Visiting a city museum in the age of woke
City of Toronto Museums kept their doors closed until last weekend. Every other gallery and museum in Toronto opened quickly after the province allowed; Spadina, Mackenzie, Montgomery’s Inn, Fort York, they all decided no, they didn’t really feel like re-opening. You couldn’t even walk the grounds around Spadina House, which is one of the most beautiful green spaces we have in the city. My lockdown routes would often take me in the direction of the Baldwin Steps and up Spadina Road toward Forest Hill, and the door to the museum’s gardens were always shuttered, lights off in the house at night. In the last eighteen months I had the impression that too many of Toronto’s institutions enjoyed being locked down, not having to deal with people and provide service which is in their mandate to provide. Whenever I asked @TOHistory on Twitter when they intended to open, they’d ignore me.
So I was pleasantly surprised to discover last weekend that Spadina House decided to open itself to people for six hours a day on some days of the week. You must book an entry time online and you may only stay one hour inside the house. I was the only one for the tour at 11h00 and after the pointless covid questionnaire (do you have difficulty breathing, are you required to stay in isolation?) I was let in. You won’t let people come in and just have an independent walk about? No they can’t, it has to be a tour. What about if you record the audio guide, would then a person be allowed to have a little walk through the house on her own? No, that’s not likely to happen. They can’t let anybody in unsupervised because there are all these valuable objects. And the tour you are given now ought to wrap up within an hour, whether or not there’s another tour scheduled after (there wasn’t that day). The guide and I both wore masks for the duration; we talked, we said goodbyes, and I left without ever seeing the guide’s face.
The tour at SH always starts with a short video about the Austin family history so I enjoyed that although they tacked on the mandatory Land Acknowledgment in opening credits. The video itself is a nice intro, assembled out of recovered footage from the last century teens and 20s Toronto. Then the guide came to begin the tour. The first thing said was We are working toward greater understanding about our history with three Indigenous elders (she named them) and aim to decolonize the museum, and I thought OH DEAR.
That went on for a bit and in the first pause for breath I managed to get in a question about the video and then steer the conversation toward the actual house. I imagine interrupting the woke tangents will be harder if you’re in a group… I was lucky to be alone and so could steer the convo somewhat. We went to the underground kitchen, the only remnants of the original house owned and occupied by the Baldwins, William and his son Robert and later his offspring. When the Austins swooped in to purchase the estate, the Baldwin dynasty occupying the modest digs was down to one person. (I think it was Robert’s daughter Mary? The guide did not dwell on the Baldwins, which was too bad.) So possibly maybe, Robert Baldwin hang out in this space at some point? Yes, possibly, was what the guide offered. The story was decidedly about the Austins, and how they built a much better kitchen upstairs, which we would visit.
She also wanted me to pay close attention to the display board that the museum made about one of the Austins’ housekeepers. She was black, and there’ll be more about her upstairs. I inwardly cringed at the awkwardness of this. Hey we found records of one black servant and here we are highlighting her, reflect on that! On the table in the upstairs kitchen there was a picture of a painting that one of the Austin aunts made of the black housekeeper. (Where was the original painting? I forgot to ask.) Toronto was diverse already back then, the guide offers. Right, so Austins had servants of many different ethnicities, not only Irish girls? That’s right, says the guide. This housekeeper lived in Yorkville with her family. Isn’t it interesting how women couldn’t continue working as maids if they got married, but housekeepers could be hired as married women, was my next question. So we covered that for a bit, and she showed me some pictures of women queuing to be paid somewhere in Toronto, and we touched on manufacturing of that era and that some women worked in manufacturing as well. She told of a housekeeper (ethnicity unmentioned) who upon becoming too frail to work the Austins out of the goodness of their hearts kept on payroll while also hiring another housekeeper. Oh. So elderly housestaff would usually be laid off if they get too sick or too old to work?, I had to tease this out. Yes, she says. Or some would go back to their home country, she added; Mrs so-and-so returned to Glasgow upon reaching her old age. This could have been a good moment to tell me when the state pension system was introduced in Canada and how, but she had to keep us on the clock and we pushed on.
It became clear as we proceeded that – I am guessing during the summer of American BLM protests which spilled around the globe because everyone wants to be American to the degree that they want American problems too – the city museums decided to tack on all kinds of “BIPOC” content onto their existing programs. This could be done well! I have no problem with that at all. City museums have been eager to chime with the Zeitgeist and openly follow trends since always. I remember listening to a curator talk in the antediluvian 2009 explaining why they were planning to turn the SH into a 1920s establishment. The house is full of Victoriana and Edwardiana, with the odd Art Deco bit here and there, but the 1920s were all the rage I presume 13 years ago, so the House was reorganized and the design of the era of the younger cohort of the house highlighted. Some years after that transformation, SH tour used the popularity of the Downton Abbey and the narrative of upstairs-downstairs master-servant set up and took its visitors through the back hallways and servant quarters on the top floor in addition to the more lavish front of house. The book Inside the Museums: Toronto's Heritage Sites and their Most Prized Objects by John Goddard which Dundurn Press published in 2014 gives the overview of what you’d hear and what you’d be asked to pay attention to in a Toronto historic house back then, and for SH, he confirms my memories, it was all about the Great Gatsby balls and flapper cosplay on the one hand, and (this I welcome) the servants and class on the other. Around that time the museum put some work into reopening the third floor, and displayed some servant uniforms on mannequins, and sought out stories of servant lives.
But now the SH is emerging from the long sleep with this newly found interest in certain ethnic groups. Again, this could be done well. It appeared to me on this visit as tokenish and as if tacked on overnight to the main narrative. We were in the green billiard room chatting about hunt and the ostentatious displays of ‘manly’ pursuits when the guide said, And as you can see, there’s a painting of Hiawatha and another depiction of an indigenous man here on the side of the fireplace, and while Canadians were subjugating the native populations they depicted them as ‘exotic’ and put on the wall, and I braced myself for some more learnings. Near the end of the tour, as I was about to step outside and head to the orchard, the topic of Canada forcing itself on the territories and forcing its national project on the people was again brought up and after that lasted for a bit, I kept my thoughts to myself said thank you and goodbye.
Topics I’d love to hear more about:
-Percy Austin. The WWI volunteer returned home shellshocked and spent the rest of his days first hidden away from the public eye in Barrie Ont. and upon returning to SH tucked away in his room obsessively listening to the radio. He rarely left home. Did he leave any diaries, anything? I tried to pry away more info about the Quebec vs the ROC conscription crisis (was there not one in WWI as well as WWII) and on whether there were Native men in the Canadian contingent fighting for the empire, and if that affected in any way male indigenous franchise? but not a lot of info was ready on that topic. You could, you know, if you’re in search of indigenous content to add to the narrative, add some right here, but what do I know. (To find out more about the history of suffrage for indigenous men, I went here.)
- Constance Margaret Austin, the daughter who also volunteered to go to WWI and served as nurse’s aide. She never married. Records of her life were sparse, and when she died mid 1960s the obituaries were extraordinarily stingy, which was apparently nothing unusual for women of that generation, even wealthy ones. Apparently no letters or diaries survive? Any of the other siblings wrote about her? The longest living Anna Kathleen (d. 1983, who bequeathed the SH to the city)? Is anybody really still looking?
- Servants. Now they’re not in any more, unless “BIPOC”. We only rushed through the top floor, and mostly lingered in the light-filled, spacious recovery area for the eldest Austin son Bertie who died from TB. Here’s the Zeitgeisty thing that I welcomed finding in that room: the pictures of tents that Torontonians built on their properties for members of family recovering (or, likelier, dying) from TB at the time that Bertie was sick and trying to survive in that beautiful room. Any associations with covid – and how its effects chimed with class – intentional.
- The Baldwins are sadly a footnote only at SH. There should be something about the Baldwins in the city of Toronto. There’s currently nothing barring the ghostly basement kitchen under SH and the Baldwin Steps, a more contemporary addition to their former estate.
When I got back home, I went again on the museum website, and hey shocked but not surprised, the home page still tells the potential visitor that all City-operated museums are closed until further notice. They really hate having people over, don’t they? You have to ignore that, scroll for Admissions and Hours and click on Book Tickets Online. I did a little browse of the city museum site and spotted that they’ve commissioned some video work and short films from – you guessed it -- “BIPOC” young artists in order to create some sort of a dialogue between these ethnic minorities and the old city houses.
I went in sceptical but I’ll admit that some of these videos are intriguing pieces of experimental and political court-metrage. (The art-speak-wokery alongside some of them is unbearable but let not that put you off the whole thing.) I particularly liked Sonya Mwambu’s experimental video in which SH is owned by a black family with black servants, every shot superimposed on something from the past or something weirdly oneiric. The video by Karimah Zakia Issa about the Mackenzie House printing press and another printing press in town owned by Mary Ann Shadd was also interesting.
And then there’s one which I didn’t even attempt because it’s introduced with a stonking piece of historical inaccuracy:
Really? They did not come from Asia, via the Bering Plain, between 20,000 and 10,000 B.C.? There was a god who created Native Americans separately from all the other homo sapiens who evolved on the African continent? Come on, people. Historical museum. Not a museum of myth and legend. I guess the many historians and curators on the city of Toronto payroll all had a day off when this copy was published?
If you check out some of the artist interview videos – and I did, I’m a masochist clearly – the task will be to separate the art-speak-anti-colonialism-and-pronouns nonsense from some of the good ideas there. “Colonization is ongoing” says one the young artists co-commissioned by this colonialist institution that is Toronto’s municipal government, after which she proceeds to gush about the artist who mentored them in this project, Director X. “I’m thankful to be working with him. He’s paved the way for us… When we go to L.A. now and we say we’re from Toronto, we have a reputation. And that’s because of people like X.” [No not Cronenberg or Egoyan or Arcand or Rozema or whoever, sit down Methuselah.] So everything is to be questioned, except the fact that the USA is the place to move to to build a career in filmmaking.
I’m pondering what my next historical house will be, post-lockdown… and what to expect there. Meanwhile I’ll be back to the SH gardens, if not inside.
