Chiaroscuro: Italians in Toronto,
1815-1915*
Chiaroscuro: Italians in Toronto,
1815-1915*
By: Robert F. Harney
From: Polyphony Vol.6, 1984 pp. 44-49
© 1984 Multicultural History Society of Ontario
From: Polyphony Vol.6, 1984 pp. 44-49
© 1984 Multicultural History Society of Ontario
*This is an abridged version of an article by the same author
and title which appears in ltalian Americana I (Spring 1975), pp.
143-67.
Toronto ranks with New York, Chicago, Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo
as an Italian metropolis outside of Italy. About half a million
people in the metropolitan area are immigrants or the descendents
of immigrants from Italy. Unlike the other great cities of
immigration, the majority of Toronto's Italian population arrived
after World War Two. The numbers of Italians arriving in Toronto
in any two-year period of the early 1950s exceeded the number of
Italian Canadians already in the city. This fact probably
justifies the social scientists' and politicians' concern with
postwar immgration, but it has also helped to obscure the history
of Italian settlement in the city. The newcomers themselves found
the older immigrants so Canadian and so ''umbertine'' that they
perpetuated the myth of the prewar city as ''Toronto the
Good"-good being synonymous with blue laws, victorianisms
and an homogeneous British population. So, many thousands of
Italian immigrants and their children, who lived and worked in
Toronto before World War Two and even World War One, have for the
most part been ignored.
Those early Italian immigrants faced the same hostility that more
recent visible minorities have. Sifton, the minister of the
interior in l901, informed his deputy minister that ''no steps are
to be taken to assist or encourage Italian immigration to
Canada.... You will, of course, understand that this is to be done
without saying anything that will be offensive.'' Toronto had
about four hundred residents from the Italian peninsula in 1891.
That number doubled in a decade, and by 1911 the census showed
2,200 men and 800 women of Italian descent in Toronto. They
practised the stereotyped occupations of the first wave of
immigrants. Mainly of urban and northern background, but with a
significant number of southerners among them as well, (1) the
Italians served as food vendors (victualers), innkeepers, teachers
of music, musicians and shopkeepers. So the average income and
status of the early Italians was quite high. In general, they made
their living by providing ''European'' services, luxuries and
amenities to their Anglo-Canadian neighbours. At the turn of the
century their pattern of settlement was to provide the skeletal
neighbourhood structure for those navvies who escaped the closed
and cyclical world of migration and the padrone system.
At first, the older Italian settlers and the city held little
meaning for the navvies. As Georges Goyau pointed out in 1898,
migrants were drawn from high in the Apennines and sent to work on
the raw frontiers of the New World, places like Patagonia and
northern Ontario. In effect, they travelled through cities and
modernity from one primitive setting to another, exploited as they
passed by the city and the urban elites. Through accident or
personal enterprise, some migrant navvies became urbanized. Even
before l900 a few men, who boarded in Toronto during the harsh
winter months, broke out of the exploitive tutelage of
contractors, steamship agents and innkeepers. In the city they
found alternative and freer economic opportunity. For example, the
first pedlars who hauled bananas and other perishables from the
railway yards behind St. Lawrence Market to middle- and
upper-class neighbourhoods had been part of Sicilian railroad work
gangs when they first reconnoitred the clty. (2)
In other cases, the padrone system itself failed, and men
were trapped in the urban environment. The Toronto Empire
of August 9, 1888, under the hostile headline "Those Deluded
Italians,'' described the pattern:
Quite recently a gang of navvies were brought to Toronto arl victimized, it is alleged by a countryman of their own .They came from New York to Cornwall, where they were unable ta secure the employment that had been promised them. There Alfonso De Santi and his brother took charge of them. They confidingly handed over $7 each to the De Sarlti brothers, the latter undertaking to pay the fare from Cornwall to Toronto....
So men who had migrated to the United States found themselves in
the proletariat of the British Empire. Victims of the larger game
being played by some dishonest countrymen and many callous North
American businessmen, they became, perhaps despite themselves,
urban men and immigrants, when they had started out as migrants
from small agrotowns.
Italian settlements in cities like Toronto grew for another reason
as well. Toronto' s Little Italy could be compared to a coastal
enclave on a foreign shore. Most railway work gangs and most small
Italian outposts in the mining or railroad towns of the Ontario
hinterland fell back on Toronto or Montreal for protection against
the hostile countryside. The Little Italy that grew up, first
around the train yards and wholesale market and then in the
"Ward'' in downtown Toronto, was the metropole, along with
Montreal, for small huddled colonie throughout the interior
of the province.
If one sees Toronto's Little Italy in this light, questions about
magnitude and permanence-transience arise. The government census
and Might's City Directory help only a little; the migrant
and non-propertied were always underenumerated. That was
inevitable since the census taker thought of Toronto as a
self-contained entity while the migrant worker treated it only as
a base camp. Before 1911, the census was taken in April, after
that in June, but many men had already left for the North or the
Niagara peninsula by the first thaw. Consequently, the number of
Italians in the city was underestimated; also, underenumeration of
navvies produced an impression of perrnanence and middle-class
prosperity among the Italians that was only partially true. Men
came and went, unrecorded by the larger society:
As a rule, a good percentage of them are absent from the city during some months in the year. A number have been employed in the new bridge being built near Brockville, by the Ottawa and New York railroad; others have recently gone to work on the railways near Hull, Muskoka, and Niagara Falls, and a good many others have been employed on the Peterborough canal.
This description in 1897 of the Toronto Italian work-force by a
future prime minister of Canada (Mackenzie King) affords a proper
perspective on the city's role. The city was a place from which to
sally forth or to fall back on when unemployed and unable to
return to Italy. The range of the adventure from the city could be
five hundred to a thousand miles, but, at least initially, one
city-Toronto or Montreal-remained the base camp. It was the
address to which relatives sent mail. It was the location of the
importer of pasta and tomato paste- it was the location of the
immigrant banker who transmitted savings to loved ones in the
homeland. In fact, it was where one was, even if one were in the
bush several hundred miles away.
When one hundred and fifty Italian workers went on strike at a
Grand Trunk Railroad job site in June1906, they were attacked by
police and company guards. They retreated to their bunk car.
Defeated and dismissed, they were shipped back to the city. There
they could either settle, find their way to new jobs, or back to
ltaly, but only the city offered them alternatives to the peonage
of being a migrant navvy.
By tracking through city directories and assessment roles, one can
map the development of a settled Italian community in Toronto, a
community that was varied and rich in its occupational structure.
Seeing what happened is not, however, understanding what happened.
Who were the new class of shopkeepers and professionals who
emerged after 1910? Were they all the offspring of that earliest
middle-class immigration? Did young migrants begin as navvies,
work as pedlars and succeed as businessmen, or did a different
type of immigrant come with sufficient capital to enter directly
into the middle classes? The percentage of those who travelled to
North America as steerage passengers would seem to negate the
latter answer. (3)
The area of permanent Italian settlement in Toronto reflected the
sources of the community. Located in the heartof the city, the
first neighbourhood was part of an authentic foreign quarter known
as the Ward, where Jews outnumbered Italians, and Chinese and
Slavs also lived in considerable numbers. (4) The Ward was
directly north of the train station; York Street and other
arteries that ran to the railway had a jumble of boardinghouses,
labour, bureaux and small immigrant shops. On the other hand, the
colonia and its network of lesser streets and laneways lay
behind the main commercial streets of the city.
Unlike their Jewish neighbours, the Italians had no dietary laws
or a ritual performed by laity to encourage or promote the
proliferation of special stores and specially skilled immigrants.
Nor was there a hard and fast commercial stereotype of the
Italians to match the place that Chinese laundrymen and
restaurateurs had in the city's economy. True, one of the city's
more muck-raking papers-Jack Canuck in 1911-complained that
"the Italians employed by the City of Toronto refuse to buy any
other than Italian macaroni," but that sort of food provisioning
had traditionally been handled by contractors and innkeepers. How
then can we account for the rapid development of enterprise among
the newcomers?
The emergence of an Italian ambiente in Toronto' s Ward
depended on three circumstances. First, in spite of facile use of
the adjective unskilled, most of the migrants who settled in the
city did have a mestiere -a trade-if only at the apprentice
level. They worked as navvies, but they knew how to make shoes,
tailor clothes, barber and work as stonemasons. Second, the
seasonal nature of outdoor labour in Canada and the natural
entrepreneurship of many migrants led to a constant probing of
economic possibilities in the city during periods of unemployment.
The heritage of chronic seasonal underemployment in rural Italy
made it natural to accept a multiplicity of jobs as one's lot.
Finally, and most important, the demand for unskilled labour
almost imperceptibly passed from the countryside to the city. Not
double-tracking the transcontinental railways through remote bush
areas, but rather digging sewers and laying street railway lines
in Toronto became the chief source of work for navvies. After
1905-a great fire the year before had prompted much demolition and
building work-more and more navvies became permanent residents of
the city, and Toronto' s Little Italy achieved the critical mass
necessary to support and encourage a kaleidoscope of enterprises
and occupations.
The building of the urban infrastructure, even more than the
factory system, was the beginning of Toronto as a metropolis, and
the Italian immigrant work-force was intimately and complexly
bound up with the city's growth. Immigrant labour, whether in the
form of pedlars, sewer workers, or streetcar track gangs, enabled
the middle classes of the city to live away from the commercial
core of Toronto. It enabled them to live in a style that scant
years before had been the preserve of only the wealthy. Sicilian
banana men or Calabrians and Abruzzians who created a sewer system
where there had only been outhouses and cesspools were, through
back-breaking labour, supplying amenities to the middle classes.
Other Italians who found work in the needle trades in the Spadina
area, or who rolled cigars and cigarettes all day, were also
making middle-class life gentile e civile, while creating
mass production and mass consumption without rapid
industrialization.
The relationship of the Italian labourer to the city's economic
boom sometimes appears downright providential, if not actually
causative. For example, the technological shift, beginning in the
1900s, from wooden boardwalks and dirt roads to cement sidewalks
and paved roads corresponds so closely to the arrival of Italians
in the urban work-force that it defies coincidence. Italian
navvies, through bitter experience in the Ontario north, or on
rocky farms in Italy, knew about excavating, grading and shoring
up ground. Large numbers of them, from a land where wood was too
scarce to be used as a building material, had apprenticed as
stonemasons. (Few were trained as carpenters.) After the
anti-conflagration legislation, Toronto emerged as a city of
brick, cement and cobblestone, from its sewers to the large new
hospitals in the Ward. It is almost inconceivable that the city
could have been so transformed without Italian workers.
Beyond the enlarged payroll that the navvies, now city workers,
began to bring home to the Ward, the Italian community had several
other major sources of income from the receiving society.
Ironically, many of those minor trades that had languished in the
restricted market of Italian agrotowns flourished in the no man's
land between consumer demand and the slow industrialization of
Toronto. Barbers, cobblers, tailors, victualers could depend on
the middle-class desire for service and new luxuries to provide
employment. In these trades too, Canadian stereotyping-the idea
that "this is what those people do and are good at''-seems to have
aided these enterprises. So much so that entrepreneurship was
sometimes more important than apprentice skills. One of the first
successful Italian barber-shops (ten chairs) on Toronto' s main
street was staned by a man who had apprenticed as a shoemaker in
Pisticci.
Nowhere did stereotype and talent interweave more than in the
perishable foods trade. From the earliest days of settlement,
there had been Italian fruit stores, and after 1900 the navvy
turned fruit pedlar was ubiquitous. By 1912 at least half of the
fruit stores in Toronto were Italian owned. Contrast that with
only about a hundred out of 1,500 grocery stores and with less
than 10 per cent of the barber-shops in Italian hands. Syrians,
Macedonians and Greeks provided sharp competition in shoeshine
work, diners and the sale of confectioneries. (5) In the early
days, fruit pedlars rose before dawn to buy produce directly from
the arriving freight trains, later from Italian wholesalers; they
pushed carts many miles through alien streets selling to the
non-Italian community. The logic of time-as-money caused many of
them, as their businesses prospered, to settle and to open stores
among their Canadian clientele outside the Ward.
Obviously, the older British stock and native Canadians held a
stereotype of the Italians as expert handlers of fruit and
vegetables, but it is interesting to see how that stereotype
spread and interacted with reality. When Jews moved westward from
the Ward to the Kensington area-where a new kosher market grew
up-the first fruit store in the new complex of shops was Italian
owned. The founder of Frontier College, an experimental
institution for educating immigrants and isolated workers
throughout Canada, wrote an English-language primer for newcomers.
One reading lesson, illustrated with a push-can and a small,
smiling, mustachioed man, discussed buying fruit. The little man
was called Mr. Conti. So, not just the older stock, but other
immigrants as well, were to be taught that Italians had a special
affinity for the fruit business.
Two points emerge. By 1905 Italians in Toronto earned their
primary income by performing their stereotyped roles. In other
words, they did the jobs that Canadian society expected of them.
On the other hand, that money-from navvies, pedlars and so
forth-was spent within the ambiente of the Ward on a myriad
of goods and services that gave the lie to the stereotypes. A
typical street intersection in Little Italy might have a steamship
agency that doubled as "immigrant bank" or post office, several
boardinghouses or inns, a notary and interpreter. These
enterprises obviously served as conduits for money, goods and
people from Toronto to Italy and to the work sites in the
interior. Bakeries and confectioneries, a shoemaker's shop and a
newspaper office, along with many little stores selling
Italian-style cheese, canned fish, vegetables and pasta, also
lined the street. The Ward had few multi-storey buildings, and
proprietors tended to live in back or over their shops. The
presence of Kosher poulterers and fish markets retarded Italian
enterprise in those trades. Restaurants, a saloon, the
headquarters of several mutuo soccorso organisations were
prominent as well. Barber-shop steps and the fronts of clubs
served as piazze in the evening. (6) A Casa Metodista-the
Little Flower Methodist mission-was in the heart of Little Italy,
while the first Italian parish-Our Lady of Mt. Carmel-was on the
fringes of the community. So while the stereotype depicted only
navvies, pedlars and hurdy-gurdy men, a total ambiente and
a multiplicity of trades existed within the community itself.
Preliminary study of the Ward shows that assumptions about social
class, familialism and generational change do not help the
historian very much. As the choice of occupations increased,
status and income varied greatly within the Ward and often within
the Italian family itself. Brothers living together on Elm Street
left their flat in the morning, one to be cellarman in a brewery,
a second to peddle fruit and a third to run a grocery and give
music lessons downstairs. In one residence, five men with the same
surname worked respectively as grocer, tailor, musician, labourer
and hotel manager (boardinghouse keeper). (7) Only strong parents
or expanding business could keep the immigrant family destiny a
shared one.
While the locations of the first clusters of Italian immigrants,
near the train yards and then in the Ward behind the business
district, could be explained simply enough, the history of
secondary Italian colonies in the city is more complex. Churches,
the proximity of work, new public transit routes and cheap housing
drew people to new areas, but so did accident and, of course,
chain or family migration patterns within the city itself. First
we must record the courage and enterprise of men who spoke little
English and yet chose to live outside the Ward among their
clientele. A high percentage of barbers, tailors, pedlars-if they
felt the need of the ambiente-commuted back to the Ward
every evening, but other men dared to move out.
As we have already seen, fruit vendors, particularly, resided in
non-immigrant neighbourhoods. Many such merchants remained
isolated. In a number of cases, however, such shops became the
nuclei of new Italian residential areas. Men who began in the
fruit business became grocers and provisioners. This often meant a
change from a Canadian to an immigrant clientele. Sewer or street
work near their stores turned them into subcontractors, steamship
agents and boardinghouse keepers as well. Remarkably, all this
activity could go on from the same corner store and upstairs flats
that had passed into the hands of a fruit merchant at the
beginning of the century.
One sort of distribution that may have been as important as the
fruit vendors was that promoted by the street railway development
and by the construction of railway sheds in greater Toronto. Just
as the railroads played a key role in the settlement of various
ethnic groups across the continent, so the substations and
junctions created little groups of foreign labourers and, later,
of their dependents in various outlying parts of the city. Track
maintenance in the severe winters further attenuated the pattern
of setlement. In the city itself the street railway and the radial
trolleys served to disperse the original Italian community. Track
workers, motormen and, ultimately, drivers who worked the long and
often split twelve-hour shifts on the street railways found it
logical to reside at different turns and junctions on the
line.
The North American historiographical debate about the urbanism of
south Italian peasants tends to undervalue the immigrant's search
for self-sufficiency through home ownership and also through truck
farming on the margins of the city. The new Italian Canadians
probably had no dream of rolling wheat fields, but they did buy
and intensively cultivate arable patches of ground in and
immediately outside of Toronto. Sometimes these little farms were
more than a supplement to family diet. Several extensive truck
farms, employing many gardeners, grew up within the confines of
Toronto. These properties were the centres of small Italian
populations. They were also serendipity as the city expanded, and
they played a role in the later development of Italian wealth in
some suburbs around Toronto.
When we try to move from the objective conditions of immigrant
life in order to reconstruct the settlement' s culture, the cant
and bias of the available sources is obvious. In a city where
library copies of G.A. Henty's Out With Garibaldi were as
dog-eared by adulatory young readers as the copies of the same
author's With Wolfe to Quebec, a myth of Italian
liberty and bravery competed with disdain for the navvies, ''bare
armed, bare-necked, sturdy, brown fellows,'' who accompanied each
swing of the pick with some "utterance, an unintelligible
muttering or a snatch of song." Unlike Garibaldi, the newcomers
had not renounced Catholicism, so the evangelists thought that
"something must be done to Canadianize and to
Christianize them, or there was a danger of free institutions
being dragged to their low level.''
Perhaps the ambivalence of Toronto attitudes toward the Italian
can best be seen in a poem of 1895 that hovered between derision,
doggerel and respect for the Risorgimento tradition:
Ice 'a cream-sex banana 'vive cent.
Pea nut drhee cent sze glass.
Ah Lady! sze 'Talyman's cheap
You no tink he vill sell, and he vass.
....
Thus night after night as I stroll down the street
At his cart on the corner the same man I meet,
At the southwestern corner of Ad'laide and Yonge,
Where the Saxon falls sweet from the soft Latin tongue.
.....
But hard 'tis the trumpet fierce calling afar,
Its summons is rousing the valleys to war
The banners are floating o'er mountain and sea,
With golden words gleaming and crest of the free
And brave Garibaldi rides forth in his might
And Victor Emmanuel leads far in the fight....
The cross-cultural diffraction was such that evangelists and
social workers saw the immigrants as savage innocents in need of
moral uplift, assimilation and organisation. The navvies did not
look much like the stylized lithographs of Garibaldi; somehow,
educated Canadians reasoned, the heavy weight of Catholicism and
rural poverty had dragged them down from the civic heights of the
Risorgimento. So the Central Neighbourhood House, a non-sectarian
agency in the Ward, sponsored, under the auspices of a Professor
Shaw, a branch of the Dante Alighieri Society. However, both the
settlement house and the Little Flower Methodist Mission had many
more ltalians registered in evening classes to learn English than
in cultural soirées and hymn singing respectively. The
immigrants, locked in the struggle to survive, wished to cope with
the new environment, not to be ''brought back to Jesus,'' nor to
gain a new and uplifting awareness of italianità
.
The establishment of an ltalian parish-Our Lady of Mt. Carmel-in
1908 may have lessened the distance between the immigrants and the
clergy, but it is clear that diocesan officials did not find the
pastoral mission to the newcomers an easy one. Either the
parishioners were fractious, or the imponed Italian clergy
suspect. The first priest at the new parish came under criticism
because he lived with his sister a housekeeper and a cousin. All
these ladies came either from Italy, or from Buffalo with him to
Toronto. The archbishop did not see the persistent rumours of
scandal as a refreshing sign of lay initiative and so, after it
was discovered that the priest had ''no papers from Rome," he was
replaced. (8)
Toronto's years as a small, transient and dependent colony left
their mark on immigrant culture in the city. In the same way that
Italian immigrants in the city depended on Marca Gallo of Montreal
or De Nobili of New York for their Tuscan-style cigars, so they
often read II Progresso Italo-Americano or the ''kept"
papers of Montreal padroni like Cordasco and Dini rather
than support locai newspapers. Touring musical maestri and
other Italian celebrities who could have given impetus to cultural
life often bypassed the city. (9)
Another cultural and, in a sense, political consequence of being a
small community and of not being an ocean port was that barriers
between paese groups broke down more quickly than in larger
American cities. Certainly there was localism, and distinctions
between Sicilians and those from the mainland were marked;
traditional clannishness based on the home town or the province in
ltaly did matter. Abruzzians, Calabrians and Neapolitans had
skeins of paesani, which affected who was taken in as a
boarder, where one shopped and had credit and which provided the
contours for ephemeral social clubs. But the tansient years when
men from many towns had bunked together , navvies, as well as
insufficient numbers, meant that there was a block settlement by
paese in downtown Toronto. More importantly the larger clubs, such
as the Italian National Club, and the major mutual aid societies,
such as the Umberto Primo Italian Benevolent Society, seem to have
been open to all Italians.
Such organisations played a dual role. They nurtured Italian
patriotism while they also created Italian Canadian culture and
polity. The Umberto Primo Society had successfully petitioned the
City Council as early as 1897 to commemorate the unification of
Italy by annually raising the flag over City Hall on June 14. In
turn, no one seems to have found it outlandish that the procession
and festa of San Rocco should include a violin solo by a gifted
Jewish boy from the Ward and should conclude with the D'Angelo
band playing "God Save the King.''
The coming of World War One had special importance for Toronto's
Little Italy. Loyalty to Italy and well-being in Canada were
tested simultaneously. At the beginning of the war, there was
anti-ltalian feeling because Italy was a member, if a vacillating
one, of the Triple Alliance. Social workers reported that there
was increased unemployment and discrimination against ltalian
immigrants until May 1915. However, when the Italian government
joined the Allied war effort, an immediate reversal of sentiment
occurred. The British government had underlaken to help her allies
gather their reservists working within the British Empire, and
Italian legislation on emigration included a clause that made the
diplomatic and consular service responsible for rounding up
reservists in time of war. So the organisation and transfer of the
riserva from Canada to Italy during 1915 was far more systematic
than the volunteer movement among Italian Americans in the same
year.
For a bitter-sweet moment in 1915, the chiaroscuro in the
relationship between Italian and Canadian disappeared. Central
Neighbourhood House published an honour roll of volunteers replete
with drawings of bersaglieri. The image of Victor Emmanuel and of
Garibaldi triumphed for the moment over hostile and racial
stereotypes. Mayor Tommy Church of Toronto posed happily with
Italian consular of ficials and recruits on the City Hall steps.
Meanwhile late in May, a train left Vancouver bound for Montreal.
Italian reservists and volunteers, many to be sacrificed in the
bloody Isonzo campaigns, boarded the train at every stop. When the
train arrived in Toronto, it was bedecked with placards in
Italian, English and French: ''Andiamo a prendere Trento e
Trieste,'' or "Britanni eccoci qua,'' or simply ''Andiamo a fare
la guerra.''
The mood of exhilaration vanished with the train-load of troops.
While many men who had not been called to service found the war an
opportunity for upward mobility and full employment, families with
bread-winners at the front were less fortunate. Many were reduced
to living on public and private charity, and there was growing
impatience as well. The editor of La Tribuna Canadese had to
explain to many women whose husbands were fighting for Italy as
loyal allies of the Canadian monarch that ''that fact was
unfortunately not good for a vote in Canada.(10) World War One
ended an era for Toronto Italians. Many reservists never returned
to the city, and many families drifted out of the Ward to the
newer neighbourhoods in the west end. Immigrant housing in the
Ward had long been the target of both reformers and speculators,
and the expansion of institutions like the Toronto General
Hospital destroyed the housing that would have been the most
likely first shelter of new immigrants after the war. St. Agnes
parish to the west became almost as important as the Ward for
Italian immigrants by the end of the war. The days of the founding
community were over. The problem of generations, Canada's
exclusionist legislation of the 1920s and the struggle for and
against fascism in the community lay ahead.
