Being black in Toronto during the 1930s was one thing. Being black and buying a three-storey Victorian house downtown when most of your white neighbours couldn't afford rent – that got a lot of backs up.
"My father would hear, `Clarke is stupid to move. West Indians don't own houses in Canada!'" says Claire Clarke, 95. She was 17 at the time, the younger of two daughters.
Critics, many of them friends, thought the Clarkes were reaching way beyond their station. Barely eight months had passed since the stock market collapsed. It was the beginning of the Great Depression, though no one knew how long it would last. Canada was in the midst of an election with Mackenzie King's Liberals losing popularity faster than the workforce – mostly white men – was shedding jobs. Toronto's population hovered around 630,000 people; fewer than 3,000 were black. And who in their right mind would settle in a country covered in snow and ice half the year?
But Henry Clarke owned his own house in Barbados and intended to put down roots in Toronto. He had found steady work as a moulder making train wheels at an iron and steel foundry.
His wife Louise had earned a reputation in Kensington Gardens as a gifted dressmaker. She had even used some of the money she earned to buy her daughters a Newcombe piano so they could learn to play.
Where pessimists, or realists, saw a tiny black community, the Clarkes reminded them it included social clubs like the United Negro Improvement Association, one doctor, two lawyers, a grocer and three churches. They saw opportunity for their girls.
"We decided he was going to throw whatever money he had in the bank on the first shack he found and that shack was at 76 Robinson St.," Clarke recalls.
The Clarkes bought the property near Queen and Bathurst on Monday, June 9, 1930 from a Jewish couple, Abraham and Fannie Reisberg, for $3,600 – the equivalent of $46,350 in 2009 dollars.
Though Clarke says race relations in Toronto weren't as tense as in the United States – "you could play with their children but you didn't go into their houses" – dark-skinned immigrants had a hard time finding rentals, let alone buying property.
She recalls Jews being especially empathetic. "The other people would slam the door in your face and that's it."
When she walked into the house at 76 Robinson St. for the first time, Clarke remembers a bed set up on the main floor in the dining room. She thought back to the first flat they rented in Kensington Market nine years before, when they arrived in Toronto.
That apartment had three rooms. Her parents slept in one. Another held the piano and fancy furniture reserved for company. A curtain drawn across part of the kitchen cordoned off the area where Claire and her sister Eileen bunked.
In the new house, the girls shared the entire attic floor, which had dormer windows facing the street and smaller ones overlooking the backyard. They slept in a double bed.
"It was always a fuss who was going to sleep on which side," Clarke says. "One side, you could get out faster and you were closer to the Quebec heater ...
"We had lots of fun at that house," she adds.
Her sister started piano lessons at a music conservatory. Henry tried to teach Claire himself "but I hated it. It interfered with me reading."
Within two years of moving in, Henry's work schedule at the steel foundry was cut in half. Claire, who had just graduated from Central High School of Commerce on Shaw St. with top honours and specialized skills in stenography and typing, began looking for a clerical job. She devoured classified sections and sent out resumes. An engineering firm invited her for an interview. "But you see, they didn't know I was black. So when I showed up, that was the end of that job."
Undeterred, she approached an influential "light-skinned coloured man" who worked at City Hall for advice.
"He said: `Well, you won't get a job in the city because the white girls won't work with you.'
"That was his answer for me! He didn't even try. I said, `Well, that's not a good answer for me.'"
Like her seamstress mother, who could copy any design in the window display at Eaton's, Claire worked wonders with a needle. The family needed extra income fast, so Clarke shifted her search to the garment district.
"One morning I woke up. I said, `Well, today, I'm going to get a job.' And I went knocking on every door."
The only one that opened belonged to a Mr. Wise. He owned a hat shop.
"I remember the pieces were cut on the bias so they would pull," Clarke says.
The money she earned making hats went into the family pot. It helped pay for the coal in the Quebec heater that kept the attic space warm. It helped pay for the cornmeal and okra her mother used to make one of her favourite meals – what Claire called kuku as a child.
"It would be turned with a spatula until it stood up on your plate," she recalls.
As the threat of war began to pull the continent out of its Depression, Clarke continued to write letters to employers outlining her skills and eventually found work with the federal government that fit her qualifications – first as a secretary in a naval supply store and later as a training officer at an employment insurance bureau.
When she retired, she enrolled as a first-year student at University of Toronto, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree at the age of 71.
For 75 years, she lived at 76 Robinson St. She raised a son, whom she named Henry, there.
Just a few winters ago, a bad fall outside a downtown school landed her in hospital. When the stairs in her grand Victorian became too much for a bad hip, she moved into a retirement home in Kensington.
She entertains visitors most days of the week and chats up a retired economics professor in the dining room at suppertime.
Last month, after years of deliberation, her family put 76 Robinson St. on the market.
It belongs to someone else now. Gone for half a million.
She's wistful but matter-of-fact:
"Bought in a Depression, sold in a Depression."
"My father would hear, `Clarke is stupid to move. West Indians don't own houses in Canada!'" says Claire Clarke, 95. She was 17 at the time, the younger of two daughters.
Critics, many of them friends, thought the Clarkes were reaching way beyond their station. Barely eight months had passed since the stock market collapsed. It was the beginning of the Great Depression, though no one knew how long it would last. Canada was in the midst of an election with Mackenzie King's Liberals losing popularity faster than the workforce – mostly white men – was shedding jobs. Toronto's population hovered around 630,000 people; fewer than 3,000 were black. And who in their right mind would settle in a country covered in snow and ice half the year?
But Henry Clarke owned his own house in Barbados and intended to put down roots in Toronto. He had found steady work as a moulder making train wheels at an iron and steel foundry.
His wife Louise had earned a reputation in Kensington Gardens as a gifted dressmaker. She had even used some of the money she earned to buy her daughters a Newcombe piano so they could learn to play.
Where pessimists, or realists, saw a tiny black community, the Clarkes reminded them it included social clubs like the United Negro Improvement Association, one doctor, two lawyers, a grocer and three churches. They saw opportunity for their girls.
"We decided he was going to throw whatever money he had in the bank on the first shack he found and that shack was at 76 Robinson St.," Clarke recalls.
The Clarkes bought the property near Queen and Bathurst on Monday, June 9, 1930 from a Jewish couple, Abraham and Fannie Reisberg, for $3,600 – the equivalent of $46,350 in 2009 dollars.
Though Clarke says race relations in Toronto weren't as tense as in the United States – "you could play with their children but you didn't go into their houses" – dark-skinned immigrants had a hard time finding rentals, let alone buying property.
She recalls Jews being especially empathetic. "The other people would slam the door in your face and that's it."
When she walked into the house at 76 Robinson St. for the first time, Clarke remembers a bed set up on the main floor in the dining room. She thought back to the first flat they rented in Kensington Market nine years before, when they arrived in Toronto.
That apartment had three rooms. Her parents slept in one. Another held the piano and fancy furniture reserved for company. A curtain drawn across part of the kitchen cordoned off the area where Claire and her sister Eileen bunked.
In the new house, the girls shared the entire attic floor, which had dormer windows facing the street and smaller ones overlooking the backyard. They slept in a double bed.
"It was always a fuss who was going to sleep on which side," Clarke says. "One side, you could get out faster and you were closer to the Quebec heater ...
"We had lots of fun at that house," she adds.
Her sister started piano lessons at a music conservatory. Henry tried to teach Claire himself "but I hated it. It interfered with me reading."
Within two years of moving in, Henry's work schedule at the steel foundry was cut in half. Claire, who had just graduated from Central High School of Commerce on Shaw St. with top honours and specialized skills in stenography and typing, began looking for a clerical job. She devoured classified sections and sent out resumes. An engineering firm invited her for an interview. "But you see, they didn't know I was black. So when I showed up, that was the end of that job."
Undeterred, she approached an influential "light-skinned coloured man" who worked at City Hall for advice.
"He said: `Well, you won't get a job in the city because the white girls won't work with you.'
"That was his answer for me! He didn't even try. I said, `Well, that's not a good answer for me.'"
Like her seamstress mother, who could copy any design in the window display at Eaton's, Claire worked wonders with a needle. The family needed extra income fast, so Clarke shifted her search to the garment district.
"One morning I woke up. I said, `Well, today, I'm going to get a job.' And I went knocking on every door."
The only one that opened belonged to a Mr. Wise. He owned a hat shop.
"I remember the pieces were cut on the bias so they would pull," Clarke says.
The money she earned making hats went into the family pot. It helped pay for the coal in the Quebec heater that kept the attic space warm. It helped pay for the cornmeal and okra her mother used to make one of her favourite meals – what Claire called kuku as a child.
"It would be turned with a spatula until it stood up on your plate," she recalls.
As the threat of war began to pull the continent out of its Depression, Clarke continued to write letters to employers outlining her skills and eventually found work with the federal government that fit her qualifications – first as a secretary in a naval supply store and later as a training officer at an employment insurance bureau.
When she retired, she enrolled as a first-year student at University of Toronto, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree at the age of 71.
For 75 years, she lived at 76 Robinson St. She raised a son, whom she named Henry, there.
Just a few winters ago, a bad fall outside a downtown school landed her in hospital. When the stairs in her grand Victorian became too much for a bad hip, she moved into a retirement home in Kensington.
She entertains visitors most days of the week and chats up a retired economics professor in the dining room at suppertime.
Last month, after years of deliberation, her family put 76 Robinson St. on the market.
It belongs to someone else now. Gone for half a million.
She's wistful but matter-of-fact:
"Bought in a Depression, sold in a Depression."
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