A Toronto Album: Glimpses of the City That Was

Toronto has a complicated relationship with its own past. The city builds fast, tears down fast, and moves on without looking back. Then a generation later, everyone wonders what happened to the thing that used to be there.

Mike Filey spent his career in the gap between those two moments. He gathered photographs before the wrecking ball arrived. The streetcar lines, the storefronts, the intersections that look nothing like themselves anymore. He made them available to a city that otherwise would have forgotten.

This is the visual memory of Toronto. Not the postcard version, not the landmarks. The everyday city. The one that made the people who made everything else. Without books like this, that city just disappears.