Bill Smith's Photography

 My day trip around Brock Township included a visit with my cousins at their cottage which has been in the Smith/Stewart clan for almost a century. I found out a few things about my great granddad William G.  Smith and my granddad Arthur Smith. I know great granddad William G. moved to Toronto prior to the First World War but I got the Toronto address wrong. They didn't live on the edge of what's Corso Italia but instead in Hillcrest just east of Oakville Collegiate a block south of St. Clair West. I think Great Granddad Smith rented as he spent the final year of his life in the early 1930s in Moore Park a couple blocks south of St. Clair Avenue East and east of Yellow Ravine.  The other thing I found out was Granddad Arthur signed up for the Canadian Expeditionary Forces in his mid 20s in 1915 as a Private. He came home three years later as a Sargent on a medical discharge with an injured left hand. Granddad Arthur, I think moved to Montreal in the later 1920s to work in...

  I was last in the Juction a year ago doing a beer run to Indie Ale House, this time out I was back with my friends John Meadows, Art Liem and Ori Carmona. We wanted somewhere a bit fresh as we've been shooting a lot in the Beaches (it's a safe neighbourhood in terms of low case counts). Ori wanted to visit one of Toronto's oldest synagogues Congregation Knesseth Israel tucked away on a side street north of Dundas. The Shul is only open on High Holidays as most of the congregation moved elsewhere. The building is protected as an Ontario Heritage Site.  The Junction is the last neighbourhood in Toronto with some grit left in it leftover from the days of being a major Canadian Pacific Rail Hub (sadly the beautiful West Toronto Station was torn down in I think 1981 in the middle of the night, I've only seen it once when my family was exploring Toronto's west end in fall 1979, it was a cool looking train station.). The extensive meat processing companies and stockyards...