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Museum mystery

Olivia Chow was enthusiastic. “A city of the world deserves a museum that tells its story,” she said, “so that visitors and residents can learn about our diversity, opportunity and ongoing transformation.”

John Tory was also passionate. “A lot of the communities we think of as newcomers have in fact had a presence here for 100 and 150 years,” he observed. “So I think we have to reach out and we also have to bring the heritage in, and maybe do it in the form of a museum.”

David Soknacki, who had yet to drop out of the mayor’s race, hedged. He said he couldn’t honestly promise to come up with the “$25, $50 million” required for such an initiative.

At the August 21 Heritage Toronto mayoral debate, candidates were asked what they would do to promote the city’s diverse cultural histories and whether they would support the establishment of a Toronto museum.

What none appeared to realize, however, was that four years ago council approved a project that would satisfy them all: a low-cost public museum devoted to chronicling Toronto’s immigrant history.

At the final meeting of the 2006-10 term, council unanimously voted to “dedicate the currently vacant third-floor mezzanine of City Hall for use as the ‘Ward’ Gallery of Immigration,” a tribute to the early Jewish, Italian and Chinese neighbourhood that stood for a century in the Bay-and-Queen area where the building is now.

Councillors directed staff to launch a community engagement process and strike an advisory committee to refine the concept and raise both public and private money.

Two months later, Rob Ford was elected mayor, and the project mysteriously disappeared.

And today, rather than showcasing graphic displays, touch screens and artifacts documenting Toronto’s immigrant history, City Hall’s third-floor mezzanine is home to 15 plastic Christmas trees, seven large coat racks, three spare lecterns, a pair of old TV sets and many, many excess stanchions. It remains closed off to the public.

So what happened?

“What do you think happened?” asks Rita Davies, the city’s former head of Cultural Services, who authored the council report.

Well, if you talk to Howard Moscoe, the former Ward 15 (Eglinton-Lawrence) councillor who spearheaded the proposal prior to his 2010 retirement, he’ll tell you it’s merely in stasis. “We’re biding our time and waiting for Mayor Ford to disappear,” he says in late August.

He points out that the city already commissioned a study from Lord Cultural Resources, the price of which he pegs at $45,000. The Toronto-based company is the world standard-bearer for museum consulting and has worked on the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and the just-opened Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.

Lord produced a 35-page report on the “Ward” Gallery of Immigration that included an estimated timetable for completion (16 months) and breakdown of costs ($785,000, plus minor building retrofits). A copy is housed at the Toronto Reference Library.

“The ‘Ward’ exhibition will introduce Torontonians and tourists to ‘the Ward’ as geographic location, as neighbourhood in transition, as home to diverse and changing communities and as lens to view the larger immigration story of Toronto,” the report said.

Over the latter half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th, the Ward was home to successive waves of immigrants as well as black fugitives escaping slavery in the U.S.

The gallery’s sections would be Growth of a City and a Neighbourhood The Changing Face of Toronto and “the Ward” and The Rise Of Modern Toronto and the End of the Traditional “Ward.”

“We will ultimately raise the funds to do it,” Moscoe says, “but we have to wait for Rob Ford to leave. The administration is all paralyzed because of the mayor, you understand.”

He expresses confidence that Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, whose Ward 27 (Toronto Centre-Rosedale) includes City Hall, remains committed to the project. Moscoe believes it will swing “into high gear after the election, once we have a mayor that’s more receptive.”

Wong-Tam doesn’t exactly agree.

“I wouldn’t say that that’s an inaccurate statement,” she says with characteristic diplomacy, but then explains that the project is no longer being actively pursued.

Wong-Tam says because funding hadn’t been earmarked for the gallery, it never got off the ground. She’s instead been focused on helping to update and make relevant Toronto’s current portfolio of historic sites, including the possible transformation of the Mackenzie House on Bond into a museum of social justice located near the former site of the Ward, it would incorporate content related to it, she says.

That doesn’t quite explain how a project could vanish after council explicitly instructed staff to proceed on it.

But Davies, who abruptly parted ways with the city in mid-2012, is happy to explain. She now runs her own cultural consultancy and relishes the freedom to act outside the reach of anyone who might mete out retribution for her candour.

She says city staff had been working to develop a larger, more ambitious Museum of Toronto, and when that got put on hold, Moscoe came up with the idea to do a “capsule version.”

“But in the new term of council, after the election, there was just no appetite for any… uh, anything,” Davies says. “I was basically trying to keep the museums budget from being decimated, which was a plan at one time. So there was just no political support for anything like that. It was just not possible. There was no environment for that to be nurtured in.”

She can’t recall whether its fizzling out was an act of self-censorship on her division’s part or the result of direct external factors. “But I do know that it was a very hostile environment in which to grow beautiful things.”

Her priority was the Fort York visitor centre and making sure it didn’t fall victim to the same Fordian impulses that killed the site’s proposed pedestrian bridge. (The visitor centre had its grand opening last weekend.)

Davies says she had very few discussions with Mayor Ford’s staff, which was different from her experience with the previous two mayors. She recalls that Mark Towhey, then Ford’s director of policy and strategy, “used to glare at me when he saw me at council.”

(Asked for comment on this, Towhey responded, “Who is Rita Davies?”)

She, like Moscoe, expresses hope that such a project might be revived in the post-Ford era.

“I would think Olivia Chow would be very sympathetic to that kind of museum,” she says. “Years ago I met with John Tory to talk about the Museum of Toronto, and he was very supportive.”

And if there is once again a Ford in the mayor’s chair?

Moscoe is unruffled.

“Well,” he says, “the Ward’s been gone a long time. It can wait another four [years], I suppose.”

jonathang@nowtoronto.com | @goldsbie

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