Every home I have ever visited has had a photo album.

Some are carefully arranged on living room shelves. Others sit forgotten in drawers, their pages slowly turning yellow. Yet they all exist for the same reason: someone wanted a moment to survive its own passing.

Perhaps Ernest Becker was right. Beneath so much of human life lies a quiet longing for symbolic immortality—the hope that something of us might outlast us.

If every family keeps its own memory, I wondered, where does a city keep its own?

That question brought me to the City of Toronto Archives.

After stepping off the subway at Dupont Station, I caught a distant glimpse of Casa Loma before walking toward the archives, where I had arranged to meet an experienced archivist, Ariella Elema. Inside, the first floor was lined with black-and-white photographs, silent fragments of lives already folded into history. There was little time to stop. I climbed the stairs, and our conversation began.

Some of Ariella's answers came immediately. Others arrived only after thoughtful pauses. A few returned later in an email she sent after our meeting, as though the city itself had continued whispering stories once our conversation had ended.

When I asked her about the most surprising discovery she had made recently, she smiled, then remembered a postcard from the archives. Across its front were the words: "Wish you were here in Toronto, the finest town in the United States." It may have referred to Toronto, Ohio, or perhaps it was meant as a joke. Either way, it was a reminder that history occasionally smiles at us before it teaches us.

Then she said something that quietly changed the way I looked at the city.

"Every building has a story."

The sentence sounded almost too simple.

Yet I immediately thought about all the buildings I pass every day without wondering who lived there, what happened inside, or what memories their walls still carry.

Later, Ariella sent me an example that perfectly illustrated her point. Today, Liberty Village is known for cafés, offices, and condominiums. During the First World War, however, Liberty Street was home to several munitions factories. Their existence was intentionally kept quiet during the war, and many never appeared in city directories as bomb factories. Their story survives today only because someone preserved building permits and archival records showing how ordinary industrial buildings were quietly transformed for wartime production. Ariella explained:

It can be hard to find out about them because they didn’t advertise their existence during the war, but this photo shows they were busy! They weren’t listed as bomb factories in the city directories, so often the only way to find out what they were up to is to look at old building permits to see how they transformed themselves during the war.

When I asked where someone unfamiliar with Toronto should begin exploring the city's past, Ariella suggested beginning not only with archives but with the city itself. Historical walking tours led by people deeply attached to their neighbourhoods reveal layers of history hidden in plain sight. She also pointed to an 1818 map drawn only a few years after the Toronto Purchase from the Mississaugas of the Credit. Comparing it with today's map reveals more than urban growth. Creeks disappeared beneath the ground, the shoreline expanded into Lake Ontario, and even the landscape itself was reshaped.

If you compare it to a current map, you can see how much the city has changed the very landscape around it. It’s not just that there are more roads and buildings now. On the map, you can see Garrison Creek, Russell Creek, and Taddle Creek, three waterways that were channelled underground in the late nineteenth century. The waterfront was at Front Street, and the Toronto Islands were a thin sandbar protecting the harbour. As the city has grown, it has even grown into the lake.

Ariella said.

After our interview, she looked more closely at another photograph taken in 1930 from the unfinished Canada Life Building. She realized why the photographer had climbed to the roof. Standing there, they looked across at what was then an astonishing new skyline, watching towers rise above the city.

When I think of a pattern from history repeating itself today, I think of a postcard I found in the Larry Becker collection last week…This is a photo of Toronto’s downtown taken in 1930. I worked out the date by figuring out which building is under construction on the horizon on the left. It’s the Victory Building at 80 Richmond Street West. Then I realized why the photo was taken: the photographer was standing on top of the Canada Life building on University Avenue—which was still under construction—and saying to themself, ‘Wow! Look at all those towers popping up downtown!’ Today we study that photograph as history.

Ariella said.

The photographer was looking at the future.

History, it seems, is often nothing more than yesterday's future.

Many people still imagine early twentieth-century Toronto as quiet, polite, and uneventful—"Toronto the Good." Ariella smiled at that myth. The archives tell a livelier story. In 1918, during a Victory Bond campaign, the city shipped a tank from Britain and deliberately drove it over a car in the middle of University Avenue to encourage people to buy war bonds. Toronto, she reminded me, has always been capable of surprising spectacles.

The federal government needed to raise money through bonds to fund the war, so the city of Toronto organized a giant parade and fundraising rally to encourage people to buy them. They decided that the best way to do this would be to ship a whole tank over from Britain and deliberately squash a car in the middle of University Avenue. It’s not just the Americans who have a history of bananas spectacles.

Ariella said.

The City of Toronto Archives is primarily a government archive; its shelves are filled with official documents. Yet, Ariella explained, the lives of ordinary people often survive only in the margins. To understand those stories, researchers have to gather scattered clues from different records and patiently assemble them into a narrative. No one hands you the complete story.

"We're stuck," Ariella told me, "with what people in the past thought was important to collect."

Some communities were carefully documented. Others were barely noticed. Early immigrants often left almost no official record behind. Years later, when their descendants want to understand where their communities began, they sometimes discover that those first chapters were never properly preserved.

In other words, archives preserve memory—but they also reveal forgetting.

When I asked what archives would say if they could speak, Ariella answered that they would speak with many voices, voices that do not always agree with one another.

Perhaps that is exactly what makes history valuable.

Before we finished, Ariella shared one final photograph that has stayed with her. On Christmas Eve in 1929, a Toronto police officer and his exhausted wife had just welcomed newborn triplets. His fellow officers arrived carrying an enormous raw turkey—claws still attached—while a newspaper photographer captured the moment. The couple sat there, grateful yet visibly overwhelmed, wondering, perhaps, how they were ever going to cook such a gift.

It is funny.

It is tender.

And it is deeply human.

As our conversation came to an end, Ariella made one final observation. Many visitors arrive hoping archival research will provide quick answers. More often, it demands patience. Hours of searching may uncover only a few precious lines of information.

History rarely reveals itself all at once.

I left the City of Toronto Archives carrying more stories than I had brought with me.

The archives preserve an extraordinary memory of Toronto. However, they also remind us that countless stories still live elsewhere—in forgotten family albums, around dinner tables, inside old photographs whose names have faded, and in memories that have never been written down.

And some of Toronto's most important history is still quietly waiting to be remembered.

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