3 Stylish Tea Rooms and Abundant Soda Fountains For many of Toronto''s residents, the city in the early 1900s was a dull community of churches -- vastly Protestant and firmly on the side of temperance. At that time, Toronto was the mirror opposite of Montreal. Prominent downtown department stores, such as Eaton''s and Simpsons, did their Sabbath duty of pulling their black curtains across display windows to deter window-shoppers from thinking about retail on Saturdays at closing in anticipation of those sacrosanct Sundays. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Toronto had a population of just over two hundred thousand and was still thought of as a small, quaint British town where churches, temperance, non-alcoholic drinks in public, and the ritual of high tea prevailed daily. This era was, after all, the high point in the debate between wet and dry, temperance or prohibition. Toronto was plagued, if not bogged down by, plebiscites on the big issue of wanton access to alcohol. The Lord''s Day Act was heavily enforced as a go-to source to ensure Sunday was maintained as a sacred day reserved for churchgoing with no business transactions allowed to take place freely. The Woman''s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was strong in Ontario, as it was in many parts of Canada.

It chose Toronto as the venue to hold its World Convention in 1897. A national plebiscite on September 29, 1898, by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier''s Liberal Party government revealed to drink or not to drink was a divisive issue nationally, that the architect of "sunny ways" saw a dark cloud cover this matter and thus it was consigned to the political backburner. Ontario, with its strong WCTU presence, had such a dim view of alcohol that it wasn''t surprising that in 1916 the Ontario Temperance Act confirmed prohibition. This was before a temperance referendum gave full support to the dry forces in 1921. This is only half of the truth. With an increased population in Toronto, there was certainly choice in elegant fine dining establishments. A plethora of postcards survive from that era confirming one thing: Toronto restaurateurs, even by the 1880s, were up to date with the latest technology to feed many customers in a rapidly growing city and thus make their businesses viable. Yet the surviving postcards also make it clear that Toronto restaurateurs of fine, if not stylish, establishments were cognizant of foreign influences in terms of modern decor and state-of-the-art technology to support such new eateries.

The challenging question, of course, was why didn''t they survive? While it''s true that fashionable tea rooms and high-end tea establishments in Toronto prevailed, the city was once again plugged into dining trends elsewhere that influenced and found approval. But Toronto was caught in a conflict of stricter if not harsh attitudes to alcohol and the ever-present consideration to observe temperance pitted against an increase in choice providing more places to dine out and have fun. In fact, the early 1900s were the high point almost anywhere to indulge in tea. It was a custom and a social fashion. Afternoon tea as a social food-consuming practice was "invented" in England. It started at Woburn Abbey around 1840 when Anna, seventh Duchess of Bedford, concocted a light mid-afternoon meal for women while their husbands were out hunting to tide them over until a more formal dinner was served later in the evening. For many, it was the substantial snack, as seen at a later date in the 1956 film Tea and Sympathy. As a bridge between lunch and dinner, it provided women, and men, with a chance to socialize and converse.

The fad caught on, and in England -- and in Calvinistic Scotland -- it was easy to see by mid-century how taking tea could be offered at tea rooms, some dull, others practical, still others elevated and outright elegant, where people who couldn''t live in the kind of luxury afforded at Woburn Abbey, could be seen amid fine dining and tasteful surroundings. Part of the appeal for high-end, emerging tea rooms in Toronto was that the custom was developed in Britain. In this period, Toronto was still in the shadow of Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe''s vision of York -- soon to be called Toronto -- as an all-British settlement complete with English-style food and place names, hence the prevalence of so many English-style pubs in the city. Then, as we''ve seen, Beverly Randolph Snow arrived to offer a more distinct French/American flavour based on the success of his restaurants in Washington, D.C. Yet, in Toronto in those years, the custom of afternoon tea began winning approval in Toronto. Any aspiring fine dining entrepreneur opening a thoroughly British-style tea room at this time in Toronto couldn''t ignore the success of the Lyons Corner House "empire" in Britain. In 1894, Anglo-Jewish entrepreneur Joseph Nathaniel Lyons and his brothers-in-law, Isidore and Montague Gluckstein, saw the value in adapting the growing tea custom when they opened their first tea room under the Lyons name on London''s Piccadilly.

By that time, the Lyons family were known as successful caterers and food manufacturers thanks to Lyons'' Tea and Lyons'' Cakes as well as their ice-cream brand. Before the First World War, the family''s quaint tea rooms evolved very rapidly into the elegant and larger Lyons Corner Houses, soon found at many major intersections in London. Because the establishments were profitable and their products much in demand, they were decorated to a higher level of sophistication, and presumably the quality of the teas and cakes garnered elevated prices. Ordinary Lyons tea rooms were aimed at the middle class, but the Corner Houses were targeted at a more discerning, cultured clientele. Eventually numbering two hundred locations, Lyons tea rooms, not surprisingly, were easily and enthusiastically exported across the Atlantic Ocean to Toronto. Lyons''s success was also likely inspiration. Pharmacist and ultimately restaurateur George Andrew Bingham, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, saw the profitable possibilities of the English tea room. Born in Bradford, Canada West (today''s Ontario), in Simcoe County in 1864, he wasn''t only a restaurant owner but the "oldest retail druggist in Toronto," according to his obituary in the Toronto Daily Star on August 19, 1931.

Early in his career, he opened Bingham''s Tea Room De Luxe at 146 Yonge Street, ironically close to Temperance Street and former lands owned by Jesse Ketchum, a rich tanner, Upper Canada political figure, and vice-president of the York Temperance Society. A postcard dated 1906 can be found in the City of Toronto Archives. The spelling of the term De Luxe suggests a nod to elegant high end. Bingham''s Tea Room De Luxe was in good company. It was conveniently located down the street from the Dineen Building, the only surviving structure from that time in the immediate neighbourhood, having been built in 1897. Once a hat furrier and mixed-use building, now a coffee shop, it would have provided George Bingham''s establishment with professional clientele in search of food, tea, and perhaps an ounce of sympathy. The tea room interior, as seen in the postcard, isn''t just chic but reveals that Bingham was connected to upscale trends fashionable elsewhere, if not British, at least European. The entire interior decoration scheme certainly seems more French in inspiration.

The pilasters with their gold-painted curled volutes on Corinthian columns punctuated by electric lights on wall sconces are typical of a bygone high-end age. In architecture, pilasters date back to Greco-Roman antiquity, and their appearance everywhere from railway stations, to courthouses, to banks symbolizes building interiors meant to last. The wall mural in the postcard is elegant but by no means akin to anything distinctly British. The wall is either a painted mural or an expensive, sophisticated pattern paper most likely French-inspired. It''s Louis XVI or Rococo Revival in style. In addition to the Corinthian columns, the elaborate scrolls and swags also indicate that revival style. The design points to the work of a popular eighteenth-century Paris Rococo decorator named Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728-1808), a mural designer, painter, and textiles artist, and is possibly Pillement-derived. What Bingham is offering in his tea room is a relaxed yet elegant setting for his refined, high-tea-loving Toronto patrons.

The stately clock to the right and large windows at the back contribute a more cozy or simplified version of Louis XVI in comparison to the grander treatment found in another Toronto establishment, McConkey''s Palm Garden Restaurant, where we see the oculus and other ornate Louis XVI motifs by decorator Frederick Challener (1869-1959) of the firm Bailey and Oben working for architect E.J. Lennox (1854-1933) and restaurateur George McConkey in 1899. The choice of decor at Bingham''s tea room shows that his customers were well travelled or at least appreciated French Rococo Revival taste. Jean-Baptiste Pillement was pretty blue chip in his day but also blue stocking; Queen Marie Antoinette was one of his clients. The bird at the centre of the wall in the postcard is some sort of waterfowl, possibly a bittern or an egret. Wild duck and waterfowl were popular items found on menus in Toronto in this period; at that time, wild fowl were extant in the now-vanished marshes of Ashbridges Bay. Newspaperman and author Gordon Sinclair (1900-84) mentions in his memoir, Will the Real Gordon Sinclair Please Stand Up!, that fresh ducks killed locally were a popular food in Toronto at the turn of the ce.