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Nominated name: TANDY MURCH LANE

Nominated by:
Sue Mander, Seaton Resident.

Suggested Location: City Lane Number: #1005, which is continuous with #1003.
Described Location: : Bound by: Vermont, Bathurst, Olive and Rossmore. Runs: N-S from Vermont into lane #1003, which continues south to a dead end.


At Vermont looking south,
(white home at right is #1 Vermont)
At Lane #1003 looking north
Rationale and References:

In 1974, renowned Canadian filmmakers, Deepa Mehta (director), and Paul Saltzman (producer, additional-direction), filmed a half-hour television documentary called At 99: A Portrait of Lousie Tandy Murch (1976). She was the mother of Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967), a Toronto-born artist who studied at OCA in the 1920's, now OCAD University. (Her grandmother was Clara Louise Tandy and her grandfather was Walter Murch, who was proprietor of a jewelry store "The Two Little Jewelers", in Seaton Village.)

The documentary was filmed at # 1 Vermont Ave. where Louise, a popular singing teacher, had lived for a great number of years. The film is set inside her home, in Seaton Village and the surrounding Annex streets. Louise's passion for Yoga and its benefits are highlighted as well as her philosophy on aging. It includes a celebration of her 99th Birthday with family and friends.

Walter Murch, Sr., the successful watchmaker from rural Ontario, who sang as a hobby, became engaged to (Clara) Louise, the daughter of Rechab Tandy, about 1900. They were engaged for three years before they married. Murch, Sr., bought a house, No. 1 Vermont Avenue; it was an old house, and although quite close to the downtown Toronto area where the first jewelry shop was located, it had once been a farm house, and was built of that curious northern hard red brick that seems to glow an eerie salmon colour when late fall produces dark skies.

This is the home that their son Walter Tandy Murch, the artist remembers, and he remembers it with a detailed accuracy that is perhaps part of his own character but possibly also part of the still environment, the silence of residential Toronto even today. He remembers a complex internal communications system of shiny metal tubes that enabled people in different parts of the house to talk without shouting. The tubes were buried in the walls but in each room a concave metal disc, silver-plated copper, presented itself. One would put one's mouth to the disc and blow a whistle, the call to conversation. When the system was removed around 1919, because the family thought it was dated, Murch, who had never lost his childhood fascination for mysterious gadgets, regretted its absence. Yet there were other things to take its place, Edison wax phonograph cylinders, a Victrola with a horn, dozens of curious objects from a new technology that interested him only because of the odd-looking machines it produced.

Her Grandson Walter Scott Murch is a legendary film editor in Hollywood. 

See: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/walter-tandy-murch-papers-10097/more and http://www.paintingperceptions.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Walter_Murch.pdf