If you’ve walked around Toronto, you might have noticed plaques scattered around the city. Some are new, some are old, and Heritage Toronto is trying to encourage people to stop and give them a read — through a weekly short-form video series.
In a social media campaign dubbed ‘Plaque Fridays,’ they zero in on one location and its history or unveil a new plaque.
The series is hosted by Heritage Toronto plaques co-ordinator Meg Sutton, who explains the site’s significance. Each video also features a person wearing a pigeon mask and cooing along or a stuffed version of the bird, providing comedic relief to some otherwise heavy topics.
“We’re leaning into the joke to encourage people to notice the plaques they’ve been walking — or in the pigeon’s case flying — past all along, poking a bit of fun at ourselves, but also adding some levity and joy,” said Sutton.
For Light Naing, marketing and communications co-ordinator at Heritage Toronto, short-form video is an accessible format.
“It’s bite-sized and it’s fun and it’s not necessarily reading,” he said.
“We just wanted to present it in a fun, engaging way, add some comedic relief to it, add some humour to it because that’s kind of the format that people are really absorbing right now,” Naing said.
Plaque Fridays are the group’s best performing social media content to date, with viewership taking off after a popular video from February during Chinese Heritage Month in Ontario was published.
The plaque commemorates the hand laundry businesses in Toronto’s first Chinatown. It recognizes Sam Ching, one of the city’s earliest recorded Chinese residents, who ran a laundry business downtown starting in 1878.
The video opens with Sutton standing beside the plaque before following her on a walk through the surrounding blocks.
As she narrates the neighbourhood’s history, archival photos and newspaper clippings of the city’s first Chinese immigrants are shown across the screen. The video lands somewhere between documentary and casual explainer, with an appearance by the “pigeon” providing a light touch.
That video’s popularity was surpassed by the City Park Apartments video from June, which now has about 40,000 views. The video shows Sutton walking through the apartment complex near Church and Wellesley streets, credited as one of the starting points for the LGBTQ+ community’s growth in the area, as well as old photos spanning the years since it opened in the mid-1950s.
Since Heritage Toronto started the weekly videos, there’s been a lot more community engagement with the organization, said Naing.
They’ve been getting more requests for plaques, Sutton said. “The hope is that Plaque Fridays get people thinking about what stories they would like to see on a plaque.”
The plaques program has existed since the 1970s, originating with a former department of the city called the Toronto Historical Board.
“Heritage Toronto adopted it and now kind of evolves and expands it. There’s over 900 plaques in the city, so a lot more Plaque Fridays to go,” said Sutton.
Heritage Toronto is a registered charity and an arm’s-length agency of the city with an education mandate. Toronto’s plaques program is primarily application-based, through the Heritage Toronto website.
“It’s one of the strengths of our program because it allows for unknown histories to be brought forward and have a platform for those voices,” said Sutton, who is part of a two-person plaques team.
Heritage Toronto also says it is the most active English-language plaque program in North America. According to Sutton, the organization adds about 40 new plaques to the city every year.
“The applicants can be anyone. They could be developers working on a heritage building, or they could be experts in a field of history of an area. It could be a concerned neighbour or a citizen.” said Sutton.
Extensive consultation and community work goes into each plaque.
Sutton describes a careful research-to-plaque process: she and a colleague draw on archives and community oral histories to get the story right and ensure all voices are considered. That material is then distilled into roughly 250 words, written at about a Grade 5 reading level. The whole process typically takes about six months, though most of that time is spent manufacturing the plaque itself.
Naing said it takes a couple of hours to film and edit a Plaque Fridays video that’s about a minute long.
The organization has been trying to reach a younger audience, and those who don’t usuallyengage with Toronto’s history. The project has been a success on that front, it said.
Naing said the filming process often draws curious people who come over to read the plaque.
“The same reaction comes from the Plaque Friday posts, where people share that they recognize streets or places near them and discover the history of a particular building or the area generally,” Naing said.
“And that is truly like what we’re trying to do, right? We’re promoting our plaques, yes, but like we want people to know that there’s history in every corner.”
