Toronto Between the Wars: Life in the City 1919-1939

The years between the World Wars don't get much attention in the Toronto story. There's no dramatic event, no founding moment, no singular achievement. What there is, is 20 years of the city quietly becoming itself.

The twenties brought jazz clubs, department stores, a boom in immigration, the early suburbs. The thirties brought the Depression, relief lines, and the kinds of hardship that change what a city believes about itself. Cotter went looking for the photographs, voices, and ordinary texture of what daily life actually felt like in those decades. What she found was the era that shaped the modern Toronto character: practical, unpretentious, quietly determined.

You can't understand where this city came from without understanding this period.