The 11th volume in Mike Filey's series of collected columns on the rich history of the city he loves - Toronto. Featured in this volume are Hurricane Hazel, the Great Lakes passenger ships of yore, the St. Clair streetcar redo, and the unforgettable Toronto snowstorm of 1944.

This special collection gathers the volumes ten and eleven of the Toronto Sketches series, a fascinating compendium of Mike Filey's columns about the people and history of Toronto. These are essential reading for history buffs and for people who want to understand their city.

After four straight decades as one of the Toronto Sunday Sun’s most popular columnists, Mike Filey is still telling the stories of Toronto, its people, places, and history. In this twelfth volume of his acclaimed columns, “The Way We Were,” Filey tackles the Union Station controversy, Toronto’s Kennedy family, and more.

Stories of Old Toronto never lose favour with the city’s nostalgia buffs, and as long as Mike Filey continues to provide us with his "The Way We Were" columns, no one’s appetite will have to go unsatisfied. When Mike’s Toronto Sunday Sun columns were first brought together in Toronto Sketches, demand was so high that it prompted a second collection ... then a third ... and a fourth ... and a fifth. Now, for 2000, Mike has once again brought together some of the best of his Toronto Sunday Sun columns for Toronto Sketches 6, the latest installment in the wildly popular series. This time around, Mike takes us to a performance at the Royal Alexandra Theatre by Al Jolson, the opening of Sunnybrook Hospital, a game between the baseball Leafs and the Havana Sugar Kings - with Fidel Castro throwing out the first pitch - and many more famous, notorious, and entertaining episodes in the history of this great city.

In 1953 eleven Canadian Abstract Expressionist artists banded together to break through the barricades of traditional art at a time when landscapes were about the only paintings collectors were buying. Hungry for recognition, raging against the art establishment that was shutting them out, they decided to form a collective, expecting they would gain more attention as a group than as solo artists. In 1954, The Painters Eleven--Jack Bush, Oscar Cahén, Hortense Gordon, Tom Hodgson, Alexandra Luke, Jock Macdonald, Ray Mead, Kazuo Nakamura, William Ronald, Harold Town and Walter Yarwood--held their first exhibition in Toronto. Initially the public response echoed the worldwide sentiments toward Abstract Expressionism --mockery and bewilderment. Nevertheless, the exhibition attracted wide public interest and criticism faded into acclaim from critics and collectors alike. A successful 1956 exhibition at the Riverside Gallery in New York even elicited praise from the influential critic Clement Greenberg. Packed with gorgeous full color reproductions, this highly detailed account reveals the influences of the indivudual artists on the group's dynamic art and uncovers why the Painters Eleven had such a struggle for recognition, and why they acheived it so masterfully.

Joan Murray discusses social and political events in combination with the movements, ideas, attitudes, styles, and important groups in Canadian art of this century.

Mike Filey brings Toronto's history and the stories of its people and places to life. Mike Filey's column ''''The Way We Were'''' first appeared in the Toronto Sunday Sun not long after the first edition of the paper hit the newsstands on September 16, 1973. Now, almost four decades later, Filey's column has enjoyed an uninterrupted stretch as one of the newspaper's most widely read features. In 1992 a number of his columns were reprinted in Toronto Sketches: ''''The Way We Were.'''' Since then another nine volumes have been published, each of which has attained great success. Included in this latest compilation are stories about the controversial, though not altogether new, improvements to the TTC's St. Clair streetcar route, as well as accounts of such fondly remembered gasoline brands as Joy, B-A, and White Rose. Then there are those popular Great Lakes passenger ships that carried thousands to such ''''foreign'''' ports as Lewiston and Rochester in New York State. Recounting the unforgettable Toronto snowstorm of 1944 and the tragedy of the fire aboard the SS Noronic prove that not all memories are pleasant ones.