Category Archives: history

Vintage Ontario: “Hotel life is all laughs.”

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I was searching for articles about Noorduyn airline crashes, virtually flipping through back-issues of the Toronto Daily Star from the 1940s, when I came across this little gem.

Accessed via Toronto Star: Pages of the Past through the Toronto Public Library

Accompanying the article were (unfortunately rather grainy) photos of the manager and a couple of bellhops who “struggle with a suitcase”.

All Girl Hotel photos

I found a vintage photograph of the hotel. It opened in 1940 and “boasted 100 rooms, a dining room, barber shop, smoke shop and newsstand.” (source).

Park Lane Hotel, Kirkland Lake, Ontario

I couldn’t find much else online about this little venture, but I’d be curious about how long it lasted. The building is now known as Park Lane Place and is an apartment complex.

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Mystery photos: Noorduyn bush plane wrecks

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I went through two shoeboxes full of old photographs with my mother this afternoon. Most of them were either of her events or trips, a few that my father took during his university days, and then there were the totally mysterious ones.

These four small black and white snaps (2″x3″) appear to be of wrecks of bush planes. The only notation is “Harvard” on two, and “Norseman” on the other two. From some cursory online research, it would appear that these planes were produced by Noorduyn Aircraft Company who produced the Norseman before World War 2. During the War, they produced Harvard trainers for the RCAF. If anyone can provide me with information on where these wrecks might have been. or why someone in my family was photographing them, I’d love to hear about it. I’m going to shoot off a query to the Noorduyn Norseman History site as well.

"Harvard"
“Harvard”
"Norseman"
“Norseman”
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