The Legislative Building and Surrounding Areas

There are countless postcards depicting the Legislative Building and surrounding areas. The postcards allow us to see changes to the buildings and grounds throughout the 20th century. Look for the differences in the Legislative building before and after the fire of 1909, and how Queen’s Park and the Toronto skyline have changed over time.

Yesterday’s postcards paved the way for the text messaging and Tweeting of today. With up to five mail deliveries per day, the postcard was the closest thing to instant communication available. In fact, the current limits of 160 characters for texts and 140 characters for Tweets are based on the average length of postcard messages, found to be 150 characters. Like today’s text messages, early postcard writers used abbreviations and went without punctuation to conserve space. Many in the early 20th century worried that postcards would threaten literacy standards…some things never change.