Peterborough at the Dawn of the Local Motion Picture Theatre
George Street at Hunter, looking north — Peterborough in the early age of its industrial revolution, a decade before movie theatres. Were people looking for something to do, something to amuse themselves with? Here a huge crowd gathers on Monday, July 13, 1895, for an Orangemen Parade “for the Glorious 12th” (celebrating the July 12 victory of the Battle of Boyne in 1690), with many onlookers looking out from the windows of the buildings above the street. Thousands of visitors came into town by train that day. In the mid-afternoon, when this photo was taken, the sun had burst out; but in the morning rain had fallen “in torrents,” thus accounting for the many umbrellas in the crowd. Peterborough Museum and Archives (PMA), 2000-012-002134-1.
“The Nickelodeons are important factors in the entertainment of the masses to-day, and they, springing up everywhere and in every conceivable city, town or hamlet . . . are all getting a good livelihood, and the prospects for the future are bright.” – The Moving Picture World, Dec. 7, 1907, p.643.
One autumn day in 1906 a bear was spotted shambling along downtown’s Simcoe Street. A few weeks later a “ferocious” lynx was shot dead near the edge of the city. That September, too, one Joseph Rickerby was fined for “immoderate driving” of his horse on George St. Then again, on a midsummer’s day in 1907 it was big news when a “horse and buggy” were stolen.
Around the same time, though, something even a little more out of the ordinary happened. In 1907 Peterborough’s first standalone electric motion picture theatres opened: Scott’s Colloseum (January), Wonderland (July), and The Crystal (September).
“Peterborough Always Had Plenty of Amusements,” of course, but the coming of motion pictures (along with the construction and opening of the Grand Opera House in 1905) represented a democratic transformation of the city’s cultural life in a way that could scarcely have been imagined only a decade earlier. One cinematic sage wrote that “films bear the traces of the societies that made and consumed them.” A reconnaissance of moviegoing history, he suggested, can open up “a range of important issues in politics, culture, and the arts — both ‘high’ and ‘popular.’” It is, I believe, a journey worth taking.
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Daily Review, March 31, 1904, p.5. Peterborough around the time it was being touted as “the banner city in the Dominion” (at least by the local newspaper).
“The Electric City in a Nutshell”
For the most part – and even despite a serious general depression in 1907–9 – the Peterborough of those days was a growing, flourishing, prosperous city – a place that looked to be “progressive” – filled not with bears and lynx but bullish with optimism.
Thanks in no small part to railway lines and plentiful cheap electricity charged from a fast-flowing river, by the late 19th century the place had transformed itself from a rather swampy and “backward” lumbering and milling settlement into a burgeoning mercantile and manufacturing centre with high hopes for the future, a place striving for modernity, trying its almighty best to keep up with the growth occurring in larger centres – with hopes of being one of those larger progressive centres itself.
The Canadian General Electric Company in the early years. The company established itself in town in 1891 as Edison General Electric Company, but its name soon changed to CGE and it was for years the city’s largest industrial plant. This image is from a booklet of “city views” produced around 1907 by Irishman Robert J. Soden, Bookseller and Stationer. Trent Valley Archives, Soden booklet.
As early as 1883–84 a local report remarked: “Factories are springing up on all sides, and we feel confident that in the course of a few more years this will become one of the greatest centres of industry in Canada.” Indeed, soon enough the town would provide a welcoming home to an industrial enterprise that would become one of the largest Canadian General Electric plants in the country (said to be “booming” in March 1905, and in 1906 manufacturing about 1,000 street-car motors). The American Cereal Company was touted as “the largest cereal mill in the British Empire” and in April 1905 was reportedly doing “record business.” (It changed its name to Quaker Oats in August 1906.) Peterborough had three canoe companies, with nearly 2,000 canoes being manufactured every year. It had woollen mills and flour mills and saw mills, tanneries, and a meat factory (Canada Packers). It had plants that manufactured locks and agricultural implements (binders and other harvesting machinery) and carpets.
Morning Times, Dec. 18, 1906. Peterborough on the cusp of modernity. The new Y.M.C.A. building is featured on the right.
Other factories turned out shovels and tools, harness and leather goods, cordage, and rope and binder twine. The city had a brick works, shingle mill, “dye works,” and even a mattress factory. It had long-standing breweries. It was said at the time to be in the heart of a “rich agricultural district.”
Examiner, Nov. 23, 1906, p.2. The city’s harvest of incoming workers included a sail maker from Scotland.
An old standby, lumbering, remained active, with “all mills running full time” in 1906. As early as 1901 the town was said to have a total of 122 manufacturing establishments, which provided jobs for some 3,125 workers. Those numbers would only increase in the following years, along with the diversity of job opportunities. It was the beginning of an era in which much of the workforce laboured in sizeable factories – and a good number of employees, including young women, worked in large downtown department stores.
Examiner, May 10, 1907, p.7. In the early decades of the 20th century, churches aplenty went up for a church-going population.
In the middle of the first decade of the 20th century Peterborough had workers in the building, metal, engineering, and shipbuilding trades; in printing and clothing concerns (journeyman tailors, and garment and boot and shoe workers). The city had three daily newspapers: Evening Examiner, Daily Evening Review, and Morning Times. It saw people toiling in food and tobacco preparation, with forty butter and cheese concerns. It had its bakers, confectioners, cigar-makers, ice handlers; butchers and “meat cutters”; leather workers, barbers, broom-makers, clerks, stenographers, delivery employees, and hotel and restaurant employees. It also had workers in “unskilled labour,” a general field of activity that “actively prevailed.” It had a scattering of theatre employees. Most if not all of these workers were looking for things to do once their workdays and workweeks were over.
Examiner, Aug. 21, 1906, p.8.
Construction was rampant. Although the town already had many fine and impressive nineteenth-century structures, a massive amount of new building was underway: the Y.M.C.A. at the corner of George and Murray (1897); the massive Lift Lock (opened in 1904; about 10,000 passengers passed through during the 1906 season); the Y.W.C.A. at Simcoe and Aylmer (1905) and, across the street from that, a new fire hall (1908); the Grand Opera House (1905); a Normal School (1907); a Public Library at George and McDonnel (1911); the Armouries (1909); a new filtration plant (1909, replacing the older pump house just a bit further up the river, which later became the “Monkey House” at the zoo); the Bonnerworth Woolen Mill on McDonnel (1911). In September 1906 “modernly constructed warehouses” went up at the corner of George and Dalhousie streets. The daily papers in mid-decade were full of heated debate about whether the town could afford a badly needed new collegiate institute to replace the aging cramped grammar-school quarters of Central (or Union) School. (The project was finally agreed upon and completed in 1908.)
Examiner, Dec. 29, 1906, p.9.
In 1907 a new music hall was to be constructed at the rear of the relatively new Conservatory of Music at 302 Hunter Street West, on the northeast corner at Rubidge (it would seat 600 and be available for concerts). Surprisingly, perhaps, to anyone who lives in the city today, improving (or replacing with steel and concrete) the wooden planks of the bridge over Jackson Creek on Charlotte Street was a major concern. The Trent Canal had been completed and opened. In 1906 there was front-page talk of the possibility of constructing a “high-level bridge” over the Otonabee at Hunter Street (it was years before the bridge was finally constructed in 1919–21). As archivist and architectural journalist Andrew Elliott puts it, all of the iconic buildings constructed in the period from about 1885 to 1914 “gave the city, which was rather small in land size, the sense that it was a vibrant, hopeful, even metropolitan place.”
Examiner, Dec. 15, 1906, p.22. A handy and beautiful new residential area, just across the river from downtown.
The construction included new houses. Large homes went up in what was then the far west end of the city, between Park Street and Monaghan, including Gilmour and Homewood streets and what are known as “the Avenues.” East of the Otonobee River, a call went out for prospective buyers of a nice place in the “Engleburn Park” area. On the other extreme, “Dunslow’s Dwellings” – one and a half storeys – were being built close to the “manufactories” – on Bethune between London and Dublin streets; they could be rented by workers for $12 to $18 a month. (The city had a demand for at least 200 small-sized houses, builder H. Dunslow said.) Homes for workers were being built near the new Brinton Carpet factory in the south end. By early 1907 plans were being hatched to extend George Street south to Lansdowne. In all, in the year 1906 some 310 buildings went up in Peterborough – placing the city “sixth in the Dominion” in the realm of construction.
Examiner, May 30, 1907, p.3. A housing crisis with people resorting to tents remains a familiar story well over a century later.
Housing had become a problem with the expanded industrialization and rapidly growing population. In the summer of 1906 a local manufacturer was complaining that the city needed at least one hundred moderately priced rental houses – to be offered at a rate of about $10 to $12 a month – to satisfy the needs of workingmen. Homes that had been renting a few years earlier for $4 or $5 a month were now going for $10, and hard to find. One report mentioned that rents in the city had doubled in the past six years. Many of the homes going up in the decade were large structures aimed at the wealthier class, and a report that same year commented on the overcrowding of boarding houses. An investigator found a “four-roomed house” that “sheltered twenty-five men of different nationalities.” People living in the neighbourhood expressed concerns about sanitation. In the following year the paper reported on three families that were crowded into one small house on Albert Street (on property that was being taken over by the Canadian General Electric plant). There was even a family caught living in a tent (an issue still with us over a century later). In response, house-building had become particularly active, with the “greatest number of houses being erected,” the paper noted, “for workingmen, who were building houses for themselves so as to avoid paying rent.”
Examiner, Nov. 24, 1906, p.13. With industrialization came the consolidation of the consumer economy. The Lech store, with a stuffed bear out front, was a downtown mainstay for decades.
The members of the growing working-class population, both men and women, toiled long and hard through the standard six-day week, and leisure time outside of the home was taking on a new, twentieth-century shape. The city’s manufacturing plants were filled with men, but downtown businesses and stores were hiring women as clerks, secretaries, and sales personnel. As U.S. cinema historian Lary May points out, “For the first time, females had money to spend, and the means to enjoy it.” The male labourers who had steady jobs, with incomes above the subsistence level, could use some of the extra money on leisure pursuits.
Crowds would gather at the bandstand at Victoria Park, just below the County Court House, for regular concerts in the early years of the century, and in particular the music of the 57th Regiment Band. Ancestry.ca historical postcards.
The resulting wave of commercial and mass “entertainment” and “amusement” outings represented a new industry. Huge circuses came to town in the summer months (as they had been doing since the mid-nineteenth century). In good weather there were concerts to go to in Victoria Park in the heart of the city, fronting the County Court House (where concerns were raised about the crowds damaging the lawns and flower beds), and to Jackson Park on the northwest fringe. Otherwise concerts were regular attractions at the Market Hall (and a few were held outdoors in the Market Square behind Market Hall), Brock Street skating rink, Total Abstinence Society’s “Rooms,” Foresters’ Hall, YMCA hall, Salvation Army Barracks, and churches. Bradburn’s Opera House had its meetings, concerts, and plays. The splendid music of the 57th Regiment band was a constant feature around town, drawing big crowds, whether it was paying audiences inside, at the Bradburn, or free, outside at Victoria Park. The newspapers scarcely let a day go by without announcing an upcoming “interesting lecture” of some sort. (On Tuesday, November 20, 1906, people could go out to St. John’s Hall to hear a “limelight lecture” by the “famous female explorer” Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, who would tell of her travels in Labrador and offer the story of her husband’s death on his ill-fated expedition.) To top it all off, the city’s populace, a report proudly attested, was a thoroughly “church-going” phenomenon.
Examiner, Nov. 26, 1906, p.8.
On days other than Sunday, there were plentiful sporting pursuits: golfing (on the “Auburn Links,” in 1898), baseball, hockey, tennis (on grass at Nicholls Oval), ice skating at the Brock Street Rink (often with live music) and elsewhere, fun at the roller rinks on Charlotte (“Band every night”) and George (a place called the “Auditorium” opened in September 1908), tug of war contests, boxing and wrestling, football, rugby, basketball (at the Y), horse racing, bicycling (what was called a “bicycle craze” took hold in 1897), sprinting, walking races, canoeing, summer regattas at the lakes, pool and billiards – something, it seemed, for everyone (but especially men).
An “indoor harrier competition” took place at the Brock Street rink in 1907, featuring the well-known runner Tom Longboat of the Six Nations Grand River Reserve near Brantford, Ont. The “fashionable” set had their occasions; and dancing was popular. On one special evening out at Chemong Park, “The gentlemen in their immaculate white ducks and the ladies [in] their gay-looking summer costumes, presented a pretty sight as they glided to and fro.”
Then there were all those thousands of people from a mix of social classes who turned out evening after evening to partake in the pleasures of entertainment and other activities at Jackson Park, both summer and winter.
Examiner, May 10, 1907, p.6. The Dominion Cafe, opened in 1906 below the Clock Tower at the corner of George and Charlotte, was the first Chinese restaurant established in the city (in 1937 it was renamed the Deluxe Cafe). Its owner, a newly arrived Chinese immigrant with the anglicized name Tom Him (also known as Thomas Him), called himself George Thomas for business purposes.
For those involved in the realm of commercial amusements, it was a time not just of optimism, but of rampant puffery. The times were remarkable for their lack of cynicism, at least as represented in the public record. “A Whirlwind of Pleasure,” the paper would say about some now-forgotten presentation – “One of the best musical farce comedies that has come to town in some time.” Or, about another: The McKinney Brothers Magnificent Minstrels were “easily the best which have appeared in Peterborough during the last ten years.” An appearance by the Irish Guards in October 1905 was “A Musical Treat Unparalleled in the History of the City.” (As it turned out, the audience for that attraction “was not as large as it should have been.”) Jackson Park was even described one day in the summer of 1906 as “The Prettiest Park in the Dominion of Canada.” Peterborough, said a report, “doubtless makes the best cheese in the country.” The new Dominion Chinese Cafe, opened in December 1906 at 328 George Street (Geo. Thomas, proprietor), promised a “first-class Chinese engaged from British Columbia” and the “best cup of coffee in Canada.”
Examiner, June 8, 1901, p.3.
The world of “amusement” was going big – as if each “coming attraction” had to outdo whatever had been seen before in town. When the Ringling Brothers Circus came to Peterborough in June 1901 it was advertised as showcasing an astounding 500 horses, 60 acrobats, 60 aerialists, and, quite amazingly, “30 elephants.” What painful efforts (for both humans and beasts) did it take to get all those horses and elephants onto trains and in and out of town? (In 1906 the paper reported that the visiting Barnum ’n’ Bailey Circus used eighty-four railway cars to bring its great show to town.)
Even more incredibly, as the giant topper for the Big Top, the ad announced: “See the only giraffe known to exist on earth.” Were newspaper readers more than a little suspicious about this claim? And how did people sympathetic to animals and their treatment – especially the many farmers who were constantly driving into and out of town – feel about all of this? The circuses and other events that regularly came to town offered up signs, perhaps, of something that French filmmaker François Truffaut would point to many decades later: the entertainment industry’s early “exaggerations of modern life.”
Examiner, March 16, 1907, p.11.
From a population of 2,191 in 1851 the town – which had been established overnight in 1825 with the arrival of the Irish Peter Robinson settlers – had reached around 10,000 by the turn of the century. In 1903, after the town of Peterborough amalgamated with the cross-river community of Ashburnham (forever called “East City”), the population got a boost, to just under 15,000. Suddenly, after years of straining at the bit, Peterborough became a “city.” From one year to the next the place went from being described as the “largest town in Canada” to the “Biggest Little City in Canada.”
Examiner, July 15, 1907, p.1.
Examiner, July 16, 1907, p.4. When autos were the latest thing.
Its leading characteristics included “steady, rapid and healthy progressivism” and “unrivalled railway advantages.” In 1903 the ultra-successful plumbing and electrical shop owner (and bicycle seller) Frank R.J. MacPherson drove the town’s first motor car, a Winton, somewhat cautiously along Charlotte Street’s bumpy dirt surface and over the wooden bridge across Jackson Creek. In 1906 MacPherson sold the vehicle to a Mr. “E. Hanna,” of London Street (who may well have been the Ernest Hannah who later worked at motion picture theatres). MacPherson got himself another “new machine,” and the city now had two autos on its streets. Others soon followed. Clashes between the new autos, streetcars, and the still-plentiful horses on the streets became almost daily events.
It was big news in spring of 1907 when a “local man,” Fred E. Darcy, bought a large touring car, which he intended to use to move passengers between Peterborough and Lakefield that summer. The car had to be brought to Peterborough by train and unloaded at the C.P.R. yards. Darcy soon opened up an “Automobile Service” at 346 George Street. “Call on me,” he advertised. “I can save you money and get you one reasonable [sic].” In the summer of that same year, “a New York party” arrived in Peterborough by auto, travelling from Kingston “in the fast time of six hours.”
In those days being seen as a “progressive city” was of the upmost importance. Attracting even more new industry was a primary goal. In January 1906 Edward A. Peck, an Ashburnham lawyer and politician (later serving in both provincial and federal legislatures), predicted that Peterborough would soon outrival the city of Toronto. In February Senator George A. Cox of Peterborough prophesied an increase in population of 5,000 people within “a very few years.” A few days later another wise man looking to the future estimated that the city’s population in 1915 would be 50,000. (By 1951 it had reached only around 38,272.) A 1907 photo booklet published by the R.J. Soden bookshop suggested, “Peterborough promises to become one of the most prominent of the younger Canadian cities.”
A complicated exclusion
Joseph Whetung Jr., nd. A listing of Curve Lake chiefs has Joseph Whetung as chief from 1907 to 1910. www.picbear.org.
The ethnic makeup of this hopeful citizenry was thoroughly “white” and homogeneous, almost entirely of Irish and British descent, with only a sprinkling of so-called “foreigners.” Seldom mentioned in those early years and for decades after was that it was in essence a white settler community.
The original inhabitants of the territory called Nogojiwanong (“place at the end of rapids”), primarily the Anishinaabe or Anishnaabeg (Ojibwe), had been displaced decades earlier, for the most part shunted aside to reserves – Curve Lake, Hiawatha, Alderville, and Scugog Island, among other places – and left largely out of the sight and minds of the city’s people. Even in 1950 the white community’s mindset continued to insist (in the words of an Examiner writer) that Peterborough’s history consisted of “a European culture thrust into the midst of a primitive wilderness.”
Across the country the relationship of that newly embedded white settler European community was both exploitative and broken — and it was not at all a matter of being thrust into “a primitive wilderness.” The invasion of long-existing Indigenous territories with their established communities, cultures, and governance was followed not just by displacement but by broken treaties, theft of resources, poverty, belittlement, and a denial of basic human rights. The mindset of the white settlers largely ignored cultural differences, and basic needs; the horrors of the residential school system, an attempt at forced assimilation, have become almost daily news in the twenty-first century.
Not surprisingly given the city’s white settler homogeneity, in Peterborough in 1911 it was considered newsworthy when Chief Joseph Whetung of Curve Lake “called into the Examiner” and talked to an editor about earlier days. “The Indians have come and gone,” the paper’s writer stated. “Their passing has been consistent with the rapid advance of civilization.”
Examiner, editorial, March 31, 1954, p.4. A supposedly wise man makes the argument against giving Indigenous peoples the vote. It would be okay if they weren’t living on reserves, as “wards to the state.”
The newspaper was expressing what would later be called a “hegemonic colonial discourse” (representing, as Canada’s Supreme Court Chief Justice put it, an “ethos of exclusion and cultural annihilation”). At the time of Whetung’s visit the newspaper editor was probably more than a little curious about this Native man who had strangely wandered into his office, a member of a group (in the words of Argentinian/Canadian writer Alberto Manguel) “excluded from the realm of power.” After all, it had only been thirty-five years since the 1876 annual report of the Department of the Interior had identified the “aborigines” of the country as “wards or children of the state.”
Many years later — in March 1954 — an Examiner editorial (probably written by Robertson Davies) was still using that same expression — “ward of the state” — to justify the exclusion of “the Indian” from being given the vote. The writer feared that Indians, “with no powerful political sense,” would vote as a bloc and turn an election in an improper way. To get the vote, they would have “to leave the reserves and become citizens” – a telling remark that showed no understanding of the history of the indigenous peoples living near Peterborough (and elsewhere) and the political, cultural, and economic conditions that had determined the shape of their lives over time.
The attitude turned a blind eye to Indigenous dynamism, innovation, and technology – and the innate sense of responsibility that came with their position on the Earth. In 2020 Robert Jago, a member of the Kwantlen First Nation and Nooksack Indian Tribe, would still be writing: “Non-Natives act like we entered the world the day after they landed on Plymouth Rock, like they brought us into creation and are teaching us to be almost but not quite as good as them.”
The prevailing attitude turned a blind eye to Indigenous dynamism, innovation, and technology – and the strong sense of responsibility that came with living on the Earth.
It was an irony of the time that the newspaper writer himself was a “newcomer” – a white European settler – and indigenous peoples had lived in the region for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. (The petroglyphs, carved into rocks by indigenous people about 54 kilometers northeast of Peterborough, date from 900 to 140 A.D.)
Weekly Examiner, Jan. 13, 1921, p.5. Daniel Whetung won the election; he was chief from 1913 to 1943. Here the newspaper used the top part of the larger photographic portrait of Whetung.
Even at the time of Chief Whetung’s 1911 appearance in town and visit to the paper’s office, the original inhabitants of the area had not by any means “come and gone.” If nothing else, his visit alone put the lie to the statement. The indigenous peoples survived despite colonialism, attempts at assimilation, and brutal, often desperate, conditions. They were, early on, striving to regain rights that had been taken away. This same Joseph Whetung, the Examiner reported some ten years later, made a trip to Toronto “to get more freedom for the Indians in shooting and fishing, but failed in his endeavours.” As Manitoba MLA Nahanni Fontaine has recently put it, “We were not supposed to be here. Indeed, that was the plan so methodically and strategically executed. But despite every imaginable assault, we are still here and, in some capacity or another, flourishing.”
In the early years of the twentieth century it was by no means an easy trip from Curve Lake into Peterborough. In her account of the history of the community, resident Mae Whetung-Derrick writes: “The Curve Lake village in the early twentieth century was relatively isolated. The road that was built in 1904 was not more than a muddy trail and there were very few vehicles in the village.” Whetung-Derrick also tells of how, as European settlers “arrived by the boat load” in the nineteenth century and settled on the land in the area, very soon “the conditions under which the First Nations people lived were deplorable.” They lost their hunting grounds, and the game they relied on became scarce.
Even so, the population of what was originally called Mud Lake Reserve but later Curve Lake First Nation grew from 200 people in the late nineteenth century to around 768 on the reserve (and 1,409 off reserve) in the twenty-first; some 275 people live at Hiawatha First Nation; and in all 5,400 people in Greater Peterborough self-identify as Aboriginal.
Even in the first decade of the twentieth century First Nations peoples, in various guises, were still very much in evidence – as witnessed in the appearance on the local opera stage, more than once, of the famous poet Pauline Johnson or in the local celebrity of champion road racers such as Fred Simpson of Alderville First Nation or Albert Smoke of Curve Lake.
Weekly Examiner, April 17, 1913.
Indigenous peoples of one sort or another were constants in the realm of entertainment. Chief Whetung’s interview came on the very same day that a massive “Wild West Show” arrived in town from Lindsay and pitched its tents at the Exhibition Grounds – a show packed with the usual host of “wild Indians.” A few years later it would be “Kendry’s Great Indian Congress” at the Exhibition Grounds, billed as “Depicting Indian Life of Early Days – The Greatest Arenic Spectacle of the Kind Ever Introduced.”
The following five decades of motion picture exhibition in town would never suffer from a shortage of “Indians” on the silver screens. From the start “Indian pictures” were immensely popular, at least among the white settler folk of Peterborough, and they would remain so for decades to come. As American-Canadian (and half Cherokee) writer Thomas King puts it, “Hollywood has had a long-standing love affair with the Indian.” The relationship has always depended on constantly applied stereotypes — usually administered more for ill than for good.
“I, like many Native people my generation and older, spent most of our youth looking for images of ourselves on both the big and the little screen. But what did we get? Rock Hudson as a square-jawed Chiricahua warrior. Or Jeff Chandler as a Jewish Cochise, in Broken Arrow. Chuck Connors gained fame as an actor cast in his role as Geronimo. It’s more than mildly ironic to discover that in a film celebrating the life of a great Apache leader, there was not one actual Native person cast in the whole movie.” — Anishnawbe writer Drew Hayden Taylor (of Curve Lake, near Peterborough), News: Postcards from the Four Directions.
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A survey of the “foreign population”
As for the ethnic makeup of Peterborough, an Examiner report in 1907, “Some Facts about the Foreign Population of City as It Is To-Day,” reckoned that the “foreigners” or nationalities in the city – that is, the “others” who were not of Irish, English, or Scottish origin – did “not number more than half a dozen” groups.
Examiner, July 20, 1907, p.9.
The city could “hardly be called cosmopolitan.” There were no Japanese, the paper reported, but a few Chinese people in town were “prospering” — an assessment that does not quite represent the reality of their racialized and economic marginalization. Facing everyday racism, the Chinese purposefully stuck to two small business enclaves — running laundries or setting up restaurants — thus avoiding direct competition with white labourers or businessmen.
Union Publishing Co’s Peterborough Directory, 1907, p.207.
The city, according to the Examiner article, did have “many Italians” (especially compared to 1901, when only one Italian lived in Peterborough): about sixty-five to seventy-five people, with seventeen families. The most prominent among them were the Minicolo brothers, who had a fruit shop on Hunter Street. The Italians in general made good citizens, the writer thought, although they tended to keep to themselves. So too did the small number of Greeks in town, “exactly one dozen and all progressing.” These included the Demetre Brothers, with a confectionary shop (specializing in ice cream); Mike Pappas, with his two cigar stores and pool room (and who would in a couple of years establish a motion picture theatre); and the Yeotes Brothers, who had a shooting gallery and shoe-shine shop. “Peterborough is becoming cosmopolitan in its merchants,” remarked an item in the Morning Times of Feb. 13, 1905. “We have had French, English and German, now we have Greek . . .”
Examiner, June 15, 1907, p.2.
Even more (and expressed rather indelicately): “The Jew race is well represented.” Most of them were apparently German, but some had come from Russia. Notables (according to the article) included the Mendell Bros., conducting a large junk business at Charlotte and Bethune (and employing about fifteen other Jews); Abraham Low and Solomon Eisenberg, also dealing in junk; and Bernard Laster, with a clothing and dry goods business.
The article took no account of a substantial population of people of French descent.
Peterborough was essentially an Anglo colonial enclave that did not particularly welcome either the Indigenous people who were original to the land or those from outside the British imperial sphere. A telling news item appeared in the cold of winter 1905 under the headline “One Italian Stabs Another.” The incident occurred downtown, on Simcoe Street, and the report made it seem as though such an event involving “foreigners” was an all too common occurrence: “Once more has the Italian and his deadly knife caused trouble in Peterborough. (These natives from the sunny south have a strange habit of always resorting to the dagger when they get into a mix-up.)” One of the two young men involved was said to be “living at the Italian settlement on Bethune Street.”
Examiner, Feb. 14, 1912, p.6. Minstrel shows and their depiction of “negroes” (most often white people in blackface) were immensely popular for decades in Peterborough, as elsewhere. This is only one of a large number of cartoonish notices for the appearance of the Belmont Minstrels at the Grand Opera House in early 1912.
Towards the end of the 1907 article about the city’s ethnic makeup, the writer included a gratuitous comment that reinforced the era’s cultural politics. It was a point trumpeted in the article’s secondary headline: “Negroes” were apparently “shunning” the city. According to the report, no “negroes” at all were to be found amongst the population. Most remarkably, as an explanation for this detail the writer offered: “Peterborough seems to be deserted by the negro for some reason that cannot easily be found unless it is that water melons are a rather scarce commodity here.” Perhaps the writer had seen the 1896 Edison film Watermelon Contest that showed “two colored boys eating watermelon” — or many others of a like nature. Certainly the films, cartoons, published caricatures, and vaudeville and minstrel shows of the age made this a common, conventional, and damaging way of thinking for far too long a time.
Nevertheless, the writer pointed out, “Peterborough is in a position to congratulate itself upon her foreign population which taken on the whole is a most desirable one which gives no trouble and is helping the city to advance.” No matter (in keeping with the ethos of the time) that the city’s entire population (with the exception of any Indigenous peoples who might have been in town that day) consisted of “foreigners” and immigrants who had arrived in a scattered fashion within the past seventy or seventy-five years at best – many of them quite recently – and taken over land that had for centuries been the traditional territories of the First Nations.
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For those who were coming to the city more recently to take up business, the city was by no means an easy place to break into.
The Englishman George Scott had arrived in Peterborough from Toronto sometime in 1906 and searched for a place in which he could screen motion pictures; it appears that by November he had settled on getting involved with local men who were setting up a penny arcade (including motion pictures). In January 1907 he turned the penny arcade into Peterborough’s first motion picture theatre, Scott’s Colloseum.
Examiner, Sept. 23, 1907, p.5. Opposite the street railway office, the second motion picture theatorium to be established in the city.
In March 1907 an agent said to be representing “one of the largest amusement firms in the United States, with headquarters in Philadelphia” – most likely the Sigmund Lubin company – came to town and had a long conversation with cigar-store merchant Mike Pappas. The man wanted Pappas to take “the local agency for a ‘five-cent show,’” complete with music and the other necessary trappings. All Pappas had to do was find a “suitable” spot downtown for the theatre – not an easy task in a city bursting at the seams, with a fully occupied main street where every suitable space was already taken up. Still, the Morning Times reported, “Mr. Pappas has got the capital and the energy to push this matter to a successful conclusion.”
In April, when a couple of men came to town from London, Ont., looking for a downtown spot to place a “vaudeville show,” a report noted how it was “almost impossible to secure a store in the business section” given the “great demand for business places.”
Daily Review, Sept. 24, 1907, p.8. It would not be the last time, despite the typo, that a city newspaper gave a glowing welcome to a motion picture theatre — especially emphasizing its benefit to the downtown area.
In the meantime, too, city council had reasserted its rightful stake in the new commercial enterprises, passing yet another version of a bylaw governing the licensing of “places of amusement.” In addition to merry-go-rounds, toboggan slides, and rifle and shooting galleries, the by-law covered “every person who owns, holds or keeps for hire or profit any apparatus, contrivances or mechanical device for amusement,” which for the first time would include “moving pictures.” The bylaw listed what appears to be two separate license fees: 1) “for any mechanical device, moving picture or other apparatus or contrivances” (fees of $40 for a year, $20 for four months, and $10 for a week or part of a week); and 2) “for a theatre, music hall or other place of amusement” ($50 for a year, $30 for four months, and $10 for a week or part of a week). Did a motion picture theatre manager/owner, especially given the mix of pictures and music, have to pay both fees?
From “The Nickelodeon,” Moving Picture World, May 4, 1907, p.140. A necessary message, perhaps, at a time when these new upstart theatres were considered highly suspect.
Examiner, Dec. 27, 1907, p.11. Wesley Edwards, owner of the Crystal, takes his motion pictures out of the theatre to the Market Hall, to serve as “an amusement” for a worthy cause.
Soon enough, though, crowds of people no longer had to go sit under the pines of Jackson Park or frequent other occasional indoor spaces to see the motion picture novelties. The year 1907 provided an introduction to the storefront “nickelodeon” motion picture theatres. Peterborough already had its Grand Opera House, established in autumn 1905, which showed the occasional moving picture but was known more, at that time, for its gala live performances. George Street would also soon have three small “theatoriums,” as they were called: Scott’s Colloseum (est. January 1907), Wonderland (July), and the Crystal (September). In spring of the following year Mike Pappas took out a lease on a George Street property; three-quarters of a year later, in December 1908, he opened the Royal Theatre.