Toronto Photos (1980s)

I think I came through Toronto once in the 1980s on a family trip and then a second time when the train still ran from Detroit to Toronto (or rather a somewhat indirect route that crossed at Port Huron with a one hour layover for customs and changing the crew at the border!).  I doubt very much that I have any photos from those trips, but I suppose some might exist somewhere.  I have a few more, but still not a lot from my year here in 1993-94, as digital cameras were only slowly coming to market and I didn't have a camera on my phone for years to come.

But Avard Woolaver was here and was taking lots of photos.  Most were black and white, but he has enough colour photos to make up an entire book. 

I'm always a sucker for photos of the Sam the Record Man store, which I visited frequently when I was going to school here, and then on a trip in the early 2000s before it closed.  (I probably swung into the World's Biggest Bookstore on that trip as well.)

Anyway, this post over on Blogto got me thinking about Toronto's recent past.  I thought I had recognized some of the photographs, and indeed, I saw an exhibit of photographs by the same photographer at Ryerson in 2018.  At the time I thought I would order some of his digital albums of 1980s-era Toronto, even though I would be even more likely to order if he mostly shot photos of mid-1990s Toronto, which I have the keenest nostalgia for...

While it wouldn't have been possible, as I didn't have the right paperwork at the time, it does feel like a missed opportunity to not have stayed and bought up some property, as this was probably the very last time that houses were truly affordable in the city.  But it was not to be.  Sigh.