University Avenue, Toronto

When my father arrived in Toronto on June 18, 1965, my mother and I were still in the Azores.  That summer, he sent us photographs he took to show us the city that three years later we would call home.

His camera captured images that are now over sixty years old. I’m glad my mother was wise enough to bring my father’s photographs with her when she and I left the Azores. They are a document and a testament of my father’s interest, curiosity, and exploration of the city where he had planned on making a new life for his family.

I already introduced a few of his Toronto photographs when I started my blog in 2016 and I invite to have a look at what I posted then. Now I am including his other photographs.

The ones of City Hall, at Nathan Phillips Square, which officially opened on September 13, 1965, coincidently the month and year stamped on his photographs, places my father perhaps there on that opening day or shortly thereafter.

There’s also a few photos of University Avenue, the Gardiner Expressway, and the railroad tracks with the Royal York Hotel in the distance.

He also witnessed the annual Labour Day Parade that same September of 1965, a parade which is still held in Toronto today. His photos capture the spirit of the union solidarity of the time.

My father did not have a car then, and I’m not sure how he got around to take his photographs; perhaps he walked the city or was taken by car by family or friends.

What I do sense is that he cared enough to use photography as a means to show a city with the same enthusiasm as a modern day Instagrammer, with captions written on the back of each photograph to tell me and my mother what we were seeing.

I am grateful for the preservation of these priceless images that connect me not only to my father, but to the city I have lived in for most of my life.

City Hall

Nathan Phillips Square

University Avenue

A new glass building, wrote my father on the back of this photo

An unnamed park

Railroad tracks with the Royal York Hotel in the distance

Rail yard

A new building

My father loved cars and was fascinated by the highway

Sick Children’s Hospital

Labour Day Parade

The Dufferin Gate, west-end entrance to Toronto’s Exhibition Place

These photographs have a ghostly look to them, worn out by the vintage of time, but come alive through my father’s immigrant eye.

Antonio Cabral de Melo October 3, 1928 – April 21, 2005