Lights! Camera! Fire?! The Great Toronto Fire of 1904 and the Start of Canada's Motion Picture Industry
On the night of April 19, 1904 the temperature in Toronto, Ontario Canada plummeted to 25 degrees Fahrenheit and snow flurries started to fall throughout the city with wind gusts in excess of thirty miles per hour. At just after 8 o’clock that night a city police constable, making his nightly rounds downtown on foot, noticed smoke seeping from the windows of a tie factory located at 58 Wellington Street West, what then was considered the industrial and commercial heart of the city. A fire had begun in the elevator shaft of the E & S Currie Limited men’s neckwear factory. This was the start of the Great Fire of Toronto of 1904. It would take nine full hours for the fire to burn itself out. Before all was said and done over 100 buildings would be completely destroyed by fire that night. Flames could be seen leaping into the sky for miles around and fire companies from Buffalo, New York and the nearby city of Hamilton all responded in a vain attempt to ...