The Sunday porch: healthful rest

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Sleeping porch, Toronto, October 1913, via Department of Health Collection (Fonds 200, Series 372), City of Toronto Archives.

Judging from two other photos in the same collection, sleeping porches were being promoted as a way to cut the risk of contracting tuberculosis.

Life in gardens: roof garden

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“Yonge St. Mission, Mr. & Mrs. J. C. Davis on roof garden,” Toronto, July 29, 1924, via The Globe and Mail Collection (Fond 1266, Item 3318), City of Toronto Archives.

John Coolidge Davis founded the Yonge Street Mission in the 1890s, handing out food and clothing to the poor from a “gospel wagon.” In 1904, the Mission purchased the building at 381 Yonge Street, now called the Evergreen Centre for Street Youth.

The boys

mrs-gordons-boys-1907-montreal-musee-mccord“Mrs. Gordon’s boys,” Montreal, 1906, by Wm. Notman & Son, via McCord Museum Common on flickr.

The boys’ father was a wealthy businessman and banker, and their garden encompassed five acres. Next door, another four acres were owned by their uncle and aunt, Harriet Brooks Pitcher. She was an early nuclear scientist who contributed to the discovery of radon and worked briefly with Marie Curie.

Luxembourg Gardens

women-children-in-luxembourg-gardens-paris-getty-museumWomen and Children in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, 1898, by Eugène Atgetvia The J. Paul Getty Museum Open Content Program.

Mohegan, W.V.

1-west-virginia-1938-mpwolcott-library-of-congress Gate and fence in coal miner’s front yard, Mohegan, West Virginia, September 1938, by Marion Post Wolcott, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

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Mohegan was a coal mining community or “camp” of McDowell County. It was abandoned in the 1940s.