Downsview Stories

From the Two-Spirit Pow-Wows in Downsview Park, to the queer-positive roller derbies in the Downsview Supply Depot, to inclusion at Downsview United Church, today, 2SLGBTQI+ people are at home on the Downsview lands. 

You may recognize that line from the 1989 hit movie Field of Dreams. The central character, played by Kevin Costner, hears a voice instructing him to build a baseball field in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. If he did, the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson, would magically appear. And he did. 

Film and TV production is a massive industry in Toronto, employing about 35,000 people, and annually generating over $2.5 billion in direct economic activity. About 1500 film, TV commercials and music video productions are shot in the city every year. 

Let's face it. It's not often you can find anyone with kind words to say about a baseball umpire. They make decisions about balls and strikes and who's safe and who's out, and if you take exception to their rulings, they'll toss you out of the game.

There were fewer than 50,000 Jewish people living in Toronto in the 1930s when a group of visionary and optimistic community leaders got the idea to build a large Jewish cemetery on Wilson Ave, between Dufferin and Keele Streets. Most of the city’s Jewish residents lived south of Harbord St. and east of Bathurst.

In the 1950s, future stars from the worlds of rock and roll, rockabilly, and R&B like Roy Orbison and Ike and Tina Turner, played the Crang Plaza Auditorium at Jane and Wilson.