Where sleeping car porters stayed

Gil Carty remembers his great aunt Jean McKenzie, who immigrated from Jamaica in the 1920s, saved her money and bought a house downtown.

Aunt Jean’s portrait

When I was little, I was intimidated by my Great Aunt Jean McKenzie! She seemed so big. She was experienced with kids – she had been a nanny to Eaton family children – and got a charge out of scaring me. When I called her a giant, she’d take a few steps toward me, threaten to bite my head off and send me scurrying.

She really was a giant in terms of her accomplishments as a Jamaican immigrant to Toronto in the 1920s. By the early 1940s, she had saved enough to buy a large house at 49 Beverley St. She turned it into accommodation for sleeping car porters and others. The multi-talented celebrity Paul Robeson stayed there; he couldn’t get a hotel room because of the racial climate at the time. The porters probably directed him to my aunt’s.

The place was always busy. Our family, which then included cousins and grandfather, lived on one floor in the 1950s. My parents stayed there while they saved to buy their Scarborough home. My mother was a seamstress in the garment district; my father, a porter.

They had met at my aunt’s house, where my mother came to stay after leaving Jamaica at 18. My father, from New Brunswick, had left the air force and was living around the corner at University Settlement House. I was born in 1950.

I have some vivid memories of life at my aunt’s. I used to share my mother’s bed because my father was on the trains. Once, I awoke, mistook clothes on the bedpost for a man and alerted my mother. She screamed, and my grandfather came running. After that, I never slept in her bed again.

One Sunday morning in 1955, I awoke to smell smoke from the smoldering ruins of St. George the Martyr, a Black church in downtown. It had caught fire during the night.

I also remember chicken feet hanging in the back shed. My aunt made soup out of them, but they gave me the creeps.

My aunt was a generous, considerate woman. Preparing to return to Jamaica in the early 1970s, she sold her house and left money to a loyal Hungarian tenant, who had lived in her house for many years. She wanted to make sure he would be all right.

Wedding portrait of Gil’s parents

Portrait of Gil holding a painting of a house resembling his great aunt’s house and holding Jean’s portrait.