Toronto Star

The more things change, the more they don't stay the same. As "A Visual Legacy," an exhibition of historical photographs that opens today at the Toronto Archives, makes abundantly clear, this is a city that has reinvented itself many times. Starting in the 1850s, Toronto was a small but earnest community with big ambitions and a strong sense of its own worth. Indeed, the earliest photographs in the show were commissioned by town officials as part of their effort to have Toronto named "Capital for the Province of Canada." The submission, which was sent off to the Colonial Office in London, wasn't successful; the honour went instead to Ottawa. But 150 years later, these pictures taken in 1856 and '57 by Armstrong, Beere and Hime, "Land Agents, Engineers and Photographists," provide a wonderful record of a compact Victorian city whose urbanity still offers lessons for the 21st century. It's true the streets are mud and the sidewalks made of wood, but there's an impressive sense of coherence; the buildings clearly intended to be part of a larger whole.