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The climax was his sequence of elegiac studies of the demolition of the grand old theatres of Toronto. His memories went back to the Saturday nights of his youth, when a streetcar ticket and 25 cents gained him admission to the gallery of one of them to see the most glittering entertainment of the day. Or perhaps the magic had begun even earlier, when he had performed his "chalk talks." One has only to scan the captions he wrote for these pictures to capture the mood of this work. Lovingly, he recalled the glory of the vaudeville palaces:

Here stood the conductor, baton raised, ready to give the sparkling entertainers the gayest of overtures.

Here, harp in hand, in a misty Olympus, sit the great plaster muses. [illust - theatre]

He recalled the performances:
The old miser trickling his gold through his fingers was a great favourite. The talented clown who built a house and in the process slowly fell backwards off a kitchen table and seemed quite unperturbed.
  
The two odd-looking men who walked rapidly and silently to the centre of the stage seeming so close together that the following man's toes seemed almost joined to the heels of the other. Without slowing down or paying any attention to the silent baffled audience they continued to follow an invisible intricate track all over the stage. Soon a few titters and giggles began to come from here and there and in no time a great roar of laughter swept the theatre and we all were swept away by it. Theatre magic, that's all.

 

But then, the notes became darker, telling cryptically the story of the theatres' demise:
Here from the chilly gods I watched the manager of a travelling stock company announce sadly that the performance we had just enjoyed was their last as the company was broke and disbanding.
  
One noon hour a group of us shot arrows across this stage. In the depth of the depression an archery school harvested a few silver coins in the otherwise dark theatre.

And then he wrote of the scenes he captured of the theatres' final days:
Glittering red and white molten stars fall among blue flashes through the great central sconce far down to the broken brick and plaster fragments of ornament [which are] now the only floor.

In the centre of this vast cave, a crackling fire is surrounded by heavily muffled men looking like a Mongol horde foraging in the ruin of some ancient throne room.

He remembered what a dread thing the smell of fire had been in the theatres during his youth: how dangerous the upswept sparks of the wreckers' fires would have been to these old queens, which had often been built and rebuilt in their time:
The panic smell of drifting wood smoke up against the dusky once gilt ceiling. Distantly the sound of voices from the rubble-floored cellar only adding the high loneliness.

 

Snow floating gently through the broken roof of the stage. Scarlet sparks from the cutting torch high in the flies cascading down splashing on the framework and hissing on the fallen snow. [illust]

 

There is a wonderful range to these pictures, which have been compared to the works of Piranesi and Raoul Dufy. Their greatest power appears when they are seen as a group. Before, my father most often had been an outside observer. Now he was able to enter into the bowels of these splendid, dying buildings. He worked breathlessly, accompanied by the harsh thud of the wrecking ball and the shrieking wrench of the bar and chain. Clouds of dust smothered him, as he sat hunched on his stool, whipping his pen across the paper while walls folded inwards and crumbled. Each scene is bathed in a unifying, fluid light, but there are profound differences in the treatment among the pictures. The harsh, angular, charred beams of one contrasts with the drifting smoke, dust and snow of another. With an instinctive line that was swift, rhythmical and suggestive, he achieved Herbert Read's "dancing on the page with a joy quite independent of any reproductive purpose."  For all the desolation of the ruins he records, as his captions confirm, he had an essential appreciation of the beauty and drama inherent in these scenes, which relieves  them of some of their bleakness.

 

Two pictures are particularly telling. The first, one of the few exterior views my father made of a theatre wreck, emphasizes the encroachment of the new, soulless Toronto architecture. Surmounting a jagged brick wall, a workman stands arrogantly over a nearly demolished building. Behind the man looms a white, remote skyscraper. The foreground building is reduced to a few walls, a wheelbarrow overturned on a pile of debris and planks propped against girders. However, beside the slouching figure of the wrecker stretches one last remembrance of the former state of the ruined building, an ornate stairway reaching up through the roofless edifice to nowhere. [illust] The second is more elegiac. This time we are within the theatre, staring out through a ragged hole in the backstage wall to a bleak horizon, (an empty sky is rare in my father's work). The destruction here is obscene: wires dangle, boards are upended, staircases sag askew. A ladder leans at a crazy angle in front of a mountain rubble. And hunched at its base, in front of the former stage, there is the existential, shadowed figure of an anonymous man (the artist, perhaps) contemplating the ruins. [illust] My father was the witness, the solitary mourner, the only one to accord the necessary burial ceremony, to honour a magnificent past. Moreover, at fifty, was there possibly the unackowledged beginning of a grappling with his own mortality?

 

Puzzling out his rage against the wanton destruction of his city, and its replacement with what, to him, was a soulless one, my father jotted quotations in his notebook which articulated his distress. He noted Rousseau's "We might cry out on the crucial danger of our age: All men are born creative, but everywhere they are made imitative." And then he added Lewis Mumford's: "Man running a machine is a subsidary machine." Mumford lamented:

Only quantities count, qualities by the very terms of scientific method, are disqualified. Until our age humans demanded the human imprint on all tools and utensils. That extra effort, that extra display of love and esthetic skill tends to act as a preservative of any structure for until the symbols themselves become meaningless men tend to value and if possible to save from decay and destruction works of art that bear the human imprint. 

 

While my father was wrestling against the destruction of his city because he saw it as a death of the human imprint and all the richness implicit in this, his art itself became a theatre.  At night, on his bicycle, he flapped raggedly home from the commuter train, pumping uphill and balancing several large pieces of cardboard, with their newly-made drawings, under one arm, while a shopping bag of library books or relics from the wrecks he was sketching, swung from the handlebars.
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Over the years, a few gifts came his way as a result of his drawings. As well as the knotweed pens, he salvaged a number of other treasures. There were large blue and white decorated Chinese jars and games with ivory counters, which he had found lying in the rubble of the Chinatown which was soon to be replaced by the new city hall, and various luminary devices--a train lantern, old brass candlesticks and amber votive candle glasses from Loretto Abbey. But it was the theatres which yielded the most imposing booty, a series of massive plaster ornaments which included a goddess' head, and a figure of Pan.

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