Today I delivered the SWIHHP archives to the Queen’s University Archives for safekeeping and for sharing. The collection includes interviews with 81 people — current…
What’s new and happening today — planting gardens, organic food, chickens in the back yard — that’s what we did! Our whole back yard was…
The photo exhibit Facing the Street, featured on the streets of the Swamp Ward and in the Elm Cafe for one month this summer, was…
SWIHHP is delighted to have a guest blog post this month from Joan McCulloch, telling the story of her grandmother’s arrival in Kingston in 1913.…
Fernando Monte and Bill Cassidy both live on Raglan Road. Both were raised Catholic, found fulfillment in the arts — and they are exactly the…
When I first started interviewing people in the Swamp Ward, I was a bit perplexed by all the bootlegging I heard about. To me, bootlegging…
Ella Mackay Singh worked with SWIHHP this summer on a fellowship through Queen’s. She did some fascinating thinking about what happens when we move words…
Our sixth podcast starts with an account of an explosive City Council meeting on August 31, 1970. Even the Whig-Standard stood up and took notice: On…
You might be here because you already heard this podcast episode, but if not, here it is! I’m not sure when I first heard the…
You’ve all seen this word around a lot, right? There’s the creek, the river, the conservation area, the dental clinic, the golf club, the cemetery,…
“My dad always had a joke, or a smile on his face waiting for somebody to make a joke,” Rosalyn Routbard remembers. In the 40s…
Few of us have had our new hockey skates handed to us by an NHL coach. Garry Lavallee, though, is the rare exception. And not…
Alma Street, all one block of it, runs along the west side of McBurney Park, which was once the Upper Burial Grounds. The park is…
Ronen and I have been poring over some more city directories lately, looking at who lived where, what they did for a living, who they…
Sometimes maps and pictures aren’t enough to make history come alive: you have to experience and imagine it in the place it actually happened. SWIHHP…
I was very sorry today to hear of the death of Claude Clement, my cherished neighbour, a role model for community engagement, my very first…
Earlier tonight, as the geese flew south and a banjo played over by the LCBO, a group of SWIHHP mailing list members examined the foundations…
Who would have thought reading phone books could be a fun thing to do? But the Might’s City Directories, published until the early 2000s, are…
It’s interesting to know the past lives of buildings we take for granted. Last week, I picked a few Montreal Street addresses that I had…
What a fun photo! This is the wedding party of Joan Evans and Ron North in May 1957. The photographer would have been standing on…
Lauren and I had good fortune a couple of weeks ago to visit to Bob Fray’s sign-painting shop on Division Street. Bob’s father started Kingston…
Lorraine (Burns) Good was born in Hotel Dieu Hospital in 1926 and grew up on Rideau Street and Raglan Road. Her mother, Lorida Laurin, moved…