Free Top Soil, 73 Jarvis Street renovation, 1969

Free Top Soil on Jarvis Street.

This is not a sign one would have expected to see on the sidewalk in front of a storefront at Jarvis and Adelaide, even in the late 60’s when the now plush St. Lawrence Market District was not in the foreseeable future.

However the signage seemed pretty obvious to us.  We had just shovelled out large amounts of earth not to mention, ingots, old glass bottles and sundry pieces of metal, large and small, thankful to have not come across any large bones, from the unfinished basement of 73 Jarvis Street, the second location of Aggregation Gallery.  We intended to lower the floor and lay a new concrete surface to provide additional space for our framing service and larger storage for the art inventory.

It was a laborious process shovelling the earth on to a conveyor belt that was angled through the window well out to the sidewalk from where we shovelled the earth on to a pick-up truck.  The truck when full was driven by our landlord to the Leslie Street Spit (just beginning in those days) and, once again shovelled off by hand.  We could not afford a tilt truck.

In between truckloads the piles of very rich black earth remained on the sidewalk.  It wasn’t a far stretch of the imagination to consider a sign – Free Top Soil.  As far as I can remember no one took us up on the offer. But it was a sight for eyes of the old and the new inhabitants of the area.

Basement of 73 Jarvis Street -during excavation and relocation of stairs, 1969

Rat Stories.

Before the landlord laid the new concrete there was a large thick wooden door at the bottom of the stairs to the basement.  It was closed most of the time.  A coffee house, Grumbles, had moved into our first space at 71 Jarvis.  One time, Grumbles asked us to accept an evening bread delivery to keep overnight in our space for them to collect in the morning.  The next day we opened the gallery to pick up the large kraft paper bag sitting on our desk.  It was empty but still upright.  This seemed very odd and suspicious.  Perhaps Grumbles immediate thought was we had had a hearty dinner the night before.

However, after some investigation we found a hole in the bottom of the bag and some crumbs trailing off the desk to the floor in the direction of the stairs to the basement.  We followed the crumbs down to the solid wooden door.  The door now had a small hole gnawed out of the bottom of it and an indent in the earth floor below.  We cautiously opened the door but found no bread and no rodents in sight –still a bit of a mystery.

Not for long however.  For some time after that we had regular visits of large city rats, the culprits we assumed.  Rat traps were placed around the premises.

One evening I came down late in the evening to do some gallery work.  As I entered the street from our upstairs apartment and headed to the front door of the gallery I heard a rustle behind me.  It was dark, I was spooked and hurriedly unlocked the front door and entered.  Much to my dismay there was also rustling of a different kind in the gallery and it didn’t help that the light switch was across the room.  I had a choice –back out and face the rustle on the street or risk whatever was inside the gallery.  I nervously chose the inside route.  I suspected a rat.

Once I had light to see I grabbed the phone and called David to come down and rescue me as I didn’t want to venture alone outside again.

We discovered the rat, much more attractive than rats are often depicted, in a trap, but just, and trying to get free.  After some attempts by us to dislodge the rat, it made its escape and disappeared into the basement.  We didn’t see any rats inside or out after that, thank goodness.

In 1968 we moved from 26 Spadina Road, where we had opened the forerunner of Aggregation Gallery, to the then downtrodden bottom of Jarvis Street just south of Adelaide Street .  We were still students at the Ontario College of Art and living off odd and part time jobs as well as our student loans.  We managed to put together $325.00 to renovate the storefront space at 71 Jarvis Street and opened Aggregation Gallery in November, 1968.  We were a cooperative of four people for that first year.  David Tuck and I initiated the cooperative and carried on as partners in Aggregation Gallery after the two others, fellow OCA student, John McDonald and artist, Roman Kowal, left the group.  We lived in rooms on the second and third floors above 69 Jarvis, in the same building, with some of the others of the original 8 person cooperative from Spadina Road. To help pay the rent, and in return for some construction materials and the electrical work, we also worked for our landlords helping renovate some of the other spaces in their Jarvis Street building.

With hard manual labour and a lot of ingenuity we managed to build the first space.  Not without a number of adventures along the way.  Shortly after we arrived at Jarvis Street the original Toronto  red brick  buildings across Jarvis Street and east of St. James Cathedral were, unfortunately, under the wrecking hammer.  David was not happy about the demolition and did what he could, writing letters to the papers, one of which was published in the Globe and Mail with a picture regarding the building at the S.E. corner of Church and King Streets.  He felt it was vital to the rest of the block of 19^th Century buildings –last time we noticed the lot was still being used for parking, but the rest of the block was eventually restored or infilled.  We hoped to help raise the awareness of some of the architectural losses to the city.

However once the buildings were coming down (MacFeeters Creamery and adjacent buildings seen here), we scrounged for materials, old multi-nailed, timbers that could be recycled. Several of the new interior walls at 73 Jarvis, our second location, are the results of these efforts.  We spent more time removing nails than driving them.

On one of our trips across the road to gather materials, early one evening, the night watchman recently arrived, stopped me while I was dragging a large beam out of the building.  He was not aware that we had permission from the foreman, nor of our presence, and not pleased at the unexpected meeting.  Neither was I.  After some explanation he let me carry on.  Needless to say we were somewhat rattled and discontinued our foraging for that evening.

The wood front of 73 Jarvis Street was rough-cut recycled Japanese mahogany from piano packing crates that David found in the old Gerard Street Village.  Sculpture stands were found, old industrial barrels, cleaned and painted, and so on.

We were interested in having a space to show our work and that of our peers and did not consider ourselves entrepreneurs at the time.  It was practical, we had a place to live and we met a lot of very unique people – a very exciting time.

We were the lone gallery among such existing long time neighbours as several machine tool outlets, the Toronto General Welding School , some second-hand shops and a very old seed company housed in brick building with a wraparound wooden porch, where the workers sat on their lunch hour with their feet up on the railings.

We felt that with the restoration of the St. Lawrence Hall in 1967 as a centennial project and the old St. Lawrence Market down the street, the area should have a bright future as more people became committed to its restoration.

David Tuck and Lynne Wynick, on Jarvis Street in Toronto in 1971 during work on renovations to the second location of Wynick/Tuck Gallery, then called Aggregation Gallery. In the background is St. James Park and Cathedral.

After 45 years, Wynick/Tuck Gallery is closing its public exhibition space, but will remain in business by appointment only. The final show, WTG_45 Years (happenstance & continuance), runs from September 22 to October 13, 2012.

Over the next month leading up to this final show, come back here for some behind the scenes stories and photos from the archives.