of course, a significant member and supporter of the qor, making the location of the museum appropriate (see introduction and chapter 6). The exhibition contained a collection of regimental artifacts, including documents from the regimental archives, medals, photographs, weapons, and a uniform collection dating back to 1866 (fig. 6.5). As such, the collections recounted the qor’s involvement in every major conflict in which Canadians participated. The exhibit was located in four rooms on the third floor and was open to the public. The Rifleman Room and the 1945–Present Time Room are still currently open to the public. (The other two rooms are now offices.) Another layer of narrative was added to the tour of Casa Loma in 1987 with the creation of a permanent exhibit of the Girl Guides movement as a tribute to Lady Pellatt, who was deeply invested in the Guides (see chapter 5). For her commitment, she received the Girl Guides’ highest awards, the Silver Fish and the Official Warrant. The exhibit was located in the guest suite sitting room on the second floor and offered a historical record of uniforms of the Girl Guides of Canada since 1910. The incorporation of this exhibit drew more attention to the agency of Lady Pellatt in Casa Loma’s past and amplified the overlooked place of women and girls in the history of the house, and by extension, Toronto. During the 1970s and ’80s, with a growing collection and the addition of a few special exhibits, Casa Loma went through an interior restoration and was able to open more rooms to the public. In addition to these rooms and artifacts that helped evoke Toronto’s Gilded Age, cafés and a gift shop were opened with the intention of attracting local and growing international tourism.3 According to John Hannigan, the overwhelming success of amusement parks in the 1970s and ’80s (for example, Disney World, or Canada’s Wonderland near Toronto) was recognized by the management of cultural organizations, and many chose to look at this successful formula to enhance their own marketability.4 In the 1970s, Kiwanis sent a proposal to the City of Toronto to add a wax museum to the entertainment experience at Casa Loma. The club evidently saw Casa Loma as more than a site of Toronto’s heritage: it was to be a versatile space, a combination of immersive museum and entertainment centre. As Anda Becut has shown, in the postmodern, postindustrial consumer society, cultural organizations are continuously reconfiguring their role. Although they keep their primary role of cultural heritage conservation and protection, it is essential today to combine education with leisure and social responsibility.5 In the

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past decades, the new notion in museology developed from an object-based approach, in which objects are located in a quasi-sacred space with passive visitor interaction, to an experiential approach, in which visitors are active cultural consumers. As Hannigan observed, the converging consumer activity system joins education and entertainment to create a form of “edutainment.”6 Casa Loma is one of the most visited cultural institutions in Toronto today. It is also one of few heritage houses that survived from the Gilded Age in North America and tells the story of those days. The Pellatts’ Edwardian castle on the hill continues to capture the attention of tourists and residents. As Alla Myzelev observed, Casa Loma’s theatricality, its construction of the residence as spectacle that Pellatt intended in his own time, continues to appeal to viewers.7 Visitors can take selfguided and guided group tours of the museum and participate in daytime and evening seasonal programming. The castle accommodates private events and is frequently used as a location for film shoots. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, Casa Loma was in a state of disrepair. Although designated an Ontario Heritage Property in 1987, it gave the impression of a derelict house with almost nothing left from the magnificent home that Pellatt built.

casa loma and the toronto her i tage indust ry To understand some of the changes that occurred to Casa Loma from the 1970s onward, it is necessary to place them within a developing governmental framework for heritage preservation within the city and the Province of Ontario. One of the significant events that helped change the discussion on historical architecture was the creation of the Ontario Heritage Act (oha), enacted in 1975. 8 oha designation allows municipalities and the provincial government to label individual properties and districts in Ontario as of cultural heritage value or interest. According to Robert Shipley, a factor that contributed to the creation of the oha was the Venice Charter of 1964, which contained a set of guiding principles and an international framework for the conservation and restoration of historic buildings.9 (Canada is a signatory of the charter.) The oha not only brought awareness to the city about caring for its architectural heritage but also provided funding for the preservation of important heritage sites.

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The need for these changes was evident in light of the devastating loss of much of the city’s architectural heritage. Many stately homes – once centres for commerce, politics, and elite sociability in Toronto – had already been demolished or lost, either because they were subject to rising tax rates that made them unaffordable for their owners to maintain or because they became financial burdens for the city. The Report of the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development of 2017 reports the loss of many places of historic significance and has alerted Torontonians to those in danger of disappearing due to neglect. More than 20 per cent of Canada’s built heritage is estimated to have been lost between 1970 and 2000.10 This loss included Chorley Park estate, once the official residence of Ontario’s lieutenant governor and one of the sumptuous palatial homes in Canada, built between 1911 and 1915. According to Mark Maloney, “Chorley Park fell victim to a curious mix of populist rhetoric, backroom political maneuvering, government cost-cutting and federal-provincial animosities.”11 The entire contents were auctioned in 1938, and it was bought by the federal government to be used as a military hospital in World War II and later became the rcmp’s Toronto headquarters. In 1960, Chorley Park was considered battered and obsolete, and the city purchased the property for $100,000 and demolished it. The only part that now remains from the opulent residence is a small stone bridge; the estate grounds of the property are now included in the municipal parks system.12 Around the same time, E.J. Lennox’s Old City Hall, considered inadequate for the developing metropolis and incongruent with its modernist self-conception in the mid-twentieth century, was nearly destroyed (see chapter 2). When the public objected to its threatened demolition, however, city authorities were forced to abandon the plan. In 1987, the Casa Loma estate was designated by the City of Toronto as a heritage property and became protected under Part IV of the oha (By-Laws 545-87 and 546-87).13 The reasons were identified in Schedule B of the designation statement for each by-law.14 The Casa Loma stables at 330 Walmer Road were also designated.15 Once a building is protected under the oha, any consideration that affects the heritage site, from possible demolition to an alteration (even in an adjacent site to the protected property), requires a Heritage Impact Assessment before receiving a heritage permit. Nevertheless, the intent of the oha is not to prevent all changes but to manage change in support of conserving the heritage resource. In the case of Casa Loma, any significant alteration to the site can be challenged by heritage advocates and the City of Toronto’s Heritage Preservation Service. Minor

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alterations, particularly in the buildings or interiors, also come under consideration, depending on the required work and its sensitivity to heritage standards and guidelines. Thus, the designation of Casa Loma as an Ontario Heritage Property was and is an essential contribution to the preservation of what has become one of the most iconic landmarks in Toronto. In 2002, the Ministry of Culture introduced changes to the oha that gave municipalities and the province the power to preserve and promote Ontario’s heritage. The act empowers rather than obligates municipalities to protect their local heritage. Municipal power includes establishing local architectural conservation advisory committees, designating individual properties, responding to requests to alter or demolish heritage properties, and entering into agreements with owners to maintain their heritage properties.16 The City of Toronto established the Casa Loma Advisory Committee in 2004 to provide consultation on improvements to the site. Also in 2004, the committee asked the commissioner of Economic Development, Culture, and Tourism to appoint a citizens’ committee to inquire into Casa Loma’s restoration and operation. The committee conducted a series of studies, financial analyses, and community sessions to formulate a vision for Casa Loma’s future.17

restor at ion and t r ansit ion Even though Casa Loma had the highest record of tourists in the 1990s when it was operated by the Kiwanis Club (375,000 visitors in 1998), 18 the club faced significant difficulties maintaining and preserving the property. Both the interior and exterior needed improvements. In 1997, city staff discovered that the Roman Stone Lennox had used was crumbling and realized that Casa Loma required more than the standard exterior maintenance to keep visitors safe. The Toronto firm of Taylor Hazell Architects was appointed to prepare a restoration master plan and conduct appropriate exterior repairs to the stables and castle. According to Hazell’s report (1997), the condition of the structure was a consequence of inappropriate restoration and repairs, as well as deferred maintenance.19 Following the lease agreement that Kiwanis held with the city, the club was responsible for minor repairs when needed, and significant interior and exterior repairs were left for the city to undertake. However, despite the city’s responsibility for exterior maintenance, it blamed Kiwanis

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for the failing Roman Stone. That seemed to be the beginning of the end of the amicable relationship between the club and the city. In the same year, a formal presentation on the state of Casa Loma was made to Heritage Toronto. The outcome was an endorsement of the importance of immediate restoration and the need for a plan to ensure the site’s long-term stability. For both parties to undertake and manage their obligations successfully, and for a consistency of approach to be attained, they needed a plan that included research on restoration techniques and, of course, adequate funding. Hazell recommended that the City of Toronto and the Kiwanis Club consider some heritage guidelines to govern all aspects of restoration work at the estate. The implementation of these strategies provided the necessary consistency for the long-term preservation aims for the site.20 The report determined that falling debris and the partial collapse of building components constituted an imminent danger to the public. Based on the investigation by Hazell’s firm, it was estimated that 25 per cent of the exterior building envelope, including that of Casa Loma, the stables, and tunnels, was in a state of advanced deterioration, principally as a result of water infiltration. The report concluded that deterioration was due to the inappropriate use of building systems and products, improper repairs and maintenance, the failure of original detailing, the inadequate mixing of components, and deterioration due to the end of material cycles.21 A series of investigations were initiated, including research into the composition of Roman Stone, with the intent of replicating the materials. According to Hazell, the building was in worse condition than expected when work began. In an interview in 2005, he stated, “Some sections are so damaged you can push them over with your hands … There was danger of imminent collapse. After our first inspection, we put up caution tape immediately. Amazingly, nobody was hurt by falling debris.”22 In the restoration master plan, Hazell explained that the issues with the exterior could have started in the 1980s when the city had the outside walls coated with Portland cement and painted over in latex in order to delay proper maintenance. This paint and the protective coat trapped moisture inside the blocks, and when it froze, it expanded and broke up the cast stone.23 The report advocated that stabilization and restoration should occur immediately and would cost over $16 million.24 The city started the emergency repairs in 1998 and closed off parts of the exterior for security purposes while pursuing funding. It then embarked on a seven-year restoration plan, beginning in 2003 and concluding in 2011, with a $20

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million exterior renovation program. When renovation started, city revenues from leasing Casa Loma were redirected to the project, but more was needed.25 In 2006, additional improvements were undertaken by Hazell’s firm, resulting in a sevenphase restoration plan. Between 2001 and 2010, six phases totalling $18 million were completed.26 The city had provided the funds for the restoration process throughout the Casa Loma operation, although in 2012 an additional $3.5 million was essential to complete the last phase.27 A city-appointed committee was created to suggest ways to enhance the castle and to determine if the Kiwanis Club should continue to operate it. The Casa Loma Advisory Committee (clac), comprising seven citizen members and two councillors, was formed in June 2004. The intention of the clac resolution was to create a heritage district combining Casa Loma with the City Archives and Spadina House to create the Story of Toronto in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Moreover, clac stated in its report that Casa Loma needed independent governance.28 Many were not in favour of the Kiwanis Club running Casa Loma, and it was proposed that the city open the opportunity to others. As clac chair Ron Kante opined, “The castle has been neglected for too long. There are varying views on what to do, but many think it could be better. There are many ways of adding to the tourist experience. The Kiwanis Club is doing what the City asked them to do, but the City should be asked to do more. The city really should be doing a better job with sites like Casa Loma, but running a historic site is a challenge. We intend to propose changes to improve the operation and draw of the castle.”29 Regardless of disagreements, the Kiwanis Club lease continued for a further five years until 2006 and then was extended for another two years. In 2008, after clac evaluated the club’s proposal, the committee advised the city to take over the castle.30 The report pointed to the lack of a governing body that could report to the citizens of Toronto. Kiwanis rejected the report, affronted by its claims of mismanagement. The committee also questioned why the Kiwanis Club gave a large percentage of the site’s profits to charity instead of reinvesting more of the profits in the castle.31 Finally, clac pointed out that the club failed to take any responsibility for the deterioration of the castle. While it was the city’s responsibility to maintain and repair the exterior – the club had only to care for the interior – it was a problem in the eyes of the clac that the club had not taken the initiative to repair the exterior, which would have demonstrated its commitment to Casa Loma. To alleviate such issues, the committee thus recommended that there

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should be one body operating the castle as a whole, suggesting the oversight of a city trust and the reception of offers from competitive candidates.32 The council’s executive committee decided to leave the Kiwanis Club in charge of Casa Loma for another twenty years, but the arrangement did not last long. clac reported that Torontonians were not visiting the castle and criticized the club’s governance for the lack of attendance. The club took on all of the clac recommendations, including forging stronger links with the community, drawing in more visitors, adding a high-end restaurant, and creating new exhibits, among other initiatives. It also worked with the non-profit consultant group Lord Cultural Resources to develop a plan to implement the new vision for Casa Loma, proposing to enhance heritage programming, improve visitor amenities, and change the governance by including city representatives, local community representatives, and business leaders on the Kiwanis Board of Trustees. Furthermore, the club asked the city to restructure its financial arrangement to assist with the implementation of the vision. After all, the city needed to maintain the revenue stream that was then funding the exterior restoration project.33 A few years after the city granted the club a new lease, another dispute arose. The city demanded that Richard Wozenilek, chairman of Casa Loma’s board of trustees, resign due to allegations of a conflict of interest – Wozenilek had awarded to himself legal work that the city claimed amounted to over $200,000.34 The board denied the allegations and refused to remove Wozenilek. The city then cancelled the Kiwanis Club’s lease and decided to operate Casa Loma for a few years itself until finding a suitable company to take it over.35 However, the Kiwanis Club would not leave empty-handed: to dissolve the agreement with the club, the city had to make certain concessions, paying the club approximately $1.45 million in exchange for certain artifacts and the rights to some trademarks associated with the castle, including the Casa Loma name and the term “Toronto’s Majestic Castle.”36

“under new management” After the Kiwanis Club vacated, the Toronto City Council created the Casa Loma Corporation to manage operations until future ownership and its management direction could be determined. The corporation worked as an interim entity with a single shareholder: the City of Toronto. The city operated the castle from 2011 to

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2013, and during this period the corporation decided to continue with seasonal programming. It did not, however, invest in new strategies but was more focused on creating steady revenue until new management for the castle could be found. In addition, to insure the operation of Casa Loma, the corporation’s primary mandate was to determine an appropriate future for the site. In 2012, they organized a consulting team – hlt Advisory (Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism), cbre commercial real state (Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis), and heritage architect Philip Goldsmith – to undertake a proposal for the possible future options at Casa Loma.37 The team conducted several consultations with Casa Loma tenants and neighbours, city officials, and the Toronto tourist industry, as well as heritage and cultural experts. According to the team’s assessment, Casa Loma’s business model had evolved over the past years of continuous Kiwanis operations. The model consisted of heritage attraction, daytime admission, programming, a gift shop, café, parking, special events including renting the castle for private functions such as weddings and corporate events, and use as a setting for television programs, films, and photography. The consulting group’s evaluation suggested that for the past decades Casa Loma had not been considered a priority for either interested party. The Kiwanis Club, as a charity, saw it as a funding source for its work, and the City of Toronto was only a partially engaged landlord. As a result, minimal investment has been made in Casa Loma’s upkeep, undermining its full potential as a tourist attraction and unique event venue and its ability to adapt to new ideas and to generate revenue for reinvestment in the site. A two-stage process was adopted to select new management to take over the site. Of the five qualified respondents, Liberty Entertainment Group was selected.38 Founded in 1986 by Nick and Pat Di Donato, Liberty Entertainment Group now owns and operates fifteen properties in Canada and the United States, including some of Toronto’s premier special-event facilities, restaurants, and nightclubs. As part of the agreement, the heritage house would continue to include a space reserved for the Queen’s Own Rifles and the Girl Guides of Canada, to complement the history of the house and its patrons.39 The qor museum’s permanent location remained on the third floor and the Girl Guides of Canada exhibit stayed in Lady Pellatt’s suite.40 Liberty proposed an investment of significant capital of about $7 million to improve the building’s interior (figs 9.2 and 9.3).41 Air conditioning was a necessity not only for visitors and private-event guests but also for the preservation of inte-

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riors and artifacts. The lease revenue would help the city (which continued to be responsible for the exterior) to complete the restoration plan. Phase 8 of the restoration saw work completed on the south wing and Norman Tower in 2014– 15.42 Following the city’s directions, Liberty added the high-end Blue Blood Steakhouse (fig. 9.4) on the ground floor in 2017. The Oak Room, billiard and smoking rooms, and wine cellar were converted into the restaurant, incorporating many of the main features of the rooms, including the ceiling and oak panelling. Liberty also restored and refurbished the original wine cellar. According to Bill Freeman, it is the oldest wine cellar in Toronto.43

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In 2005, an article by Jennifer Lewington in the Globe and Mail maintained that it was time to release the castle from its clichéd identity as “Sir Henry’s folly” and shift the perspective to acknowledge the house as the significant Edwardian mansion that it is.44 Casa Loma’s history, as recounted in this book – before and after becoming a tourist attraction – reflects many of the economic, social, and administrative changes that defined Toronto and (particularly relevant) the changes in the theory and practice of cultural heritage management. Cultural organizations shifted from an object-based approach, focusing on acquisition, conservation, and display with an educational aim, to a visitor-based approach, emphasizing enjoyment and learning. Typical of many museums, tourist attractions, and cultural heritage sites, Casa Loma has now become a multi-purpose facility, and the dialogue between the house and its public has changed. Through diverse functions – as cafés and restaurants, event spaces, museums, and shops – the very definition of a heritage site such as Casa Loma is in flux. Irina van Aalts and Inez Boogaarts have shown how today’s museums have adapted to cater to the wishes of visitors, where consumption is the primary mode of behaviour. They describe the museum as a “cultural supermarket,” a designation that also applies to heritage sites like Casa Loma.45 To attract visitors and provide them with better experiences, museums have started to adopt new technologies that change how museums engage with their audiences.46 Casa Loma has been engaging visitors with seasonal theme programming, from Halloween Legends of Horror to Santa Claus visits to the castle for the month of December to the medieval-themed

Casa Loma, 1970 to the Present

Figure 9.2 Lady Pellatt’s suite, 2014.

Imagine Dragons for March break. Summer programing has included Soul in the City, Symphony in the Gardens, and Comedy Night. Liberty Entertainment Group has not only committed to preserving Casa Loma for posterity but has also modernized its methodology as a heritage site, moving from a conventional museum/ tourist attraction with passive visitors to an immersive experience. In partnership with the Secret City Adventures Company, which produces themed theatrical escape rooms and games, Liberty created the Casa Loma Escape Game Series. One

279

280

of the games is in partnership with the cbc Murdoch Mysteries television show, Murdoch Mysteries Escape Game: The Secret of Station No. 4. Every game is connected with an aspect of the castle, from its medieval revival style to the secret contributions of Casa Loma during the Second World War. Van Aalts and Boogaarts believe that cultural institutions now must create spectacular, attractive, interactive, and expensive exhibits. Whether they like it or not, museums have become part of the entertainment industry, and cultural agents are taking part in what Guy Debord back in 1967 called the “Society of the Spectacle.”47 In many respects, Casa Loma is a suitable site for such fantastical historicism, from Victorian-era recreations to holiday celebrations to sci-fi and medievalist fantasy. As this book has shown, the house’s meanings have been unstable from its inception, and this instability of meaning has seemingly only increased in the course of its history. That instability can be charted in terms of patronage (a great financier

Casa Loma, 1970 to the Present

Figure 9.3 Opposite Lady Pellatt’s sitting room, 2014. Figure 9.4 Left BlueBlood Steakhouse, 2017.

or an egotistical dreamer who got what he deserved), style (Scottish Baronial, French, Canadian), and function (private home, hotel, dance venue, house museum, military museum, city-owned entertainment complex). That instability of meaning has allowed the house to function in various capacities in the course of its history and allows it now to be the setting for a range of cultural practices and celebrations in which Torontonians see and enact their own heritage.

281

ma rce l a tor res

notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

282

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Simon, Participatory Museum, 39. Marinescu, “Museum between Education and Entertainment,” 185. Van Aalts and Boogaarts, “From Museum to Mass Entertainment,” 197. Hannigan, Fantasy City, 98–9. Marinescu, “Museum between Education and Entertainment,” 185. Hannigan, Fantasy City, 98–9; see also Van Aalts and Boogaarts, “From Museum to Mass Entertainment,” 197. Myzelev, “Toronto’s Casa Loma,” 171–2. Government of Ontario, Ontario Heritage Act. Shipley, “Heritage Designation and Property Values,” 83–100. Schulte, Preserving Canada’s Heritage, 9–10. Mark Maloney, “The Curious Case of Chorley Park,” Toronto Star, 28 July 2007. Ibid. Ontario Heritage Trust, Notice of Passing By-Law No. 545-87, 1987. Ibid. Ontario Heritage Trust, Notice of Passing By-Law No. 546-87, 1987, https://www.heritage trust.on.ca/en/oha/details/file?id=3766. Ministry of Culture, Changes to the Ontario Heritage Act, 1–2. Economic Development, Culture, and Tourism, Report of the Casa Loma Advisory Committee St Paul’s – Ward 21 & 22, 2–3. hlt Advisory, Philip Goldsmith Architects, and cbre Hotels, “Future Operation for Casa Loma,” Proposal and Evaluation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2012, 4–5,19, 25, 35, 52–4. Hazell, Restoration Master Plan for Casa Loma, 1–2. Ibid. Ibid. Christopher Hume, “How a Casa Crumbles: Dusty Effort to Restore Tourist Magnet,” Toronto Star, 9 July 2005. Ibid. Hazell, Restoration Master Plan, section 2: 3 Report of the Casa Loma Advisory Committee St Paul’s – Wards 21 & 22, 2 hlt Advisory, Philip Goldsmith Architects, and cbre Hotels, “Future Operation,” 19. Ibid. Report of the Casa Loma Advisory Committee St Paul’s – Wards 21 & 22, 4–5. Hume, “How a Casa Crumbles.”

Casa Loma, 1970 to the Present

30 31 32 33

Report of the Casa Loma Advisory Committee St Paul’s – Wards 21 & 22, 8. James Cowan, “Casa Loma Stuck in the Past, Panel Says,” National Post, 1 June 2006. hlt Advisory, Philip Goldsmith Architects, and cbre Hotels, “Future Operation,” 52–4. Lord Cultural Resources, “Executive Summary,” in Kiwanis Club of Casa Loma – Casa Loma Day-Visitor Experience Concept (Toronto: Lord Cultural Resources, 2006), 1–2. 34 David Rider, “Kiwanis Club Defies the City in Casa Loma Dispute,” Toronto Star, 3 August 2010. 35 Kelly Grant, “Kiwanis Rejects City’s Demand to Fire Casa Loma Chair,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 3 August 2010. 36 General Manager of Economic Development and Culture, Ex6.7 – Casa Loma Transition Staff Report Action Required to the Executive Committee on May 9, 2011, 2. 37 hlt Advisory, Philip Goldsmith Architects, and cbre Hotels, “Future Operation,” 4–5. 38 Board of Casa Loma Corporation, Ex35.2 – Confidential Attachment 1 – Confidential Board Report on Negotiation Results Made Public on July 5, 2016, 1. 39 hlt Advisory, Philip Goldsmith Architects, and cbre Hotels, “Future Operation,” 35. 40 In 2001, it was relocated to a more suitable area in connection to Lady Pellatt, the left side of Lady Pellatt’s closet. 41 Liberty Entertaiment Group, “Proposal for Casa Loma as a Heritage Attraction and Special Event Venue,” 11. 42 City of Toronto, Acting director, Purchasing and Materials Management, Award of Tender No. 299–2013 to Clifford Restoration Ltd. for Phase 8 Structural Restoration of Casa Loma South Wing and Norman Tower, To Bid Committee, BD172.7, 6 March 2014, 2–4. 43 Freeman, Casa Loma, 43. 44 Jennifer Lewington, “Casa Loma’s Identity Crisis,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 4 June 2005. 45 Van Aalts and Boogaarts, “From Museum to Mass Entertainment,” 197. 46 Komarac, Ozretic-Dosen, and Skare, “Managing Edutainment and Perceived Authenticity of Museum Visitor Experience,” 160. 47 Debord, Society of the Spectacle.

283

9 Figures

0.1 Spadina Road, Dupont Road Subway looking north, 23 March 1915. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1231, item 1362. 2 0.2 Ground floor plan, Casa Loma. era Architects. 5 0.3 Great Hall with view towards balcony off Sir Henry Pellatt’s bedroom, ca. 2001. Photo: Peter Coffman. 6 0.4 Dining room, Casa Loma, ca. 1914. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4056. 7 0.5 Ground floor corridor, Casa Loma, view west, ca. 1914. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4127. 8 0.6 Palm Room (conservatory), Casa Loma, 8 September 2020. Thomas1313, Wikimedia Commons. 9 0.7 Sir Edmund Wyly Grier, Brigadier General Sir Henry M. Pellatt, cvo – Eighth Commanding Officer, 1901–1912 and Honorary Colonel, 1929–1939, oil on canvas, 43” x 30”. Queen’s Own Rifles Museum, Casa Loma. Photo: Christopher Lawson. 11 0.8 The Pellatts in the logia of Casa Loma, looking onto its grounds. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, series 2226, file 2. 11 0.9 Lady Pellatt, Sir Henry, son Reginald and his wife, Marjorie, served by a maid outside the “Hunting Lodge,” ca. 1911. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, series 2226, file 4. 13 0.10 Members of the Ontario Horticultural Association pose in front of Casa Loma stables, ca. 1906–1914. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1568, item 401. 14

fi g ures

0.11 Sir Henry Pellatt in Queen’s Own Rifles uniform and Mohawk clothing, cne Grandstand. June 1910. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4012. 15 0.12 Pellatt revisiting Casa Loma in 1937. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4014. 18 0.13 View of arch on Bay Street, Toronto, celebrating royal visit of the future King George V. Stereograph, M.H. Zahner, 1901. Toronto Public Library. 21 0.14 Postcard of Traders Bank Building, Toronto. Warwick Bros. & Rutter, 1910. Toronto Public Library. 23 0.15 William Nassau McKendry, Cobalt silver statue of Casa Loma, ca. 1915. Private collection. 25 0.16 Passengers exiting sightseeing bus at Casa Loma, 1962. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1567, series 648. 25 0.17 Jim Foster, “Garden’s Glory to Bloom Again at Casa Loma,” Toronto Star, 27 June 1988. Toronto Public Library. 27

286

1.1 Map of Davenport Ridge with estates marked. era Architects. 33 1.2 Map of Toronto’s elite Victorian and Edwardian neighbourhoods. era Architects. 35 1.3 Henry Pellatt’s town house, Sherbourne Street, Toronto, 1902. Canadian Architect and Builder. 39 1.4 Page spread from Toronto, a City of Beautiful Homes, featuring residences of Ambrose J. Small, Mrs. T. Eaton, W.S. Dinnick, and Albert Gooderham, 1910. 39 1.5 Rathnelly, south façade, ca. 1897. Toronto Reference Library 979-10. 42 1.6 Oaklands, north façade, June 2018. Photo: David Winterton. 42 1.7 Glen Edyth, south and east facades with corner tower, 1912. Mike Filey, More Toronto Sketches, 58. 42 1.8 Looking northwest from Casa Loma tower, view of Spadina House and estate, with Ardwold beyond to the right, 1915. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4135. 44 1.9 Spadina House, 1912. City of Toronto Museums, 1982.7.3221. 45 1.10 Ground floor plan of Spadina. era Architects. 45 1.11 East façade of Benvenuto in winter, ca. 1890s. Toronto Reference Library, 964-7-321. 47 1.12 West façade of Benvenuto, 1916. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1548, series 393, item 13220. 48 1.13 Ground floor plan of Benvenuto. era Architects. 48 1.14 Great Hall at Benvenuto, 1890. Toronto Reference Library, 971-25-5. 49 1.15 Dining room at Benvenuto, 1890. Toronto Reference Library, 971-25-10. 50 1.16 Aerial view of Ardwold estate, 1919. Archives of Ontario, F-229-308-0-2254. 51

fi g ures

1.17 Ground floor plan, Ardwold. era Architects. 53 1.18 Great Hall at Ardwold, 1918. Archives of Ontario, F 229-308-0-2263. 54 1.19 Music room at Ardwold, 1918. Archives of Ontario, F 229-308-0-2263. 55 1.20 Dining room at Ardwold, 1918. Archives of Ontario, F 229-308-0-2263. 55 1.21 View from Ardwold, looking south to gardens and pergola with city behind. Archives of Ontario, F 229-308-0-2262. 56 1.22 Wells Hill, south façade, with lawn. Job 0672-81, Olmsted Archives, Frederick Law Olmsted, nhs, nps. 57 1.23 Lenwil, entry at north façade. era Architects. 59 1.24 Ground floor plan, Lenwil. era Architects. 60 1.25 Fireplace in double-storey Great Room, Lenwil. era Architects. 61 1.26 City encroaching on Benvenuto, 1930. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 10006. 62 2.1 Erskine Presbyterian Church, Caer Howell Street at Simcoe Street, Toronto, 1878. E.J. Lennox monograph. 71 2.2 Bond Street Congregational Church, Bond Street at Dundas Street East, Toronto, 1878–79. E.J. Lennox monograph. 71 2.3 Residences for Mrs Bilton, Gerrard Street East, Toronto, 1882–83. E.J. Lennox monograph. 72 2.4 Clarke Residence, Jarvis Street, Toronto, 1882–83. Toronto Public Library, Baldwin Collection of Canadiana, Pictures-R-3690. 73 2.5a, b Clarke residence, Jarvis Street, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing of basement and ground floor plan, 1882. Archives of Ontario, fonds C43-1. 74–5 2.6 Residence of Hart Massey, 515 Jarvis Street, Toronto, additions, 1883 and 1886. Massey Family fonds, Library and Archives Canada, PA-073567. 76 2.7 Office Building for Massey Harris Company, King Street West at Massey Street, Toronto, 1883–85. E.J. Lennox monograph. 76 2.8 Fred Victor Mission, Queen Street East at Jarvis Street, Toronto, 1892–94. E.J. Lennox monograph. 77 2.9 Massey mausoleum, Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto, 1890–94. E.J. Lennox monograph. 78 2.10 Manning Arcade, King Street West, Toronto, 1884–85. E.J. Lennox monograph. 79 2.11 Manning Chambers, Queen Street East at Terauley Street, Toronto, 1895–1900. E.J. Lennox monograph. 80

287

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2.12 Municipal and County Buildings, Toronto; interior details by the Toronto Fence and Ornamental Iron Works Manufacturers, 1898. Canadian Architect and Builder 11, no. 1 (1898): 24. 83 2.13 King Edward Hotel, King Street East, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, detail of two upper storeys in terra cotta as amended for new King Edward Hotel, January 1902. Archives of Ontario, fonds 43-31-0-0-5. 84 2.14 Power House for the Electrical Development Company, Niagara Falls, 1903–08. Toronto Society of Architects exhibition catalogue, 1909. 85 2.15 Toronto Western Hospital, Bathurst Street, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing detail of centre bay, July 1901. Archives of Ontario, fond 43-69-0-0-10. 87 2.16 St Paul’s Anglican Church, Bloor Street East, Toronto. E.J. Lennox preliminary sketch, July 1909. Private collection. 89

288

3.1 Advertisement for the Roman Stone Company Ltd, incorporating E.J. Lennox’s drawing of the garden wall around the Caretaker’s Lodge at Casa Loma, 1905. Lennox monograph. 95 3.2 Postcard, Sir H.M. Pellatt’s Stables at “Casa Loma.” Toronto Public Library, pcr-2152. 96 3.3 Workmen’s cottages, Col. H.M. Pellatt’s Estate, Davenport Road, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, June 1905. Archives of Ontario, fonds 43-62-0-0-2. 97 3.4 Residence of James B. Boustead, Bloor Street, Toronto, 1891–92. Toronto Architectural Eighteen Club, Second Annual Exhibition catalogue, 1902. 97 3.5 View of Casa Loma Gardens, 1910. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4099. 98 3.6 Plan of the Caretaker’s Lodge, E.J. Lennox architectural drawing. Archives of Ontario, fonds C 43-62-0-0-55. 99 3.7 View of Casa Loma Stables Complex, 1913. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4101. 100 3.8 Scale details of stable, coach house, etc., for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, east cart shed entrance, June 1906. Archives of Ontario, C43-62-0-0-9. 102 3.9 Scale details of stable, coach house, etc., for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, driveway entrance, June 1906. Archives of Ontario, C43-62-0-0-10. 103 3.10a, b Sketch plan of new conservatories and alterations to greenhouses; also new glass roof to present potting house for Col. Sir H.M. Pellatt, Well’s Hill. E.J. Lennox, ground plan, 13 February 1909. Archives of Ontario, C43-62-0-0-20, C43-62-0-0-21. 104–5

fi g ures

3.11 Palm Room, Sir H.M. Pellatt Mansion, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawing, June 1913. Archives of Ontario, fond 43-62-0-0-35. 111 3.12 Bronze door between corridor and Palm Room, Sir H.M. Pellatt mansion, Toronto. E.J. Lennox architectural drawings, December 1913. Archives of Ontario, fond 43-62-0-0-37. 111 4.1 Russell Room, office of Sir Henry Pellatt, Casa Loma, ca. 1913. City of Toronto Archives, fond 1244, item 4063. 120 4.2 Helmet from the Casa Loma collection of arms and armour. Mary V.R. Hand, Drawings of the Sir Henry Pellatt Collection of Arms and Armour, rom fonds. 123 4.3 Swords from the Casa Loma collection of arms and armour. Mary V.R. Hand, Drawings of the Sir Henry Pellatt Collection of Arms and Armour, rom fonds. 123 4.4 Bedroom of Sir Henry Pellatt, Casa Loma, ca. 1917. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4061. 125 4.5 Napoleon or Oak Drawing Room, Casa Loma. Canadian Homes and Gardens no. 4, May 1927, 24. 125 4.6 Equestrian statue of Edward VII by Remington Clarke, formerly at Casa Loma. Jenkins Auctioneers, Catalogue of the Valuable Contents of Casa Loma. 128 4.7 John Leech, Our friend Mr Noddy Has a Day with the Brookside Harriers – with His Usual Prudence He Gets a Horse Accustomed to the Hills. Satiric print, 1865. Wikimedia Commons. 128 4.8 Paul Peel, The Shepherdess. Oil on canvas, 1892. Art Gallery of Ontario. 129 4.9 Casa Loma sale, 23 June 1924. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1266, item 2959. 131 5.1 Military function at Casa Loma, 1920. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4048. 139 5.2 Girl Guides inspection, Casa Loma, 1914. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4050. 141 5.3 View of southern grounds of Casa Loma, between 1914 and 1934. City of Toronto Archives, Alexander W. Galbraith fonds, 1568. 143 5.4 Gardens, Casa Loma, ca. 1914. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4081. 144 5.5 Lady Pellatt and group in Casa Loma greenhouses, ca. 1914. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4021. 145 5.6 Palm Room or conservatory, Casa Loma, ca. 1915. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4074. 146

289

fi g ures

5.7 Casa Loma library, ca. 1914. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4124. 150 5.8 View into main dining room from octagonal, “intimate” dining room, ca. 1914. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4059. 154 5.9 Breakfast room, Casa Loma, ca. 1917. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4058. 155 5.10 Pellatt in the conservatory of 559 Sherbourne Street, ca. 1905. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, series 2226, file 3. 156 5.11 Lady Pellatt’s suite, Casa Loma, 1917. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4132. 158 5.12 Lady Pellatt’s bedroom, Casa Loma, 1917. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4064. 159 5.13 Sir Henry Pellatt’s bathroom, Casa Loma, ca. 1917. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4062. 160

290

6.1 Tom Thomson, Burns’ Blessing, 1906. Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound, Ontario. 173 6.2 Medievalizing corbel from upper hall at Casa Loma. Collection of the author. 175 6.3 Medievalizing corbel from upper hall at Casa Loma. Collection of the author. 175 6.4 Queen’s Own Rifles heraldry, stables, Casa Loma. Collection of the author. 177 6.5 Imperial Society of Knights trophy presented to Sir Henry Pellatt, 1912. Queen’s Own Rifles Museum, Toronto. 177 6.6 Skibo Castle, Scotland. Wikimedia Commons. 181 6.7 Hatley Castle, Victoria, bc. Wikimedia Commons. 181 6.8 Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Horace Walpole, 1756, formerly at Casa Loma. Oil on canvas, 50⬙ ⫻ 40 1/2⬙. Art Gallery of Ontario. 186 6.9 Joseph Mallard William Turner, View of Fonthill Abbey, ca. 1800, formerly at Casa Loma. Musée des Beaux Arts de Montreal. 187 6.10 Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, London. Collection of the author. 188 6.11 Fonthill Abbey, view of the west and north fronts, from John Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill, London 1823. Collection of the author. 189 6.12 Balmoral Castle, Scotland. Collection of the author. 190 6.13 Balmoral Castle, Scotland. Collection of the author. 192 6.14 Casa Loma, Toronto, showing the exterior of the conservatory or Palm Room. Collection of the author. 192 6.15 Pellatt family arms on the south façade of Casa Loma. Collection of the author. 193 6.16 Carved military decoration with Union Jacks on the South Front of Casa Loma. Collection of the author. 194

fi g ures

6.17 Unicorn statue on exterior of the stables at Casa Loma. Collection of the author. 195 6.18 Lion statue, on exterior of the stables at Casa Loma. Collection of the author. 195 7.1 William Sparling, design for addition to Casa Loma, 1926. Published in Toronto Daily Star, 1 May 1926; republished 9 January 1999. Toronto Public Library. 205 7.2 Christian Jank, Ideal design for Neuschwanstein Castle, 1869. Gouache. Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds München. 206 7.3 Casa Loma Hotel, from the north, 16 February 1928. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1266, item 12724. 208 7.4 Guest room, Casa Loma Hotel, 1927. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4075. 209 7.5 The Orange Blossoms on the bandstand in the dining room, Casa Loma, 1927. From Jack Litchfield, The Casa Loma Hotel and the Casa Loma Orchestra. Photo: Betty Minaker Pratt, Grinnell Estate. 213 7.6a, b Glenn Gray promotional photo. Kenney Sergeant, Glen Gray and Pee Wee Hunt outside Casa Loma, 1939. From Jack Litchfield, The Casa Loma Hotel and the Casa Loma Orchestra. Photo: Joe Showler. 213 7.7 Sparling, Martin, and Forbes, design for new east wing for Casa Loma, 1928. “New Wing Planned for Casa Loma,” Toronto Daily Star, 29 June 1928. Toronto Public Library. 214 7.8 A.W. Harris, design for new east wing for Casa Loma, 1929. “Casa Loma Hotel Re-opens August 1st,” Toronto Daily Star, 28 June 1929. Toronto Public Library. 217 7.9 Advertisement for the second iteration of the Casa Loma Hotel. Toronto Daily Star, 30 July 1929. Toronto Public Library. 219 7.10 Guest room, Casa Loma Hotel, presumably from the second iteration of the hotel. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4076. 219 7.11 Lady Pellatt’s suite transformed into a billiard room. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4067. 220

291 8.1 Casa Loma open for tours, ca. 1937. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4120. 235 8.2 Lt-Gov. Herbert Alexander Bruce and his wife, Angela (née Hall), at the opening of Casa Loma, 1937. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4148. 237 8.3 Visitors gaze at fireplace in Great Hall, ca. 1937. Notice guard seated on the right. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4069. 238 8.4 Photograph of Henry Pellatt in Kiwanis brochure Casa Loma, Canada’s Famous Castle, 1957. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 471, series 2226, file 5: Staff members, tourists, and misc. photos after 1937. 1937–[196–?]. 242

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8.5 Sir Henry Pellatt signing the guestbook during his visit to Casa Loma at the invitation of the Kiwanis Club, August 1937. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 1244, item 4013. 245 8.6 Visitors in the Grand Hall at Casa Loma, ca. 1949. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 471, series 2226, file 5: Staff members, tourists, and misc. photos after 1937, 1937–[196–?]. 247 8.7 “Civic Neglect,” January 1952. Newspaper clipping, undated, City of Toronto Archives, Sir Henry Pellatt’s scrapbook, fonds 471, series 2225, file 11, 1906–1957. 248 8.8 Dance competition, Casa Loma, ca.1960s. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 471, series 2226, file 7: Kiwanis Club, banquets, new years and other activities, vol. 1, 1937–1986. 250 8.9 Casa Loma tour guides, ca. 1960s. Newspaper clipping, undated. City of Toronto Archives, Sir Henry Pellatt’s scrapbook, fonds 471, series 2225, file 11, 1906–1957. 254 8.10 Two children, Anne Winters and Kevin Bothwell, standing in the full-body-surround shower, 1963. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 471, series 2226, file 5: Staff members, tourists, and misc. photos after 1937, 1937–[196–?]. 255 8.11 Postcard of Casa Loma, aerial view, ca. 1949. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 471, series 2226, file 5: Staff members, tourists, and misc. photos after 1937, 1937–[196–?]. 257 8.12 Casa Loma, southern exposure. Undated booklet of postcards of Casa Loma, ca. late 1930s. City of Toronto Archives, fonds 471, series 2226, file 5: Staff members, tourists, and misc. photos after 1937, 1937–[196–?]. 257 8.13 A selection of mid-twentieth-century souvenirs from Casa Loma. Private collection. 258

292

9.1 Castle exterior, 2014. Photo: Larry Koester, Wikimedia Commons. 269 9.2 Lady Pellatt’s suite, 2014. Photo: Lorne Chapman, Casa Loma-Liberty Entertainment Group. 279 9.3 Lady Pellatt’s sitting room, 2014. Photo: Lorne Chapman, Casa Loma-Liberty Entertainment Group. 280 9.4 BlueBlood Steakhouse, 2017. Photo: Paula Wilson, Casa Loma-Liberty Entertainment Group. 281

9 Bibliography

pr imary sources Archival Collections Archives of Casa Loma Archives of Ontario City of Toronto Archives Olmsted Archives Royal Ontario Museum (rom) University of Waterloo Library, Special Collections

Newspapers Chicago Tribune Evening Telegraph (Toronto) Globe (Toronto) Globe and Mail (Toronto) Mail and Empire (Toronto) Toronto Daily Star / Toronto Star Toronto Mail Toronto Star Weekly

biblio g r aphy

Toronto Telegram Toronto World Weekly Globe and Mail (Toronto) West Toronto Weekly

Periodicals American Art News Canadian Architect and Builder Canadian Homes and Gardens Canadian Magazine Construction Electrical News MacLean’s Magazine Saturday Night

Catalogues Catalogue of Highly Important Old and Modern Pictures and Drawings, Fine English and French Furniture, Engravings, Early English, Chinese and Continental Porcelain, Aubusson Tapestry and Works of Art: Chester D. Massey, Sir William Mackenzie, Sir Edmund Walker collections. Toronto: Jenkins Art Auction Toronto 1927. Catalogue of Pictures by the Glasgow Painters, Toronto Art Museum 1906. Catalogue of the Valuable Contents of Casa Loma, Toronto, Ontario. Toronto: Jenkins Art Galleries, 1924. J.L. Mott Iron Works. Imperial Porcelain Lavatories. J.L. Mott: New York, 1900.

0ther sources

294 Adam, G. Mercer. Toronto Old and New. Toronto: Mail Printing Company, 1891. Adams, Annmarie. “Eden Smith and the Canadian Domestic Revival.” Urban History Review/Révue d’histoire urbaine 21, no. 2 (March 1993): 104–15. Adams, Annmarie, and Silvia Spampinato. “Carrollcroft as Women’s Space: An Architectural History.” Journal of Eastern Townships Studies, no. 35 (2010): 21–48. Adams, C. Kingsley, and W.S. Lewis. “Portraits of Horace Walpole.” Walpole Society, no. 42 (1968–70): 1–34. Adilman, Sid. “Toronto’s Casa Loma Is the Private Preserve of 115 Members of the West

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Kiwanis Club: If You Are Nice to Them, They’ll Show You a Few Rooms.” Toronto Life (1970): 36–7. Alexander, Kristine. “The Girl Guide Movement and Imperial Internationalism during the 1920s and 1930s.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2, no. 1 (2009): 37–63. Anderson, Benedict. “Staging Antimodernism in the Age of High Capitalist Nationalism.” In Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, edited by Lynda Jessup, 97–103. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Armstrong, Chris. Making Toronto Modern: Architecture and Design, 1895–1975. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. Arthur, Eric. Toronto: No Mean City. 3rd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Aslet, Clive. The Edwardian Country House: A Social and Architectural History. Hampstead: Francis Lincoln, 2012. Baden-Powell, Agnes. The Handbook for Girl Guides, Or, How Girls Can Help to Build Up the Empire. London: Thomas Nelson, 1912. Ballantyne, Andrew, and Andrew Law. Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Bassnett, Sarah. Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. Berger, Carl. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Best, John C. Thomas Baker McQuesten, Public Works, Politics and Imagination. Hamilton: Corinth Press, 1991. Billings, R.W. Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland. Edinburgh: E. Saunders & Co., 1845–53. Blank, Sean. “The City at Their Feet: Documenting Suburban Estate Development on Toronto’s Davenport Escarpment.” MSc thesis, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2015. Boetzkes, Amanda, and Aron Vinegar. Heidegger and the Work of Art History. Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2014. Bothwell, Robert, Ian Drummond, and John English. Canada, 1900–1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Bremner, G.A., ed. Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.

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9 Contributors

sean blank is a member of the heritage planning team at era Architects, where he works primarily on the firm’s portfolio of private residential projects. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto, a diploma in Heritage Conservation from the Willowbank School of Restoration Arts, and a master of science degree in Historic Preservation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His thesis explored the history of estate development on Toronto’s Davenport Hill. joan coutu is professor of art history and visual culture at the University of Waterloo. Her research concentrates on the built environment in eighteenth-century Britain and early twentieth-century Canada, focusing on space, power, and social differentiation. Her publications include Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (2006), Then and Now: Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-Century England (2015), and a co-edited volume of essays with Jon Stobart and Peter Lindfield, Politics and the English Country House, 1688–1800 (2023). matthew m. reeve is professor of art history at Queen’s University and fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (fsa). He has written widely on medieval through modern art and especially architecture, with a particular focus on Britain. His recent publications include Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole (Penn State Press, 2020),

cont r i bu tors

which won the Historians of British Art Book Prize for exemplary scholarship on the period ca. 1600–1800. marcela torres was curator of Casa Loma before becoming director of Puente Art Gallery in Rothesay, nb. She has curated exhibitions of art and material culture in Canada and Argentina. She holds a fine arts degree from the University of La Palta, Argentina, and her work has been shown in exhibitions in Argentina, Canada, and the United States. sharon vattay is an architectural historian and heritage specialist. She holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto and teaches in the Cultural Resource Management Program at the University of Victoria. Sharon is principal at gbca (Goldsmith Borgal and Company Architects) in Toronto, a firm specializing in historic restoration and adaptive reuse. michael windover is associate professor and head of Art and Architectural History at Carleton University, with cross appointments to Carleton’s Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture and School of Industrial Design. He is a historian of modern architecture, design, and material culture. His publications include Art Deco: A Mode of Mobility (2012), Seeing, Selling, and Situating Radio in Canada, 1922–1956 (2017), co-authored with Anne MacLennan, and The Routledge Companion to Art Deco (2019) co-edited with Bridget Elliott.

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david winterton is a senior associate at the heritage architecture firm era Architects Inc. in Toronto. He is a registered architect in Ontario (oaa) and New York State and a member of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (raic) and holds a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Toronto and master of architecture degree (History and Theory of Architecture program) from McGill University. Prior to joining era, he was a senior associate at Robert A. M. Stern Architects (ramsa) in New York.

9 Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Aberdeen, Lady. See Hamilton-Gordon, Ishbel Maria architectural salvage, 121, 157 Ardwold, 33, 43, 44, 46, 50–6, 109, 210. See also Eaton family Armstrong, N.A., 50 Art Gallery of Ontario, 117, 130–1 Arthur, Eric, 7, 232 Arts and Crafts architecture, 38, 39, 52, 58, 172, 232 Astor, William Waldorf, 179 Austin, Albert, 41, 44, 50 Austin, James, 40–1, 43, 63n Austin Terrace, Toronto, 95, 96, 206, 210, 270 Baden-Powell, Agnes, 140, 165n22 Baden-Powell, Lady Olave, 140, 147 Baden-Powell, Robert, 140, 147 Baldwin, Robert, 41 Baldwin, Stanley, 212, 215 Baldwin, William Warren, 41 Balmoral Castle, Scotland, 149, 176, 190, 191–3, 192 Bancroft, Ontario, 147 Bannerman, Francis, 180

Bannerman Castle, New York State, 180 Beasley, William, 246 Beckford, William, 127, 187–8 Bentley Mays, John, 175 Benvenuto, 33, 40, 42, 43–4, 46–50, 62–3, 64n9 Benvenuto Place Apartments, Toronto, 50 Berger, Carl, 22, 178, 194–5 Billet, Pierre: Avant la pêche, 119 Biltmore (mansion), Toronto, 233 Bird, Eustace, 44, 46 Black Creek Pioneer Village, 251–3, 255, 267n93 Blue Blood Steakhouse, Casa Loma, 278, 281 Blue Room Orchestra, 211 Boldt, George, 180 Boldt Castle, New York State, 180 Bond Street Congregational Church, Toronto, 70, 71 Book Cadillac Hotel, Detroit, 211, 212 Bothwell, Kevin, 255 Bothwell, William A., 235–6 Boulton, D’Arcy, Jr, 117 Boustead, James B.: residence, 96 Boym, Svetlana, 163 British Empire: and architecture, 137; 185–98; and Canadian nationalism, 19, 130, 178, 253; and

index

chivalry, 174; as cultural idea, 135, 140; dark side, 14; and fashion, 152–3; and Girl Guides, 140; and medievalism, 170; and militarism, 194–5; and new imperial movement, 19; and ornamentalism, 135–7; profit from, 33; and Toronto, 20, 22, 240, 248; versus American ideals, 20; versus modernity, 163. See also Casa Loma; Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire; Pellatt, Henry Mill Brown, A. Page, 46 Bruce, Herbert, 236; and Angela (Hall) Bruce, 237 “built unionism,” 149, 191, 193 Burgess, Cecil Scott, 197 Burke, Edmund, 81. See also Langley and Burke firm

312

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), 236 Cannadine, David, 135, 137–8 Carnegie, Andrew, 179 Carrere and Hastings, New York architects, 44–5 Carruthers, Roy, 212 Casa Loma, 40, 46, 58–60; alcohol consumption at, 211, 215, 216, 221–2, 239, 249; arms and armour collection, 121–2, 123, 142; as art gallery, 117–18, 149; auctions, 130, 131, 214, 221, 244; bathrooms, 112, 160, 161, 255; caretaker’s lodge, 96, 98, 99; carved ornament, exterior, 176, 184, 193–5; carved ornament, interior, 175; citizens’ committee, 273; and City of Toronto, 202–10, 214, 231, 236, 243, 246, 248–9, 248; city’s revenue from, 237, 248; coach house, 102, 103; community engagement in, 26, 27; and cosmopolitanism, 152, 153; cost of running, 204; and dancing, 207–12, 218, 219, 221, 237–9, 247, 249, 250, 253; derelict, 231, 232–4, 236, 243; deterioration of, 233, 273–5; designed by Pellatt, 106–7; and “edutainment,” 269–70; electrical fittings, 112–13; and exhibit space, 270, 277; Gothic style, 121, 169, 188, 189, 191; heritage designation of, 272–3; as heterotopia, 201–2; as hotel (see Casa Loma Hotel); iconicity of, 24–6; iconography of, 142; and imperialism, 136, 138, 142; and Kiwanis Club (see Kiwanis Club, West Toronto); landscape and gardens, 26, 27, 53, 98, 139–40, 142–3, 144–6; as legacy of great industrialists,

233; and modernity, 136, 169, 175; as museum, 243; and nationalism, 190, 192; and neighbours’ concerns, 202–3, 205–7, 209–11, 214, 215, 222, 236, 244; and nostalgia, 25, 136–7, 233, 258–9; as ornament, 134–68; Palm Room or conservatory, 9, 44, 101, 109–10, 111, 124, 130, 146, 146–7, 192, 193; as performative space, 136, 140–2, 151; photography at, 256; postcards of, 256, 257; proposed demolition, 203, 231, 234, 248–9; proposed road tunnel under, 260n15; proposed uses (other than as hotel), 201, 203–4, 232–4, 240–1, 243, 244, 246; restoration of, 96, 270, 273–7; and Roman stone, 273–4; sources for design, 182–94; souvenirs, 256, 258; stables, 99– 101, 102, 103, 272; support to save, 231–4, 248, 249; taxes on, 202–4, 231, 243; tourist attraction, 230, 234–42, 235, 237, 238, 247, 251–6, 254; during wartime, 237–40, 246, 265n77; workmen’s cottages, 96, 97. See also modernity; nostalgia; Queen’s Own Rifles; tourism Casa Loma Advisory Committee (clac), 273, 275–6 Casa Loma art collections: British painting and prints, 127–8; Canadian (or Anglo-Canadian) painting, 128–30; Hague School, 126–7 Casa Loma Club Ltd, 212 Casa Loma Hotel, 204–22, 205, 208, 209, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220, 236, 246; closing, 219; distinguished guests, 212 Casa Loma Orchestra, 211–12 Castle Drogo, Devon, 179–80 castles, 178–82; on Hudson River, 183; idea of, 240–1, 256–8; in film, 241 Chadwick, Vaux, 44 Charles II, King, 52 Charlford Castle, Colorado, 180 Château Frontenac, Quebec, 214 Château Laurier, Ottawa, 214 Chicago: architectural influence of, 20, 23, 78–81, 127 Chisholm, Daniel, 230 chivalry, 174–8 Chorley Park, 109, 212, 251; demolition of, 265n76, 272 City Hall, Toronto (new), 251

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Clair, René, 178 Clarke, Henry E., 72; Jarvis Street home, 72–3, 75 Cliffside, 64n9, 67 Club Esquire, Toronto, 221, 246 Cobalt, Ontario: and silver mining, 197 Cobb, Henry Ives, 83 Coffman, Peter, 148, 186–7 Cohen, Israel, of Regent Tailors, 220 Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis (cbre), 277 Coleman, Daniel, 171 Connaught, Duke and Duchess, 40 Corman, William E., 246 cosmopolitanism, 152, 153 Cox, George Albertus, 37, 83 Craigdarroch Castle, Victoria, bc, 180 Cram, Ralph Adams, 196 Crinson, Mark, 163 Currelly, Charles Trick, 121–2, 252 Currie, Arthur and Lucy, 212, 215 Dafoe, William, 234 D’Alvarez, Theodora, 215, 227nn64–5 D’Arcens, Louise, 172 Darling, Frank, 38, 40 Darling and Pearson, architects, 49, 58 Davenport Ridge, 32, 36, 38, 40, 62–3, 63n3, 201, 244 Davenport Road, 40, 41, 51, 58, 61, 106, 207 Davis, Kathleen, 178 Debord, Guy, 280 Dendy, William, 52 Dennison, William, 249 De Pencier, Nina, 57–8, 94 De Wolfe, Elsie, 160, 161 Dick, David Brash, 67 Dickinson, Peter, 50 Dionne quintuplets, 234–5, 240 Disney, Walt, 241 Don Valley Brickworks, 64n24, 65n27 Drewe, Julius, 179 Dunsmuir, James, 180 Dunsmuir, Robert, 180 Eaton, Flora McCrea, Lady Eaton, 51, 56, 134–5, 210

Eaton, John Craig, 43, 45–6, 50–2 Eaton, Mrs Timothy: residence, 39 Eaton, Timothy, 43 Eaton family, 32–4, 43, 56, 64n9 Eaton Hall, 64n9 Eatonia Brick, 65n27 Edward, Prince of Wales: 1927 visit to Toronto, 210, 212 Electrical Development Company of Ontario (edc), 81, 85, 92n37, 112 Elizabeth, Queen (wife of George VI), 236, 240 Embassy Club, Toronto, 221 Englishness, 142, 148, 151, 160 Ernescliffe apartment building, Toronto, 37 Erskine Presbyterian Church, Toronto, 70, 71 Fall of Nineveh (Hilser), 237, 262n41 Faskin, David, 85 Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, 121, 127, 183, 186–9, 187, 189 Ford, Henry, 244 Forster, John Wycliffe Lowe: portrait of Sir Henry Pellatt, 18, 242 Fort York, Toronto, 251–3, 255 Foster, Thomas, 209 Foucault, Michel: and heterotopia, 201–2, 205, 211, 240 Fred Victor Mission Building, Toronto, 77 Freehold Loan and Savings Company Office Block, Toronto, 81 Fudger, Harris Henry, 37 George, Prince, 210, 212 George V, King, 20, 21; and invitation to Pellatt to Balmoral, 15, 149, 176, 191 George VI, King, 236, 240 Ghost Goes West, The (dir. René Clair), 178–9 Gilbert Watson Orchestra, 217 Gillies, Kenneth, 247–9 Girl Guides of Canada, 139–42, 141, 147, 151, 236, 243; exhibit in Casa Loma, 270, 277. See also Pellatt, Mary, Lady Pellatt Girouard, Mark, 174 Glen Edyth, 41, 42, 64n3 Goldkette, Jean, 211, 226n51

313

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Goldsmith, Philip, 277 Gooderham, George Horace, 83, 85 Gooderham, W.H., 85 Goodman, Benny, 212 Gordon, John Campbell, 172 Gothic imagination, 148, 187 Gothic Revival style, 41, 44, 46, 66, 70, 88, 127, 137 Gothic style, 66, 169–72, 182, 186, 196, 214 Grabar, Oleg, 138 Grange, 117 Gray, Glen, 212, 213 Great Fire of 1904, Toronto, 23 Group of Seven, 21, 122, 123, 172, 174

314

Hague School, 126–7, 129, 130–2 Halttunen, Karen, 153 Hamilton-Gordon, Ishbel Maria, Lady Aberdeen, 171–2 Hand, Mary, 122, 133n17 Hanlan Hotel, Toronto Island, 71 Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, 148, 149 Harris, A.W., 216, 217 Harris, John, 157 Hart House, University of Toronto, 109 Hatfield Hall, bc, 148 Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, 148, 184 Hatley Castle, bc, 144, 180, 181 Hearst, William Randolph, 179 Henderson, Chas. M., 130–1 Hepburn, Mitchell, 234 heritage, 136; and consumption, 278; heritage management, 278; heritage preservation, 271; heritage tourism, 259; and television shows, 259 Hever Castle, Kent, 179 Highlandism, 192 Hilser, Theodore, 262n41 hlrt Advisory (Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism), 277 Holbrook and Mollington firm, 82 Horticultural Gardens (later Allan Gardens), 34 Houses of Parliament, Ottawa, 170, 196 Housser, Frederick Broughton, 122 Hoyt, Burnham, 180 Hubbard, R.H., 172

Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire (iode), 219, 239, 243 Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor, 135–6 Indo-Saracenic style, 137 Irving, William, 66, 69, 70, 71 Jackson, A.Y., 132 Janes, Simeon Henan, 32–4, 40, 42, 46–7, 63, 64n16. See also Benvenuto Jarvis, Aemilius, 83 Jarvis, Edgar Beaumont, 38, 67 Jarvis Street, 34, 37–8, 72–4, 77 Jarvis Street Baptist Church, 70 Jenkins, Brigitte, 157 Jenkins Art Auctioneers, Toronto, 16, 118, 119, 130, 157 J.L. Mott Iron Works, 112 Kalman, Harold, 8 Kawandag, 56, 64n9 Kerr, James, 46 King Edward Hotel, Toronto, 83–5, 84, 95, 216 Kingston, Ontario: birthplace of Henry Pellatt, 10; limestone, 47 Kiwanis Club, West Toronto, 230, 235–9, 241–8, 242, 259, 261n30, 269–70; lease, 246, 273, 275–6; revenue from Casa Loma, 266n80; tour guides, 241, 254 Knowles, Miles, 212–13, 215 Knox Presbyterian Church, Cannington, 70 Langley and Burke firm, 38, 67 Langley, Langley and Burke firm, 70 L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, 171 Latham, Charles: In English Homes, 150, 157, 167n54, 184 Leacock, Stephen, 28 Lennox, Edgar Edward, 61, 71 Lennox, Edward James, 4, 12, 20, 28, 33–4, 38, 40, 43, 58–60, 67–90, 94; “Builder of Toronto,” 90; death, 60; education, 68–9; mid-career, 71, 85, 144, 205; negative press, 67; opposition to Casa Loma as hotel, 206, 207, 210–11; as Orangeman, 211; and St Paul’s Church, 88. See also Lenwil Lennox, Emmeline Wilson, 60

index

Lenwil, 33, 40, 43, 58–61, 90, 94, 206 LePage, A.E., 233 Liberty Entertainment Group, 259, 277–9 Lidbury, Austin, 215 Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 219; and Liquor Act, 215 Lismer, Arthur, 172 living history sites, 251–5, 258, 267n92 Lockwood, Green, and Co., 212 Longleat House, Wiltshire, 148 Ludwig II, King, 205, 244 Lutyens, Edward, 179 Macdonald, John, 41, 63n3 Mackenzie, William, 37, 49. See also Benvenuto Maclean, John Bayne, 43, 57–8, 64n9 Maclure, Samuel, 144 Madill, H.H., 232, 233 Manning, Henderson, 78 Manning Arcade, Toronto, 79–80, 80 Manning Chambers, Toronto, 80, 81 Marchand, Marie-Éve, 159 Marylake, King City, 12, 64n9, 134, 141, 151 Massey, Charles H., 73; Jarvis Street home, 73 Massey, Hart A., 73, 77, 91n21; Jarvis Street home, 74, 76 Massey, Victor, 77. See also Fred Victor Mission Building Massey Manufacturing Company, 73–5, 76 Massey Mausoleum, Toronto, 77–8 Mathers and Haldenby firm, 58 Mayfair Club, Toronto, 221 Mayfair Mansions, Toronto, 49–50 McCausland, Robert, 24, 82, 91n29, 110 McCausland firm, 82, 91n29 McCaw, William Frederick, 69 McCaw and Lennox firm, 70–1 McGill, John, 94 McKendry, William Nassau, 25, 25, 197 McKim, Mead and White firm, 46–7 McMaster, William, 32–4, 41, 46, 63, 63n3. See also Rathnelly McQuesten, Thomas B., 240 McTavish, Newton, 176 Mechanics’ Institute of Toronto, 66, 69

medievalism, 148, 169; in Canada, 170–5; economic, 182; and Henry Pellatt, 178 Metropolitan Building, Toronto, 205 modernity, 136, 148, 162–3, 169; and chivalry, 175, in Toronto, 3, 246–55 Moseley, W.B., 213, 215, 227n60 Mulock, Marjorie, 212 Mulock, William, 212, 219, 226n51 Municipal and County Buildings, Toronto (Old City Hall), 67, 79, 81–3, 83, 85, 88, 108, 272 Murdoch Mysteries, 259, 280 museum: as experience, 268; object-based approach, 271, 267n95, 278 Myzelev, Alla, 136 Napoleon Bonaparte, 124–6 National Chorus of Toronto, 149 nationalism, Canadian, 135, 178, 185; in architecture, 38, 195, 196. See also British Empire; Pellatt, Henry National Trust (uk), 240 Neiswander, Judith, 153 Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria, Germany, 205, 206 New York City, 147, 159 Niagara Falls, Ontario, 12, 85, 86, 240 Niagara Power Station, 8, 85–6, 182, 67 Nickle, William Folger, 164n9 Nickle Resolution, 136, 212, 164n9 Nordheimer, Samuel, 41, 46, 63–4n3 Nordheimer Ravine, 46, 51, 53 “Northern myth” in Canada, 171; and Gothic, 185, 196 nostalgia, 25, 136–7, 162–4, 258–9; “restorative,” 163 Oaklands, 41, 42, 46, 62, 63n Occident Hall (Masonic Hall), Toronto, 70 Old City Hall, Toronto. See Municipal and County Buildings, Toronto Olmsted Brothers, 47, 49, 57, 144 Ontario Heritage Act, 1975 (oha), 271–3 Ontario Railway and Municipal Board, 203, 207, 210–11 Orange Blossoms Orchestra, 211–12, 213, 226n49 Orange Order in Toronto, 22–3, 200, 201, 222n2,

315

index

249–1, 252; Casa Loma as Canadian headquarters, 204 Oreskovich, Carlie, 13–14, 95–6, 138, 151 ornament, 135, 138, 160 ornamentalism, 29, 134–8, 152, 162

316

Palais Royale (Toronto), 221 Park Lots, 34 Peacock Alley, 52, 151, 167 Peel, Paul: The Shepherdess, 128–9 Pellatt, Catherine, née Welland Merritt, 17, 219, 243; death, 17, 221, 243 Pellatt, Henry Mill: anglophilia, 19, 130, 175, 178; aristocratic aspirations, 201, 210, 216, 219, 242– 5; and arms and armour collection, 121–2, 123, 180; as art collector, 118–19, 122, 124, 126–30; and new imperial movement, 14, 19, 21, 122, 135–7, 140, 152–33, 173–6, 178, 185–96; and city officials, 202–3; death, 17, 231; designer of Casa Loma, 183–4; education, 10; financial collapse, 202–4, 211; and hotel syndicate, 1929, 215–21; and hydroelectric power, 12, 37, 242; images of, 11, 13, 15, 18, 156, 242, 245; and King Township estate, 204, 216–17, 230; and knighthood 12, 94, 135–6, 140, 165n17, 176, 242, 243; marriage to Mary Dodgson, 10; marriage to Catherine Merritt, 219; and nostalgia, 170, 178; Queen’s Own Rifles, 10, 11–12, 15, 19, 138, 140, 175–6, 242; promoter of empire, 14, 19, 122, 124, 126, 130, 136, 173–5, 178, 242; rehabilitation of reputation, 241–6, 242, 245, 249; and Sherbourne Street, 37–40; Sussex origins, 170; Toronto Electric Light Company, 63; vision for Casa Loma, 134– 5. See also British Empire; Casa Loma; Lennox, Edgar James; Queen’s Own Rifles Pellatt, Henry, Sr, 10, 63n3, 64n9; Glasgow birth, 191 Pellatt, Mary, Lady Pellatt, née Dodgson, 4, 13, 14, 109, 120, 134, 135, 145, 201; aristocratic aspirations, 147–8, 151, 153; as art collector, 118; Casa Loma’s owner, 222n4; death, 17; and gardens, 144–5; and Girl Guides, 140–2, 141, 166n36, 243, 270, 270, 277; health issues, 141, 158; and imperialism, 140; interior design of Casa Loma, 120,

158; marriage to Henry Pellatt, 10; patron of iode, 219, 242–3 Pellatt and Osler firm, 10, 63n3 Pellatt family genealogy, 169–70, 191 period rooms, 157, 253, 266n91 Phillips, Nathan, 249–51, 259; and demolition, 251 Pickford, Mary, 204, 240 Picon, Antoine, 135, 138, 160 Power House, Niagara Falls. See Electrical Development Company of Ontario; Niagara Power Station prodigy house, modern, 147–8, 151–2 Prohibition era, 211, 222 Provincial Parliament Buildings, Queen’s Park, Toronto, 88 Queen Anne Revival, 108 Queen Elizabeth Way, 240 Queen’s Own Rifles (qor), 10, 11–12, 14, 15; Pellatt’s trip to England with, 19, 66, 138, 140, 175– 7, 177, 242; Regimental Museum in Casa Loma, 243, 264n65, 269–70, 277; at Toronto Industrial Exhibition, 138 Quinn, Percy, 234–5 radio, 211, 235–6; role in saving Casa Loma, 24, 233 Ramsden, George, 231 Rathnelly, 32, 41, 42, 46, 62–3, 63n3. See also McMaster, William Ravenswood, 41, 44–5, 50, 53 Regimental Museum at Casa Loma. See Queen’s Own Rifles Reid, George, 82 residential neighborhoods of Toronto: Annex, 34, 35, 40, 43, 46, 51, 63; Queen’s Park, 34; North Rosedale, 35–6; South Rosedale, 35–6 Revell, Viljo, 251 Reynolds, Joshua: Portrait of Horace Walpole, 127, 186 Richardson, Henry Hobson, 20, 46, 82 Richardsonian Romanesque, 82, 88, 92n31, 108, 180 Robbins, William, 233, 234, 244

index

Roberts, Herbert Charles, 50 Rogers, Rita, 149 Roman Stone, 86, 95, 95–6, 112, 273–4; Roman Stone Company of Toronto, 95 Romanticism, 136, 137, 151, 172; “Romantic Interior,” 116, 121, 189 Rothschild, Baron Ferdinand de, 124 Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 117, 119, 121–2, 157, 223; as living history site, 251–3 Royal York Hotel, Toronto, 216, 220 Russell, Charles M., 119; and Russell Room, 120 Saunders, Leslie, 249, 251 Saunders, Robert Hood, 247 Scott, Walter, 191–2 Scottish Baronial style, 8, 34, 137, 179, 281; of Balmoral, 149, 176 193; and “built unionism,” 149, 193; as Canadian style, 195; and Casa Loma, 116, 180, 185, 193, 195; and Lenwil, 58; and nationalism, 191; and North American castles, 180; of railway hotels, 196; on Sherbourne Street, 38, 42 Second Empire style, 69; and McCaw and Lennox firm, 70 Shadwell Park, Norfolk, 101 Shaw, George Bernard, 179 Shaw, Richard Norman, 38 “Shaw House” greenhouse, Casa Loma, 145 Sherbourne Street, 10, 34, 37–8, 67, 68, 98; Pellatt town house, 39, 42–3, 67, 98, 118, 156 Sherbourne Street Methodist Church, 37–8, 92n31 Sherbourne Villa, 37 Shipley, Robert, 271 Simpson, James, 233 Skibo Castle, Scotland, 179, 181 Small, Ambrose, 212 Small, Teresa, 212 Smith, Eden, 38–40, 58, 66 Spadina House, 33, 40–1, 43–6, 50, 62, 63n3 Spadina Road, 2, 3, 41, 46, 51, 53, 260n15 Sparling, William F., 204, 206, 212, 244; bankruptcy, 214, 228n68; partnership with Miles Knowles, 212–13; partnership with W.B.

Moseley, 213; partnership with Henry Pellatt, 204–11, 215 Spence, Rev. Ben, 211 Sproatt and Rolph, architects, 66, 214 St Alban the Martyr Cathedral, 196 St Donat’s Castle, Glamorganshire, Wales, 179 Stewart, William James, 232 St George Street, Toronto, 34 St Paul’s Anglican Church, Toronto, 88, 89 Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, 184, 186–9, 188 St Thomas, Ontario: and Jumbo the Elephant, 232 Summerson, John, 148 Sunnyside, Toronto, 221 Taylor, E.P., 251 Taylor Hazell Architects, 273, 275 Teperman, Marvin, 231 Tesla, Nikola, 12 thing theory, 258 Thompson, Anna Kathleen, 46 Thompson, George, 119–20, 143–5, 151; son Tommy, 165n33 Thomson, Tom, 172; Burns’ Blessing, 173 Tiffany and Co., 85 Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, 56 Toronto: elections, 233; and imperialism, 20, 21, 178; and Orange Order, 201, 233, 249, 252; and prudishness, 222; and “small-townishness,” 221–2, 231, 251; tourism film, 251; on world stage, 230, 250–1. See also tourism Toronto and Niagara Power Company, 67, 85–6 Toronto Architectural Eighteen Club, 38 Toronto Art Museum, 117 Toronto Electric Light Company, 63 Toronto Fence and Ornamental Iron Works, 82 Toronto Hotel Company, 83, 85 Toronto Industrial Exhibition, 138–9 Toronto Western Hospital, 86, 87 tourism, 234, 239–40, 251; and amusement parks, 270; and Casa Loma, 4, 25, 235–41, 256, 258, 273; from US, 240. See also Kiwanis Club, West Toronto tourist experience, 256, 275

317

index

Traders Bank Building, Toronto, 23, 44 Tudor Revival (Jacobethan), 142, 148, 149–51 Turner, J.M.W.: View of Fonthill Abbey, 127, 186, 187 Ukrainian Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, Christ the King Province, 61 Veblen, Thorstein, 117, 182 Victoria, Queen, 127, 194 Villa Fiori, 56 Waddeston Manor (Buckinghamshire, England), 124 Wagner, Richard, 205, 240 Wainwright, Clive, 116, 189 Waite, Richard, 88 Waldorf Astoria, New York, 167n64, 180, 211 Wallace, Claire, 233, 236 Walker, Edmund: and Long Garth, 35 Walmer Road, Toronto, 96, 99, 101 Walpole, Horace, 121, 184, 186–8, 186

318

Wardour Street trade, 121 Warren, Michelle, 174, 182 Watson, Gilbert, 217 Watson, Homer, 119 wax museum: proposed for Casa Loma, 241, 270 Wellesley, Richard Colley, 1st Marquess, 137 Wells, Joseph, 57, 94 Wells Hill, 43, 57–8 West Toronto Kiwanis service club. See Kiwanis Club, West Toronto Wharton, Edith: and Ogden Codman Jr, 161 Wickson and Gregg firm, 51–2, 56 Wilde, Oscar, 10, 119 Willcocks, William, 40–1 Winters, Anne, 255 Wollaton Hall, Nottingham, 148 Workman, Leslie, 169 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, 20, 23 Zalaffi, Benedetto, 47