Picturing filth and disorder: Photography and urban governance in Toronto

Abstract

In July of 1911, just nine months after his appointment to the post of Medical Health Officer for the City of Toronto, Dr Charles Hastings issued a report on an investigation of slum conditions in the city. 1 The investigation found that Toronto had many of the conditions that were associated with the slums of 'great cities' in Europe and America: tenement houses, overcrowding, dark rooms, filthy yards and lanes and outdoor privies. The central downtown area around City Hall and the business district, referred to as ‘The Ward’, was overcrowded with poor and working-class immigrants, and in this area alone, sixty-three tenement houses were discovered, and 108 houses were declared unfit for habitation.2 The investigators discovered common lodging houses where sometimes more than twenty 'foreigners' lived under conditions that were described as a threat to the sanitary welfare of the city. They also reported on areas where outdoor privies overflowed into nearby yards and lanes. Photographs of dilapidated houses, narrow, muddy back lanes and backyards littered with refuse were included in the report as evidence of the written descriptions and statistical data. Both the public and city council recognised the thirty-two page document as a thorough and significant study of one of the city's most pressing concerns (figure 1).3