If Only These Walls Could Talk: Urban History and Toronto’s Murmur Project
View of Chinatown, with the Bright Pearl in the foreground (Source: rfzappala, Flickr)
At the corner of Spadina and St. Andrew in Toronto’s Chinatown, a large yellow building sits at the intersection. Red lettering proclaims it to be the Bright Pearl Restaurant, which been offering dim sum for at least the last thirty years. Two stone lions sit on the banisters by the main entrance. The whole building (all three floors) was once used to house the entire restaurant, but shops are now located on the first floor, though the restaurant still operates on the second and third floors. The Spadina corridor between Kensington and Queen Street is now known as Chinatown, and markets, restaurants and small shops abound. The same area was once the Jewish centre of the city, and there are vestiges of the community left behind, including a few small synagogues, and The Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre located further up Spadina at Bloor Street. Except for Murmur, one might otherwise never know that the Bright Pearl used to be the home of the Toronto Labor Lyceum, an old Jewish labour organization.
“So we’re here on Spadina, just south of St. Andrews’s . . . and we’re right out front of the Bright Pearl Restaurant . . . . Some of you may not know that this is the original site of the Labour Lyceum . . . and one of the famous events that occurred here back in 1937, was a talk by Emma Goldman, who was a pretty notorious anarchist and feminist and war activist . . . . On the 14th of April 1937, she gave a talk right here in this building.” (Dave Fingrut)
A Green Murmur Ear (Source: EssG, flickr)
Murmur is a oral history documentation project, focused on unearthing Toronto’s past through oral histories about particular locales throughout the city. The format of oral history is well-suited to the project, since oral history tends to be geared towards giving voice to people and places that would otherwise remain silent. Murmur’s presence is identifiable by green metal signs cut in the shapes of large ears posted through various neighbourhoods in the city of Toronto.
Each sign comes with a phone number and a code, and one can simply dial the number to connect with a menu of three or more oral histories told by people who remember something about that particular building, park or intersection, be it a personal recollection, or an anecdote about an historical figure like Emma Goldman in 1937 (see below). The stories are also accessible online through the project’s website, but ideally, if one should happen upon a Murmur sign while wandering the city streets, one’s curiosity might be piqued enough to call the number. Better yet, if one is taking a walking tour of a neighbourhood, this a new way of learning about its past. On the website, each neighbourhood is accompanied by a hand drawn map, and marked locations on the map can be selected to gain access to the oral histories available. Murmur began in Toronto in 2003 with the Kensington Market area. Since then, it has been set up in eight other areas around the city, and has also been developed in cities around the world, including Montréal, Vancouver, Galway, Edinburgh and São Paulo. At least one cousin project called Heresay has been developed in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.
It is Murmur’s focus on the oral history of people that makes it so important and so crucial to urban history. Over the last several years, oral history has emerged more and more as a respected form of documentation. Where history tends to examine broader trends and the overarching cultural climate of period of time, oral history works from a local perspective. Those like Murmur, which does oral history, collect the stories of people with lived experiences, witnesses to moments of history that are not typically included in official history. Oral history is a practice that has long been used by folklorists and anthropologists to document information about culture through people that live/d it, and has also been used to do music histories, most notably Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and An Unauthorized History of the World: Oral History on the Front Lines by Michael Riordon. According to Murmur’s website:
“It’s history from the ground up, told by the voices that are often overlooked when the stories of cities are told. We know about the skyscrapers, sports stadiums and landmarks, but [murmur] looks for the intimate, neighbourhood-level voices that tell the day-to-day stories that make up a city. The smallest, greyest or most non-descript building can be transformed by the stories that live in it. Once heard, these stories can change the way people think about that place and the city at large.”
One of Murmur Toronto's downloadable maps - the red circles show listening points (Source: Murmur Toronto's website)
Certainly, there are other projects that have made efforts to document the unofficial histories, such as the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, which has archived and digitized some 650 oral histories from across the country, or Lost Rivers Walks, a Toronto organization designed for the urban ecologist, combining the paths of the watershed below the city’s surface with its cultural history. But it is Murmur that has created a wonderful, local and interactive fount of information. It provides a deeper connection for the user, and whether they are local or just visiting, a more tangible association is made.
Neighbourhoods change all the time – buildings are torn down, new ones are built, streets are named and renamed, and all of this change both past and present makes up the texture of a city. Architectural and structural changes in cities are normal, and these bones are how the character of a city gets built up. These changes are not necessarily bad changes, but more often than not, in the face of new change, the past is forgotten or overlooked, especially since change feels like it is happening more and more quickly all the time. Murmur helps to illuminate the city’s past.
Got your own oral history to share?
Visit Murmur’s global website to get involved
What a great article and an amazing project. How can we get this to Ottawa!
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