The Christie Pits Riot and the birth of multicultural Toronto

The Christie Pits Riot and the birth of multicultural Toronto

via Posted Toronto by Rob Roberts on 8/15/08

(Toronto Archives; fonds 1266, Globe and Mail Collection, item 30791)

By Brianna Goldberg, National Post

The picture seen above, the only image of the anti-Semitic rampage known as the Christie Pits Riot, wasn't published in 1933. By newspaper standards of its time, the frantic image taken by a photographer at the Globe was deemed too streaky to print, for all the movement it captured.
Four papers wrote about the riot. Their details were streaky, too: Hours of violence. Bricks and pipes. Blood. And, of course, the swastikas.
For Jews, the story became something passed between family members as legend; it became a symbol of the second-generation Canadian Jews who asserted themselves.
But to the city at large it is coming to mean more, a symbol of the first stages of a multicultural Toronto. Sunday, Heritage Toronto unveils a plaque to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its anti-Jewish violence.
The story goes like this:
The first summer after Hitler came to power in Germany, Toronto temperatures blasted past the thermometer's 100 F mark for many, many days as Canada suffered through the deepest moment of the Depression.
Many Jews in Toronto, most working in stifling warehouses near Spadina Avenue's garment district, were deemed not welcome by resorts in Northern Ontario, and thus made a weekend routine of shooting eastward along the Queen Street streetcar to cool relief at the shores of Kew Beach.
The locals complained that the Jewish visitors were littering orange peels. The locals complained they were changing into their bathing suits in the open air. And, soon, the locals more menacingly expressed their displeasure by taking a cue from the headlines they would have read about Hitler, and founded their own "swastika clubs."
The only thing that prevented a riot from happening along the shores in those days of the swastika clubs was the swift action of a few police officers, and an agreement brokered by the mayor that "officially," but certainly not effectively, disbanded the swastika clubs.
So when the all-Jewish Harbord Playground baseball team took the pitch against the non-Jewish St. Peter's team for the city's semi-finals in the coming weeks, the swastika supporters and those they aimed to intimidate were there in force and ready to scrap.
The first game on Aug. 16, 1933, came and went amidst catcalls, pushing, shoving, and a shirt waved around with a swastika sewn into the back.
But it wasn't until the second game, after St. Peter's caught the ball for the final out of the game, that local anti-Semitic thugs, part of a group called The Pit Gang, stood up on a small hill behind the field and unfurled a bed sheet painted with a black swastika.
Jewish supporters rushed the toughs holding the sheet. Nazi supporters rushed the Jews. Residents around the park (who, census statistics show, were overwhelmingly WASPs) spilled out of their homes and into the street armed with broom handles. And so began the six-hour riot.
This is where the newspaper reports start to diverge, and urban myth takes over.
Dr. Levitt says the legend goes that trucks were commandeered, and trolled along roads in the traditionally Jewish neighbourhood of Kensington Market as passengers called out that Jews were being attacked in the Pits.
People grabbed whatever they could find — a brick, a pipe, brass knuckles, a pool cue — and ran north to become a part of the swarm in the park.
Some say there were hundreds. Or else thousands. Or else tens of thousands there that night.
And the legend, according to Dr. Levitt, says it was the first time Toronto's Jews stood up for themselves.
It was this richness of the Christie Pits folklore that motivated literary journalist Judy Stoffman to chair a committee that would create a definitive Heritage Toronto plaque in the first place.
"I just kept coming across novels and short stories that use the riot as a background, and I was intrigued by the way it had entered the consciousness of the city," she said. "Traumatic historical events like that... they trouble you. They trouble the writers. And I was puzzled why there was no marker for an event like that."
Ms. Stoffman got the go-ahead from Heritage Toronto, and invited academics and politicians to be part of a committee to make the plaque. She said they endlessly edited its wording, and even fund-raised for it to be made. Sunday, they will unveil the piece of bronze, which makes a place in the city's official history for the night of racial violence.
National Post columnist Robert Fulford wrote the forward to Levitt and Shaffir's book on Christie Pits. In it, he laments his own ignorance of the riot, and ascribes it to his theory that "colonies, by nature, lack self-awareness and a sense of their own past; they believe that matters of note happen elsewhere."
Now, 20 years later, he still describes it as "a very small event in the history of the world."
"Nobody will ever think of it as a great Canadian event," he says. "But in a way, it was an expression of the multiculturalism that would be, in the future.