Howard Dennison Chapman, RIP

I read the sad news in yesterday's Globe and Mail that architect Howard Dennison Chapman died. He was 96.

Chapman was the son of Alfred H. Chapman, the Toronto architect behind the Royal Ontario Museum's entrance on Queen's Park, the Princes Gates at the Canadian National Exhibition, the Toronto Hydro Building and others.

Chapman pere also built Toronto's first Central Reference Library, which Chapman fils restored (with partner Howard Walker) and turned into the Koffler Student Centre of the University of Toronto (which houses the university book store).

Alfred Chapman left no information (that I could find anyway) about who the bearded figure is on the building, and Howard was unable to answer the question when I spoke to him in 2005 while researching Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto.

Among his other works was the "half-round" Riverdale Hospital (with Len Hurst), which was demolished in 2013 after years of opposition.

A web exhibit of some of his work by the City of Toronto archives is still online.

Faces *Around* Places?

One of the last times I was in San Francisco, I was walking around in the area of City Hall and the Opera, and noticed this unusual doorway.

I don't remember what this door led to at the time, but it's been a succession of financial institutions since it began life as the entryway to Vivande Ristorante, a second Italian restaurant opened in 1995 by chef Carlo Middione, in addition to his Vivande Porta Via, opened on Fillmore Street in 1981.

Both restaurants have closed. I'm not sure when Vivande Ristorante died, but Vivande Porta Via fell victim to the recession at the end of 2009 — as well as to Middione's loss of his senses of smell and taste as a result of a car crash in 2007.

A 1995 story on sfgate.com, a division of the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, attributes the 15-foot (4.6-metre) doorway sculpture to local sculptor Michael Casey.

The article also claims the inspiration for the doorway sculpture is La Bocca della Verita (the Mouth of Truth) in the Roman portico of Santa Maria in Cosmedin.

But in a 2011 blog post, San Francisco architect Larry Mock found it reminiscent of the Orcus sculpture in the the Sacro Bosco ("Sacred Grove"),known colloquially as the Park of the Monsters (Parco dei Mostri) and the Gardens of Bomarzo in northern Lazio, Italy, about an hour's drive from Rome.

Inscribed on his upper lip is "Ogni penser vola" — translated as "All thoughts fly" but also as "All reason departs").

I'll leave it to you to figure out which the San Francisco doorway most closely resembles. I'm checking out flights to Rome!

What a gas! The clock is back!

Over the Christmas holidays, I was driving past the old Consumers Gas Showroom, on Yonge Street north of Eglinton in Toronto and happened to glance up at the clock. The clock that hasn't worked — at least, not for long — for at least the last 20 years.

Well, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a cleaned-up, lit-up, working clock!

(Yes, I know — this is a daylight photo of the clock.)

I guessed — correctly — that the work on the clock had been done by Abernethy and Son, the Richmond Hill-based firm of watch and clockmakers and heritage clock restorers.

I called to find out about the Consumers Gas clock, and found out it was Phil Abernethy (the eponymous "Son") who handled the job. He told me that the original Telechron system was worn out and couldn't be restored. So he installed a main synchronous motor, an AC motor that is synchronized with the frequency of the supply current. If the power supply is interrupted, the clock shuts off for 12 hours, at which time (assuming the hydro has been restored) it begins telling the correct time again. It even has an automatic Daylight Saving Time correction.

"The system is virtually hands-off," Phil said.

The clock's case and the bird on whose back it is borne are made of cast aluminum which was sandblasted, changing the colour from near-black (as in the picture below, from 2005) to a dull grey.

Because it's difficult to apply a finish to aluminum, that's just the naked metal exposed to the elements, meaning it will acquire a darker patina in time, he said.

The southern-exposed clock face — milk glass that is 24 in. (or about 61 cm.) in diameter — was cracked, but that could be repaired without Phil having to reproduce it in acrylic.

It's great to have the clock working again, and so beautifully. It actually was important to the North Toronto community in 1931 when architect Charles Dolphin built the Consumers Gas Showroom.

“A feature required on the building was a clock,” according to a report in the building journal Construction in 1931. “As there was none in the immediate district it was felt that this would be a very useful as well as attractive item if it could be embodied in the design.

“In order that the clock might be visible north and south on Yonge Street it was necessary to extend it out from the face of the building.”

Dolphin accomplished that by placing the clock on “an allegorical design of a bird,” frozen as it was poised for flight to the east, thus allowing people on Yonge Street to see the time. The bird motif was repeated in stone at the corners of the building, atop fluted pilasters.

The birds most resemble the phoenix, the legendary bird that is said to have lived 500 years, burned itself on a pyre, and risen from the ashes to live again. Only missing on this building are the flames that usually accompany representations of the phoenix — unless they were assumed, or the choice of bird was emblematic or a visual joke (Consumers Gas — get it?).

In recent years, the Consumers Gas Showroom building also been a women's fitness centre, a Puma athletic shoe store, Bowerings, the Children's Book Store, and a YWCA. Its latest incarnation is as Casalife, a furniture store that opened in early December, and for which the clock was restored. Nice job, Phil!

They're no angels...

Italian priest and self-described "angelologist" Father Renzo Lavatori told a conference on angelic art hosted by the Fondazione Archivio Storico and held in the Vatican-owned Palazzo della Cancelleria that angels don't have wings. In fact, he said, according to a story in Britain's The Independent newspaper that angels don't even have a recognizable human form - that they're more like shards of light.

"Angels do not have wings or look like cherubs,"The Independent quoted Father Lavatori. “You do not see angels so much as feel their presence… They are a bit like sunlight that refracts on you through a crystal vase."

After centuries of seeing angels as winged humans, I'm sticking with that portrayal, as with these angels from the Clarendon Apartments in Toronto (and featured in my book Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto; Anansi, 2006).

I'm not sure that Catholics are angel experts... They're no angels, after all.

Many thanks to Doors Open Toronto and...

all the enthusiastic gargoyle hunters who came out for the Faces on Places walking tours! You have motivated me to update and maintain this blog after a lapse (due to the crush of work at my day job). Stay tuned - new posts coming soon! Keep looking up! For those of you who couldn't make it: CTV News walked with us on the first tour on Saturday (http://toronto.ctv.ca/ - look under "Latest Videos" tab on the right for "Doors Open city architecture tours kick off"), and CBC Radio's Here and Now promo'd the walks on Friday but they don't seem to have archived the interview (or not yet).

More decorated Toronto schools

Harbord Collegiate Institute and Jarvis C.I., both by school-board architect C. E. Cyril Dyson in the 1920s and 1930s, have figures so similar in style that they must have been designed by the same person.

Flanking the main entrance to each building is an academic figure (the Jarvis scholar above - an apparent math phobe, and the Harbord scholar below),





and another pointing to a spherical object that may be a globe — or a ball. (The Jarvis figure is above, and the Harbord fellow is below).



The latter would suggest that the figures illustrate the mens sana in corpore sano philosophy— healthy mind, healthy body. (However, similar figures appear inside Northern Secondary School, where it is more apparent that the spheres are globes and not sport balls.)

Outside the third-storey art-studio window at Jarvis are more student figures, including a reader and a writer.

Central Technical School's scholar and journeyman

Of the four ornamented secondary schools in central Toronto, only Central Technical School has information available about its building’s carved faces — despite publication of individual histories of two of the other schools, and a book devoted to art (including sculpture) in Toronto public schools.

(The original school building was constructed in 1915, designed by architectural firm Ross & Macdonald.)

As described on Central Tech’s web site, at the top of each column supporting the main entrance arch is a “gnome”—a scholar in cap and gown, busily scribbling in a book, and a journeyman with hammer and chisel, representing the two sides of the school’s curriculum. (The tradesman’s hammer has broken and disappeared over the years.)

The "Handball Gods" of Northern Secondary School, Toronto

I recently discovered the website of The Decorated School Research network, a largely European group whose focus is sculptures and murals in and on 20th Century schools, and the relationships between architects, artists and educators through that art.

"We are interested in understanding more about how the art came to be commissioned, how the subject matter was decided, what was its function, its life story and what ideas about education or childhood, if any, were intended to be conveyed," according to the website.

The network, which seems to have begun last year, has a two-year plan including seminars, a final international conference and a book, motivated by the fear that "many of these [artworks] may be in danger as school buildings are becoming replaced often with scant regard to the treasures that they contain."

Having found this group (which I've included in my list of links, to the right), I thought I'd revisit some of the schools I included in Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto (my 2006 book on Toronto's architectural sculpture) as well as to bring out pictures of school sculptures in Toronto and elsewhere that I haven't included here before.



Northern Secondary School, whose architect was C.E.C. Dyson, the Toronto District School Board's own architect, was built in record time in 1930. When I went to shoot the dozen masks all around building in the summer of 2005, a janitor leaned out a window and called to me, “You taking pictures of the funny people?”



“Funny people” they are indeed—and some are contented, goofy, frightened, frightening, or sad — but there is no information on the Oxford-like faces to be found in architectural journals, at the school itself, or in the Toronto District School Board Archives. (In fact, the archive does not even have a file on Dyson, who was the board’s architect from 1921 to 1949.)

I appealed for information — even pet names that students, faculty, or staff may have had for their stone classmates — on the website for Northern’s 75th anniversary in that year. I heard from several of the original graduates, who had a wealth of information on the history of the school, but nothing specifically about the faces.

Then I heard from Amir Fatemi, a more recent graduate. “When I attended Northern between 1993 and ’98, my friends and I played a lot of handball outside the south doors,” he said. “We frequently referred to the gargoyles as the ‘Handball Gods’ since they could oversee everything.”

There is also a wealth of sculpture inside the school (which is known for its art programmes, among other things), and I was recently told by the parent of a Northern alum that the students paint murals on the lockers in the corridors.

Sitting on top of the world!

Okay, more like standing. And as for it being the top of the world, it's only the top of Toronto's Old City Hall. This picture was taken in 2003 when the Ventin Group, the restoration architects working on the building, allowed me to come up on the scaffolding of the 103.6-metre tower to take pictures of the gargoyles that were being replaced.

South High School, Denver

Toronto's Bishop Strachan High School is not alone in not knowing why there are certain sculptures (in this case, chimps) on its building. As I discovered in researching the stories behind many of Toronto's architectural faces, that information is lost for a lot of buildings - but I was left with no doubt that architects and stone carvers had specific people or ideas in mind when they created those faces.

One school that has an elaborate sculpture programme and has kept the stories behind it alive in its yearbooks and on its website is South High School in Denver. My friend Kathy Lingo, one of the principals in Avenue L Architects, took me on a tour of the school (designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1992) when I visited Denver a few years ago. CORRECTION: Kathy Lingo has informed me that contrary to its claim, South H.S. is not a National Historic Landmark and not listed on the National Register. It is, however, a Denver Historic Landmark. (Thanks, Kathy!)

The Romanesque building, designed by the architectural firm of Fisher & Fisher (actually a whole family of architects, which you can read about in this PDF), was completed in 1924. The Fishers, originally Canadian, became a force in Denver architecture.

Apparently, Arthur A. Fisher was a proponent of using painting and sculpture in Denver public buildings, and influenced the use of the sculptures adorning South High.

The most prominent exterior sculpture is the slightly more than one metre tall gargoyle on the roof, the "symbolic protector of South," according to the school's website. Created by sculptor Robert Garrison, it is said to have been inspired by one on Italy's Spoleto Cathedral.



Striped poles flank the front entrance. They are topped by figures said to be faculty members holding creatures representing final exams. The creatures seem ready to devour students whose heads are on piles of books in front of them (see right).

One of two friezes above the main door (pictured below) is known as "Faculty Row," and shows the principal in the centre of a line of the entire faculty. To his right is the assistant principal; on his left is the dean of girls (no longer a position at South). The second frieze, called "Animal Spirits" and not shown here, has figures the symbolize unscholarly behaviour such as rubber-band shooting and gum chewing. (To think that those were the big behaviour problems in classrooms as recently as 10 years ago; now it's students using cell phones and iPods in class.)






Above another door is a frieze showing children going to school - some eagerly, others less so. The less enthusiastic children tend to be toward the back of the line, like this one seen here in close-up:

Let's put on a show!

My friends Michal and Yaniv at the Yonge/Eglinton Aroma Espresso Bar have booked me for a three-week photo exhibition. The pictures, which I hung on Saturday night, are virtually all from Faces on Places, my book on Toronto's gargoyles and other architectural sculpture.



It seemed like a good theme for the period leading up to and including Halloween. Stop by if you get a chance, between now and the 6th of November.

A pox on your ivy!

Ivy clinging to walls looks all scholarly and academic, but it can be destructive when its roots worm their way into fissures in the stone.

So I was shocked and concerned when I saw that many of the sculptures on Ryerson University's Kerr Hall were completely obscured by ivy when I led a Heritage Toronto walking tour there on Sunday, based on Faces on Places, my book about Toronto's architectural sculpture.

The ivy was much, much thicker than is seen in this picture, shot in 2005. The sculpture pictured here is of a javelin thrower by Elizabeth Wyn Wood. She was one of four leading Canadian sculptors of the mid-20th century (the others were Dora de Pédery-Hunt, Jacobine Jones and Thomas Bowie) who were chosen to decorate Kerr Hall when it was built in the early 1960s with sculptures representing the aims of an institute of higher learning in the heart of a city.

Ryerson president Sheldon Levy has made no secret of the fact that he'd like to see Kerr Hall torn down. He's been saying that since before the university's "master plan" was released, envisioning greater integration of the campus into downtown Toronto.

That was four years ago, and Kerr Hall is still standing. Is it Ryerson's apparent ambivalence about Kerr Hall that has resulted in this inaction? For the sake of the sculptures, which surely will be saved if Kerr Hall is demolished, the ivy should be removed and any necessary repairs or cleaning undertaken. Several people on the tour, unprompted by me, voiced that opinion, which I hope they will communicate to the university.

Speaking of opinions, researchers in Oxford, England, are investigating whether ivy is actually damaging, or whether it plays a "bioprotective role ... on the surface of historical buildings and structures as an agent of thermal and moisture regulation."

Hmmmmm... With all the gargoyles and whatnot in Oxford, you'd think they would know. But over on this side of the pond, Yale University - an actual Ivy League school - has been waging a war on the vines for some time.

Back in business, baby!

Sorry for the long absence, folks. The day job and numerous other responsibilities have occupied all of my waking hours over the last year. (Has it been that long?!) But I'm back now.

NEWS: See the sidebar (right) for an upcoming Faces on Places-themed walking tour, and a link to a chapter of my forthcoming biography of Merle Foster.

Photos and regular updates to resume presently.

Maclean-Hunter Ltd. (RIP)

These aren't from a newspaper office, but from the building that used to be the head office of Maclean-Hunter Ltd. on University Avenue here in Toronto. It was built in 1961 for MH which published Maclean’s and Chatelaine magazines as well as a large stable of trade publications.

Maclean-Hunter had been on this site long before that — the company, including its printing plant, had been on the corner of University and Dundas since 1911. The printing plant moved — when? — to Yonge Street and Highway 401, and later to Aurora, Ont.; Maclean-Hunter moved to College Park (the former Eaton's College Street store) in 1983, and ceased to exist when it was bought by Rogers Communications Inc. in 1995. Rogers now publishes Maclean's, Chatelaine and a much smaller (and shrinking) stable of trade and professional publications (including the Medical Post, where I do my Day Job).

So this building was never actually a newspaper office, but it was the hub of a considerable proportion of Canadian periodical publishing. As I describe in Faces on Places, it features an incised naked woman floating in front of a long ribbon on one side of a building, and a naked man floating and holding a ribbon on the other.

When she won the commission for “exterior decorations” on the new MH building, Elizabeth Wyn Wood apparently thought the company had something more sculptural in mind.

“Symptomatic of the diminishing role and significance of sculptural decoration in modern Canadian architecture, Maclean officials agreed to only two simplified entrance panels on ‘Communications,’” said Victoria Baker in her examination of Wood’s life and work.

“Wood interpreted this theme in the form of female and male nude figures symbolizing ‘Sending’ [above] and ‘Receiving,’ [below] respectively.”

STOP! Don't click away from this site!

This is still Terry Murray's blog, featuring gargoyles and other architectural sculpture from Faces on Places and elsewhere.

I just felt the need for a change.

What do you think?

They're everywhere! Part 2

A few weeks ago, I posted a picture of a gargoyle at Denver International Airport, remarking on how gargoyles (generically speaking) seem to appear everywhere.

Guess where else they appear? How about on a mausoleum? This guy (above) is on the Massey mausoleum in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Yes, that's the "Massey" of Massey Hall, Massey-Ferguson, Raymond Massey (the late actor) and Vincent Massey (the first Canadian-born governor general of Canada).

It's not as though the Masseys couldn't have afforded a proper gargoyle. I mean, look at this spout (below) with all the fancy detail around it. With the face on the turret, why couldn't they have sprung for a face on the spout that would turn it into an honest-to-god gargoyle?

Last glance at Baltimore

I didn't like Baltimore. I probably didn't see enough of it or at its best, but what I did see didn't really make me interested in going back. I spent most of my time at a pediatrics conference for the Day Job, but on the shuttle to and from it every day, I saw a depressed, boarded-up downtown. The skies were slate grey and rained much of the time I was there, which didn't help my impression either.
But I did see a bit of architectural sculpture. These figures on the defunct Hotel Junker caught my attention because this type of architectural ornament really doesn't appear anywhere in Toronto.

When these supporting sculpted figures are female, they are called caryatids, but males are known as telamones (singular: telamon) or atlantes (singular: atlas as in Atlas, who bore the sphere of the heavens on his shoulders.

Toronto actually does have one (below, as shown in Faces on Places), on the former Bank of Montreal that is now the Hockey Hall of Fame. He is mostly identified as Hermes, though - the god of commerce.

Back in Toronto

So when I was driving around the GTA a few weeks ago, I noticed a house that had a riot of birdhouses and garden ornament. There were these bird condominiums (left - sadly the clouds rolled in for this shot), and this interesting configuration of birdhouses on the wall of the human-house:

It was a corner house, and when I turned into the perpendicular street, I saw a profusion of garden ornament, of which this picture offers only a hint:

Okay, so they're not gargoyles, but I shoot a lot of things.

❖❖❖

A friend drove me home from the Distillery District a few weeks ago, where I'd read from Faces on Places as part of Toronto's 175th anniversary (the theme of which was Toronto writers and books about the city) and Doors Open Toronto. We took a short cut which took us past a garage with the head of Caesar on one corner of the roof




and a lion or cat over the main garage door. Of course I was curious about who they were and why they were there, so I phoned the people listed as living there, and learned they were props from a couple of movies that were shot here - "Bulletproof Monk" and "The Incredible Hulk."



The props (made of styrofoam, by the way) were just sitting around, so the owner of this house (a carpenter in the biz) rescued them and gave them a good home - his.

Watcher at the window

A couple of Fridays ago, the weather in Toronto was glorious - sunny, warm - and it promised to be the same on the weekend. So late on that Friday afternoon, I managed to get a deal on a rental car, and spent the weekend driving around the GTA (Greater Toronto Area - yes, I even ventured into Mississauga) and shooting.
This house is one of my finds. In the University of Toronto Annex neighbourhood, it has two faces on either side of the main door, and a face on each of two bay windows.
The late architectural historian Patricia McHugh described this house as having "too many quick and fussy decorative details for its own good," but I think that's a bit harsh.

Toronto faces by Harry Wayne Owen

Back somewhere in the depths of 2008, master carver, sculptor and painter Harry Wayne Owen (of Harry's Folly) and I swapped our handiwork. I sent him a copy of my book, Faces on Places, and he sent me some of his sculpted ornaments.
Working down in Atlanta, he then interpreted some of the faces in my book and produced the ornament you see here. (He posted others on his own site back in January.) This fellow and his confreres are from Toronto's Old City Hall.
Wayne's ornaments are great, but his walking sticks are fabulous. Be sure to swing by his blog.