February is Black History Month. The Archives has a number of documents that illustrate the history of black people in Toronto. One particular collection is the William Hubbard papers. He was Toronto's first black councillor and Deputy Mayor.

Barbara Ann Scott greets crowds in Toronto
March 13, 1948
City of Toronto Archives
Fonds 1266, Item 123300

At the 1948 Olympic Winter Games, held in St. Moritz, Switzerland in early February, Barbara Ann Scott created history by becoming the first Canadian woman to win the Olympic gold medal in figure skating.

All events at these games were outside and thus reliant on favourable weather conditions. For the first portion of her routine, the ice surface was "just like a swimming pool" .

During freestyle portion of Scott's program, she was skating on ice that had hosted two hockey games the night before. The ice resurfacer had not yet been invented, so the surface was cut up, uneven and full of holes. Scott adapted her routine to the conditions to emerge as the winner.

The above image of the Ottawa native, with her mother and her trainer, Sheldon Galbraith, was taken in Toronto after her return from Switzerland. She was welcomed by Mayor Hiram McCallum and a crowd of over 50,000 Torontonians. The photograph appeared in The Globe and Mail on Monday 15 March, 1948.

See past editions of this month in Toronto.

January 25, 2010 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Viljo Revell, the Finnish architect of Toronto City Hall. Born in 1910 at Vaasa, a town on the west coast of Finland, Revell studied architecture at the Institute of Technology in Helsinki and opened his practice there in 1935.

He is best known in Canada for his design of Toronto City Hall. However Revell died in 1964 before the project was complete. The building was officially opened in September 1965.

As part of the fortieth anniversary of this event, the Archives created a web exhibit, titled A Step Forward in Time.

The Archives has rolled out a new user interface for our online descriptive database. New features include easier search prompts, enhanced visual displays for our scanned photographs and the ability to print out a list of the boxes you want to order from the database, instead of writing the list out on a form.

Let us know how you like this new interface by e-mailing us at archives@toronto.ca.

This exhibit highlights some of the many architectural records housed at the City of Toronto Archives, which span the period from the 1840s to the present.

Celebrating 125 years of Toronto Public Health, this exhibit presents a selection of archival photographs and documents from 1883 to the present, exploring themes such as health services for children, the struggle for clean water and air and the development of public housing and social services.