The Personality of American CitiesHungerford, Edward
History
The Personality of American Cities
Hungerford, Edward
Cities and towns -- United States; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
But Victoria is across a broad continent as well as a broad sea, and so
your thrifty emigrant from an English town picks Toronto as the city of
his adoption. Winnipeg he deems too American; Montreal, with her
damnable French blood showing even in the street-signs and the
car-placards, quite out of the question. But Toronto does appeal to him
and so he comes straight to her. There are whole sections of the town
that are beginning to look as if they might have been stolen from
Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool--even London itself. The little
red-brick houses with their neat, small windows are as distinctively
British as the capped and aproned house-maids upon the street. In the
States it takes a mighty battle to make a maid wear uniform upon the
street. In Toronto it is not even a question for argument. The negro
servant, so common to all of us, is unknown. The service of the better
grade of Toronto houses is today carefully fashioned upon the British
model--even to meal hours and the time-honored English dishes upon the
table. And in less aristocratic streets of the town one may see a
distinctively British institution, taken root and apparently come to
stay. It is known as a "fish and chip shop" and it retails fried fish
and potato chips, already cooked and greasy enough to be endearing to
the cockney heart.
* * * * *
Remember also that the city upon the north shore of Lake Ontario is an
industrial center of great importance. You cannot measure the tonnage of
Toronto harbor as you measured the harbor of Cleveland--alongside of the
greatest ports of the world--for Ontario is the lonely sister of the
five Lakes. No busy commercial fleet treks up and down her lanes. But
Toronto is a railroad center of increasing importance; they are still
multiplying the lines out from her terminals and, as we have just
intimated, she is a great and growing manufacturing community. Her
industrial enterprises have been hungry for skilled and intelligent men.
They have gradually drafted their ranks from the less-paid trades of the
town. Into these places have come the men from the English towns. The
street cars are manned by men of delightful cockney accent, they drive
the broad flat "lourries," as an Englishman likes to call a dray, they
fit well into every work that requires brawn and endurance rather than a
high degree of intellectual effort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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