The summer of 1816 has been called ‘the summer that never was’, ‘the poverty year’ and ‘eighteen hundred and froze to death’. Temperatures that year fell around the world causing massive crop failures, killing livestock and creating calamitous food shortages....
Just after eight o’clock on the evening of 9 April 1904, a policeman walking his beat in the cold and snowy Toronto night saw flames shooting from the roof of the Currie building at 58 Wellington Street, near Front and...