Toronto's Historical Plaques

at torontoplaques.com

Learn a little of Toronto's history as told through its plaques

Maple Leaf Gardens 1931-2011

Welcome to Maple Leaf Gardens

Toronto Huskies
Billy Graham
The Royals
The Beatles
All Star Game

Canada vs Russia
Bill Barilko
Nirvana
Diefenbaker & Trudeau

Ali vs Chuvalo
Churchill
Elvis Presley
Wrestling
Leafs Kings 1993

There are 16 plaques at this location.
All can be seen on this page.

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Inside Loblaws on the northwest corner of Carlton and Church streets inside the former Maple Leaf gardens on the inside south wall at the Loblaws Cafe is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

Plaque coordinates: 43.66205 -79.37973

From the day it opened in the fall of 1931, Maple Leaf Gardens has been a social and cultural hub in the City of Toronto. Best known as a "cathedral of hockey", it also hosted political rallies, war rallies, religious assemblies, and pageants. Maple Leaf Gardens provided the setting for every conceivable form of musical entertainment, from the opera to heavy metal concerts. It was the battleground for boxers, wrestlers and runners, and has hosted innumerable bicycle races, tennis matches, ice follies, basketball games, rodeos, track meets, ballets, bingos, and circuses.

The thirteen-thousand seat arena was built at the tail end of the Great Depression, in just over five short months. The building style broke with traditional revivals and achieved a popular modernism - a machine aesthetic articulated in streamlined, geometric forms. Retail openings at street-level gave the building a human scale, and both connected it to and enlivened the surrounding neighbourhood.

The interior of the building was utilitarian and functional, with exposed structural concrete and block walls. The dome roof was designed as a series of massive steel trusses sitting on four concrete trusses, which allowed each spectator a clear view of the action at the centre. Large vertical windows on the north and south sides of the building originally allowed daylight into the arena, and smaller windows on the east and west lit the office spaces tucked beneath the bleacher seating.

Maple Leaf Gardens was one of the largest and most popular gathering spaces in the city, and the wide variety of events held here influenced the cultural development of the nation. The building is widely acknowledged as a local and national landmark, and has been recognized as a National Historic Site.

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

On your right just inside the main entrance to Loblaws on the northwest corner of Carlton and Church streets can be seen this plaque. The text on this plaque is identical to the text on the plaque "Maple Leaf Gardens 1931-2011" above.

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it says:

The Maple Leafs were in first place, the football season was in full swing, and the local sports calendar was mighty crowded. So forgive Toronto for treating a moment of history as a mere curiosity. On November 1, 1946, the Toronto Huskies opened the inaugural season of the Basketball Association of America at Maple Leaf Gardens, playing the New York Knickerbockers on a newly constructed wooden floor and showing off a radical innovation - transparent backboards. Fifty-five years before, basketball had been invented by a Canadian, Dr. James Naismith, and was popular in schools and at the YMCA. Ads for the first Huskies' game touted it as the "World's Most Popular Sport!" and "King Basketball - Canada's Own Sport." But this new, professional version of the game was alien to the city, and only 7,090 fans, not all of them paying customers, turned out to watch the Huskies lose 68-66. "On the play our Huskies appeared short on both conditioning and competition," the Toronto Star reported. The losing would continue. A month into the season, player-coach "Big" Ed Sadowski, a future all-star, was gone, and by the following spring, after finishing last, so was the franchise, having cost its owners $100,000 in losses. But history was indeed made that first night. Though there were professional basketball teams in the United States dating all the way back to 1895, and other leagues had come and gone, the National Basketball Association - which was created when the BAA merged with the rival National Basketball League in 1949 - considers the first Huskies game as the first in its history. And Frank Biasatti from Windsor, Ont., the only Canadian on the floor that night, is recorded as the NBA's first "international" player. Other basketball games were played at Maple Leaf Gardens through the years, including many appearances by the Harlem Globetrotters, a series of regular season Buffalo Braves NBA games, college exhibitions, the 1994 World Basketball Championship, and occasional appearances by the Toronto Raptors before the construction of the Air Canada Centre.
-Stephen Brunt

Related Ontario plaque
Dr. James Naismith 1861-1939

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

All was again right with the world.
What had happened three nights earlier, when a team of National Hockey League all-stars lost to the best of the Soviet Union 7-3 at the Montreal Forum in the first game of the Summit Series, was for Canadians far more than a mere sports upset. So secure was the belief in national superiority in the national game, that being humiliated by the Russians - who seemed to have somehow re-imagined how hockey could be played - was more like having the sun rise on the other side of the sky.
And so a mere exhibition hockey series was instantly transformed into a contest in which it felt like an entire way of life was on the line.
Game two at Maple Leaf Gardens provided blessed relief, restoring temporarily the old hockey order. Led by a stellar goaltending performance from Tony Esposito, the Canadian pros triumphed 4-1, delivering the comforting (and false) assurance that the result of the first game had been an aberration, a fluke, an off-night when Canada's heroes were simply caught unawares.
"A smasheroo of a hockey game," Milt Dunnell dubbed it in the Toronto Star, writing that the difference in atmosphere between games two and one was "the difference between a wedding and a wake."
The Canadians forechecked and hit the Russians, disrupting their intricate passing, seemingly discovering the key to unlocking the unique Soviet style. The highlight of the game was Peter Mahovlich's brilliant solo shorthanded goal in the second period, which came immediately after the Soviets had narrowed the score to 2-1, and appeared to have seized the momentum.
The series moved on to Winnipeg, Vancouver ... and Moscow, and it would never again prove nearly so easy to Canada as it looked on that happy night at the Gardens.
- Stephen Brunt

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it says:

In March 1966, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world had been blacklisted. Muhammad Ali - whom many still insisted on calling Cassius Clay - was undefeated, at the peak of his powers, and scheduled to defend his title against Ernie Terrell in Chicago. When the Illinois commission denied its sanction because Ali refused to honour the draft for the Vietnam War, every other American commission immediately followed suit.
Montreal showed some interest, and then passed. By default, it came down to Toronto, where the co-owner of Maple Leaf Gardens, Harold Ballard, rolled out the welcome mat. (Because a "draft dodger" was allowed to do business in the building he had constructed, Conn Smythe, a veteran of two World Wars, resigned from the board of directors and never crossed the threshold of his fabled arena again.)
Terrell pulled out at the last minute, which left the promoters searching desperately for a replacement only 16 days before the fight. They didn't have to look far.
George Chuvalo had begun his professional career at the Gardens a decade earlier, as house promoter Deacon Allen built his record and reputation, moving him into the top ten heavyweights in the world. But setbacks and disappointments, bad breaks and tough decisions, had taken their toll. When the call came to fight Ali, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.
Chuvalo won only a couple of the 15 rounds, and absorbed tremendous punishment from Ali's lightning fists, but the son of immigrant parents, the pride of the Junction neighbourhood, the embodiment of a "new" Toronto, stood tall against a fighter who, in that moment, may well have been the greatest heavyweight of all time. He didn't flinch, he didn't take a backward step, and as was the case throughout his long and remarkable career, he never went down. Ali called him "the toughest guy I ever fought."
It was a loss that felt like a win, and it made George Chuvalo a Canadian sports icon.
-Stephen Brunt

Related Toronto plaque
West Toronto Junction

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

He told them the end was near.
On October 2, 1955, at the midway point of his first Canadian crusade, the Reverend Billy Graham came to Maple Leaf Gardens, where he was welcomed by a crowd that filled the arena and overflowed onto the sidewalks outside. Loudspeakers were set up at the corner of Church and Wood streets to broadcast Graham's sermon.
Throughout its history, the Gardens was the site of many religious gatherings, some organized by the traditional churches, some featuring touring evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart.
But few if any had the drawing power of Graham, the charismatic, lantern-jawed preacher from North Carolina who would become one of the most influential spiritual leaders in the history of the United States.
Graham's first Toronto visit came ten years into the nuclear age, in the tense days of the Cold War. He told his flock that world events confirmed what the prophets had said - and that even doubters and non-believers were beginning to understand that the day of reckoning was imminent.
"The intellectual leaders have laughed. The philosophers have laughed. The scientists have laughed. But now the scientists are beginning to out-shout the preachers about the end of the world coming."
The faithful had to be steadfast like Noah, Graham said, building his ark in the face of ridicule because he understood God's will.
"Noah was led by fear," Graham said. "Noah was terrified of the judgment of God. You must fear the judgment of God."
Graham concluded his sermon, as always, by asking the crowd to make a "decision for Christ." More than 500 came forward that night.
-Stephen Brunt

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

The last goal he would ever score was one that would be immortalized in hockey history, in myth, and in song.
But on April 21, 1951, at Maple Leaf Gardens, when hard-hitting defenceman Bill Barilko pinched in on the left wing and fired a shot high on the stick side just before being knocked to the ice that beat Gerry McNeil and won the Stanley Cup, most of what would make the moment special was still to be revealed to the spoiled fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
"It was as clean as a hound's tooth," Red Burnett wrote of Barilko's shot in the Toronto Star.
"McNeil never had a chance."
Certainly it's not every day that you win the Stanley Cup, in overtime, on home ice. Barilko's teammates lifted him on to their shoulders in celebration, and in the papers, there was a picture of his mom, ladling him a drink out of the Stanley Cup.
But that year every one of the six games in the finals against the Montreal Canadiens was decided in an extra period, and as for the Leafs winning championships...well, that was old hat.
This was the greatest dynasty in the long history of the franchise, winning the Cup in 1945, 1947 and 1949, before the 1951 victory.
But this was also the end. The following August, while returning home from a fishing trip, Barilko and a friend flying in a small plane disappeared over northern Ontario. He was just 24 years old.
Their fate remained a mystery until 1962, when the remote crash site was finally discovered. And just as Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip sang in Fifty Mission Cap, it was only then, after Barilko's body was found, that the Leafs again won the Stanley Cup.
-Stephen Brunt

Related websites
Bill Barilko
Stanley Cup
The Tragically Hip

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

He arrived in Toronto a celebrity, but at home Winston Churchill's star had fallen. When he spoke at Maple Leaf Gardens on March 3, 1932, the great statesman had entered the Wilderness Years, a time when it seemed his political career was finished, before being revived so magnificently during the Second World War. And so he hit the road, just as he had as a famous young globetrotting soldier and war correspondent back in 1900, embarking on a public speaking tour of North America because he needed the money. Still, Churchill cut quite a figure, greeting reporters in the sitting room of his suite at the Royal York Hotel before the speech. "Mr. Churchill's face is round and pink. His hands are square and pink. His hair, what remains of it, is gold - an astonishingly bright gold. His cigar is long and black," wrote the reporter from the Globe and Mail. Newspaper advertisements that day trumpeted: "An unprecedented event - and unequaled opportunity to hear one of Britain's great men!" Good seats were available for between fifty cents and a dollar. But even with the added attraction of the 48th Highlanders band, the turnout had to be a bit disappointing - just 6,000, less than half of the arena's capacity, and they had to strain to make out Churchill's words through a crackling public address system. "His 'Can you hear me?' made one feel that he was putting through a long distance telephone call. The response made one think he had got a wrong number," wrote John Herries McCulloch in the Toronto Star. Despite those challenges, Churchill managed to get his message across loud and clear: a strong and united British Empire was the best protection against another Great War. "Mark you, England's weakness is the world's danger, and the strength of the Empire guarantees world peace," he said. Churchill closed his speech with a flourish, playing to the many loyalists in the crowd. "The Mother country has revived!," he said. "She is gathering her children around her, and, hand in hand with Canada, will lead the Empire and the world out of the gloom of panic and depression back into the sunlight of prosperity."
-Stephen Brunt

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - CBC News

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

Toronto was in love with a princess. On the day the heir to the British throne arrived in town, a deliriously happy crowd of half a million people lined the route from the airport to downtown, hoping to catch a glimpse of 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth and her dashing husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
The front page of the Toronto Star of October 13, 1951, featured no fewer than eight stories about the royal visit, including one describing a woman whose arm was broken when she fell in the crowd, and yet insisted on staying to watch the princess pass while lying on a stretcher. Tucked away on that same page was a tiny story about the ailing King George VI, Elizabeth's father, who had recently undergone a "serious lung operation."
Elizabeth and Philip attended the Maple Leafs' game against the Chicago Black Hawks at the Gardens the following afternoon. The princess was presented with flowers by a young girl, and later with the game puck by the team's owner, proud monarchist Conn Smythe.
The royal couple sat in a special box constructed in Section 50, and left after the first period. "The prince relaxed during the game, breaking into hearty laughter and slapping his thigh at hard body checks on the ice," the Globe and Mail wrote. "The princess betrayed her emotions by a wide-eyed look and an automatic jump of the royal shoulders when a player was hit hard."
Four months later came the news that the king was dead, and that Elizabeth would be queen. For just the second time in the history of the franchise (the other on the death of the king's father, George V, in 1936), a Maple Leafs game was cancelled.
On February 15, 1952, thousands gathered in the Gardens for a somber memorial service on the day George VI was buried in England.
-Stephen Brunt

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

From the earliest days of rock and roll, being booked to play Maple Leaf Gardens was a sure sign that you'd hit the big time.
Going all the way back to 1956, when Bill Haley and the Comets headlined what was the first true rock concert in Toronto, the arena played host to all the major touring acts, from Elvis Presley, to the Beatles, to Chuck Berry, to the Rolling Stones, to Bob Dylan, to Jimi Hendrix, to Elton John, to Led Zeppelin, to Bruce Springsteen, to Neil Young, to Madonna - and, more than anyone else, to hometown boys Rush. On November 4, 1993, the headliners were a trio from Seattle called Nirvana, playing in front of 8,500 fans in a scaled-down version of the Gardens. Only two years before, on the same day the album Nevermind was released - the record that would make them reluctant superstars - the band had played a brilliant, chaotic set at a small Toronto club in front of only a few hundred fans.
Their style was dubbed grunge, a rough, edgy and dark rejection of the excesses of big, corporate rock, just as punk had been fifteen years earlier, and like so many acts before them, they were viewed as the musical voice of a disaffected generation.
But now Nirvana were arena rockers themselves, who had sold millions upon millions of records, and it was hard not to sense their discomfort. The band's lead singer Kurt Cobain was described by Toronto reviewers as "sullen" onstage, and the band pointedly declined to perform its biggest hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit.
As it turned out, Nirvana would never be back. Four months later, they played their last show in Munich.
Five month later, Cobain was dead, a suicide at age 27.
-Stephen Brunt

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

On April 2, 1957, Elvis Presley came to Maple Leaf Gardens, and it's fair to say that Torontonians - at least the older generation - didn't know what hit them. The 22-year-old Presley was just a year removed from the release of his first major label album, and his popularity was skyrocketing. In the past year, he freely acknowledged having earned more than a million dollars. The two shows at Maple Leaf Gardens were played in front of the biggest crowds he had ever entertained, though the earlier set drew just 9,360, nearly 5,000 less than capacity. They also represented the first of only five concerts Presley would perform outside of the United States during his entire career, including two the next night in Ottawa. At the press conferences before his Toronto shows, Presley was relaxed and engaging, sitting cross-legged on a table backstage, while dealing with skeptical journalists and answering a series of largely ridiculous questions. "He unabashedly admitted he couldn't understand classical music or opera, knows nothing about music and likes the shrieks of the teen-agers," the Globe and Mail reported. When Presley finally took the stage, following an opening segment that included a tap dancer, an Irish tenor (who was booed), and a comedian, flashbulbs exploded everywhere and those shrieks all but drowned out the sound coming from the stage. At the first 40-minute show Presley wore his famous gold lame suit in full for the last time. The press made much of Presley's gyrations and the primitive reactions they elicited from the crowd: "a calculated psychological binge," one CBC commentator called it. But members of Presley's entourage remarked later that the Toronto fans were some of the best-behaved they encountered - perhaps because the 90 special police officers on site made any fan who leaped to their feet immediately return to their seat. Afterwards, local jazz musicians predicted that rock and roll was just a passing fad, and critics didn't attempt to hold back their disdain. "It goes without saying he has the appeal of one-part dynamite and one-part chained-lightning to the adolescent girls; but to one like myself who is neither a girl nor adolescent, I could only feel he was strikingly devoid of talent," Hugh Thomson wrote in the Toronto Star. But the kids understood. -Stephen Brunt

Related website
Elvis Presley

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

Beatlemania wasn't quite dead, but it was clearly on the wane.
In 1964, on the first North American tour, the Fab Four were greeted by 10,000 fans at the airport in Toronto, and were mobbed at their hotel - where one enterprising teenaged girl even managed to hide in their closet. Their two shows set an attendance record at Maple Leaf Gardens. A year later, when they rolled into town on the heels of their wild and triumphant concert at Shea Stadium, Gardens' owner Harold Ballard turned up the heat, turned off the water fountains, and made a fortune selling soft drinks as the lads from Liverpool again packed the arena for two shows. But by August 17, 1966, something had changed. John Lennon's crack about the band being more popular than Jesus had stirred controversy and protest. Only 800 fans were at the airport to greet the Beatles, and on the day of the shows, tickets were still available. As before, the Beatles only played a dozen songs, and were preceded by several opening acts - which included The Ronettes. Rumours abounded that this would be the band's final tour. "It would be embarrassing to perform Long Tall Sally when we're 35," Paul McCartney said at the pre-concert press conference. "We can't go on holding hands forever," John Lennon added. Writing in the Toronto Star, Arthur Zeldin had it right. He noted that the band didn't play some of their more ambitious recent songs like Eleanor Rigby live, because they couldn't replicate what they did in the studio on stage. Meanwhile, their more subtle numbers - Yesterday was a clear crowd favourite - were all but drowned out by the screaming. "So, by the very forces of their musical experimentation and development, the Beatles may be taking themselves off the touring, mass live audience scene," Zeldin wrote. Maple Leaf Gardens was the only building the Beatles visited on all three of their North American tours, and after that show in 1966, they would play only eight more concerts, and then never do an official live show again.
But of course, that was hardly the end of the story.
-Stephen Brunt

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

Two of the greatest and most flamboyant political careers in Canada's history reached watershed moments at Maple Leaf Gardens, one drawing to a humiliating close, the other seeming to gain new life. On September 9, 1967, the Progressive Conservative Party held its leadership convention at the Gardens. John Diefenbaker had been the party's face since 1956, and for six years the Prime Minister of Canada. But after losing consecutive elections, the rank and file wanted him out. The Chief kept his intentions secret until the last minute, when he filed nomination papers, and joined a crowded field vying for the job. But on the first ballot, he finished fifth, and on the second, many of his supporters deserted him for other candidates. Understanding that his position was hopeless, Diefenbaker voted once more then left abruptly, heading back to his hotel with no intention of returning to the Gardens. In the end, he thought better of it, and came back at the end of the night to rally support behind his successor, Robert Stanfield. "Don't, as the fire of controversy burns around your leader, add gasoline to that fire," he told the crowd. Twelve years later, the largest political rally in Canadian history packed 18,000 people into the arena, an echo of the Trudeaumania phenomenon eleven years before. But on May 9, 1979, Pierre Trudeau - the man Stanfield could never beat - was fighting for his political life, blamed by Canadians for a failing economy. Following performances by Sylvia Tyson, the Good Brothers, and the Downchild Blues Band, Trudeau took the stage like a rock star, and made a passionate argument for the patriation of Canada's constitution. "What began as an embarrassment is a shame," he said. This time the voters weren't buying, though. Thirteen days later, they elected Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives with a minority government. Trudeau resigned, only to stay on when Clark's government fell unexpectedly after only nine months. The Liberals won a majority in 1980. And in 1982, the Constitution came home.
-Stephen Brunt

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

Wrestling was featured at Maple Leaf Gardens almost from the moment the building opened, and after hockey, the unique combination of athletic prowess and pantomime billed as "an exhibition of skill and science" was the arena's most frequent attraction. All of the greats grappled here, from Jim Londos in the 1930's to Hulk Hogan in the 1980's. But two local wrasslin' icons stood above the rest - one a "baby face" and one a "heel." Whipper Billy Watson, real name William Potts, made his Gardens debut in 1940, shortly after he emigrated from England, and immediately became a crowd favourite. On March 15, 1956, he defeated Lou Thesz by count-out to win the World Heavyweight Championship, and fans and the local sports press celebrated the feat - as though it were absolutely 100% genuine. "Isn't it wonderful! Isn't it great! Whipper Watson, world's heavyweight wrestling champion. Just imagine!" Steve York wrote in the Globe and Mail, under a mammoth headline. Longtime Gardens promoter Frank Tunney, perhaps a little extravagantly, once estimated that Watson entertained five million people during his decades as a local headliner. On one famous night in 1959, Watson beat Gorgeous George, who was forced to shave his glorious golden locks as part of the bargain. And in 1965, the Whipper - who kept wrestling until being struck by a car and losing his left leg in 1971 - dispatched a nefarious newcomer called The Sheik. But that dastardly villain - whose real name was Eddie Farhat, and who hailed not from Syria, as billed, but from Detroit - would return, and in 1969 began the greatest "winning" streak in Toronto sports history. Week after week, he took on all comers at the Gardens - often with slippery manager Abdullah "the Weasel" Farouk in his corner. Employing all sorts of chicanery to which the oblivious referees somehow remained blind, he always managed to come out on top. The fans turned out in droves, hoping to see the bad guy finally get his comeuppance, including a record crowd of more than 18,000 on February 21, 1971, to see him defeat Tiger Jeet Singh. The Sheik's undefeated run finally came to an end after 15 years and 127 matches on August 11, 1974, when he made the mistake of attacking the referee, and lost by disqualification to Andre the Giant. -Stephen Brunt

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

Ace Bailey faced the man who had nearly killed him - and for a moment no one knew what would happen.
Two months earlier, during a game at the Boston Garden, the Bruins' Eddie Shore took a run at Bailey and flattened him. The Leafs' winger fractured his skull when his head hit the ice.
For days he hovered between life and death.
Boston police threatened to charge Shore with manslaughter, and Bailey's distraught father boarded a train for Boston with a gun in his pocket, intent on killing the man he believed had killed his son.
Bailey survived, though he would never play hockey again. On February 14, 1934, a team of NHL All-Stars, with Shore in the line-up, played the Maple Leafs at the Gardens, with the proceeds going to benefit Bailey and his family.
It was announced that no Maple Leaf would ever wear Bailey's number six again - the first number ever retired in the NHL.
During the pre-game ceremonies, Bailey came face to face with his attacker for the first time. After a tense few seconds, he extended his hand, and the Gardens crowd erupted in cheers. There were hopes that the exhibition would become an annual tradition, to benefit injured players. But that wouldn't happen until October 13, 1947, when the first official NHL All-Star Game was played at Maple Leaf Gardens.
It was a rough night. Chicago's Bill Mosienko suffered a broken ankle after absorbing a hard check from the Leafs' Jimmy Thomson, and the Montreal defence tandem of Butch Bouchard and Ken Reardon mixed it up repeatedly with Toronto's Bill Ezinicki.
The game marked the first time Toronto fans watched through glass on top of the boards, which replaced the traditional wire mesh. Some complained that it dulled the sound of body checks.
-Stephen Brunt

Photos and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted February, 2012

Photo Source - Wikimedia Commons

Imbedded in the top of a table at the "Canteen" on the main level and on level 2 at Loblaws is this plaque. Here's what it tells us:

Really, it couldn't have been better scripted - except for the ending.
On May 29, 1993, the Toronto Maple Leafs were just one win away from a trip to the Stanley Cup finals, where they had not ventured since the triumph of 1967. Waiting for them were the Montreal Canadiens, their great historic rivals, in the midst of an unexpected playoff run that would eventually take them all the way to a championship.
Twice already, the Maple Leafs had shown a flair for the dramatic, winning playoff series in the seventh game against the Detroit Red Wings and St. Louis Blues, and their fans filled the streets in celebration. Now, with the Cup so close, the whole town seemed set to explode. Only one small problem for Doug Gilmour, Wendel Clark, Felix Potvin and company, the best Leafs team in a long, long time, and their inspirational head coach Pat Burns: sitting on the visitors' bench wearing the uniform of the Los Angeles Kings was Wayne Gretzky, arguably the greatest hockey player of all time.
Leafs fans will tell you that they should have won the series in game six in Los Angeles - that they were robbed when Gretzky accidentally slashed Gilmour in the face in overtime, drew blood, somehow didn't receive even a minor penalty, and then scored the winner a few seconds later.
In game seven, though, there was no real controversy. Gretzky was magnificent, scoring three times, but the Leafs refused to fold, fighting back again and again. In the final seconds, trailing 5-4, with the Gardens' crowd as loud as it had ever been during the building's long history, they pushed desperately for the tying goal, only to finally be denied.
It was a heartbreaking finale to an unforgettable hockey spring in Toronto. So close. So agonizingly, tortuously, close.
-Stephen Brunt

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