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Nominated name: Skaters LANE

Nominated by:
Mark Fram

Suggested Location: City Lane Number: #203
Described Location: Runs north-south between Dupont St. and Hammond Place

Rationale and References:

The Toronto Skating Club was located at 568 Dupont Street, now the Queen's Club tennis facility.

See: http://www.torontoplaques.com/Pages/Toronto_Skating_Club.html

From Taddle Creek magazine: Dupont at Zenith

An overdue memorial to the forgotten achievements of Toronto's twentieth-century avenue of enterprise

by Alfred Holden

From the Christmas, 1998, issue

(No. 2)

Toronto Reference Library (Baldwin Room, Neg. 32396)

Two couples at the Toronto Skating Club, Dupont and Manning, 1922.

For a privileged few out in the larger world, Dupont itself was an escape. There is a photograph in the Toronto Reference Library of Clifford Sifton, Katherine Capreol, Sydney Pepler, and Melville Rogers performing a figure-skating manoeuvre on the indoor rink of the Toronto Skating Club, an arena which was built on the north side of Dupont Street near Manning Avenue in 1922.

Minus its ice, the club, somewhat mysteriously, is still there, right down to its original wicker furniture. In 1957, Imperial Optical magnate Sydney Hermant, an avid tennis player, led a group which purchased the building and converted it into an indoor tennis club. The front door is always locked (members have keys), and membership is by invitation; it includes, at this writing, former prime minister John Turner and former M.P. and cabinet minister Barbara McDougall and one wonders if the two, who once sat opposite each other in the House of Commons, have ever faced off at tennis on Dupont Street. The handsome building's unused look is probably registered as an asset by club members, who presumably value the privacy they can find on Dupont more than any pretension which they cannot.

See also: http://torontoist.com/2009/03/the_greatest_skating_carnival_in_am/

Further Information: Following provided by Mark Fram: