Welcome Guest!
In order to take advantage of all the great features that Waterloo Region Connected has to offer, including participating in the lively discussions below, you're going to have to register. The good news is that it'll take less than a minute and you can get started enjoying Waterloo Region's best online community right away.
or Create an Account




Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Victoria Park
#1
Victoria Park

[Image: Victoria-park-kitchener-monument.jpg]
Reply


#2
Missing kaiser statue ‘a mystery that will never be solved’
August 23, 2014 | Greg Mercer | The Record | Link
Quote:KITCHENER — It was sometime after midnight when a loud splash suddenly echoed across the water in Victoria Park. The bust of Germany's first emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm I, had just been tossed into the lake.

On Aug. 23, 1914, Kitchener, then known as Berlin, was three weeks into the Great War and tensions were growing in a city with torn British and German identities.

In the middle of the night, three or four young men took ropes, hauled down the 150-pound bronze bust of the kaiser and unceremoniously dropped it off a park bridge. In the process, they committed one of Kitchener's most famous acts of vandalism and kicked off a mystery that's still unsolved today.

But was their late-night attack on the statue — erected in 1896 as a peace memorial — a symbolic political statement against Britain's new enemy, or just the work of some drunken pranksters with nothing better to do?

A century later, some historians argue the case of the kaiser's bust has been blown wildly out of proportion.

"It was a prank," said Ken McLaughlin, a Waterloo-based historian and author. "I think we have done that era an injustice by making it as dramatic as we have, and taking it out of context."

What is known is this: after the kaiser came tumbling down, the First World War guaranteed life in Berlin would never be the same.

At the outbreak of the conflict, Berlin was as close to a German capital as Canada had. About 75 per cent of the 16,000 people who lived here had Germanic background. The German language could be heard in local schools, churches and factories, and the bustling industrial city proudly celebrated its German heritage.

A small minority may have resented Berlin's German connections, but it was largely peaceful city with few visible fractures. The war would change all that.

As Canada marched into battle, civil unrest spilled into the streets. Anti-German sentiment caused the city to change its name from Berlin to Kitchener. Anyone whose patriotism wasn't on display was suspected of being an enemy sympathizer.

Mobs hauled Berlin's politicians before the British flag, ordering them to kiss the Union Jack and profess their loyalty. A pastor who admitted pride in his German heritage was pulled out of his house, beaten unconscious, and dragged bloodied through the streets.

The worse culprit was the local army battalion, the 118th Battalion, who acted like a self-appointed press gang — roughing up young men who hadn't enlisted and generally acting above the law. They drank too much, fought often and raised hell.

It was, to be sure, troubling times for busy Berlin. Or, as the Kitchener Daily Record called it in 1932, "a severe case of the war jitters."

***

Rych Mills, a Kitchener historian who has studied the kaiser's bust story for decades, says Berlin was not the hotbed of German nationalism during the First World War as some have suggested.

He and McLaughlin argue many citizens of Berlin would have met the decapitation of the kaiser's bust with a shrug. He was not theirkaiser, but the grandfather of an empire many of them had never even visited.

Older German-born residents might have felt differently, but they were warned by their community leaders against public protests. For their Canadian-born, German speaking offspring, it was merely a mild insult, a minor event.

The large influx of German immigrants into Berlin had mostly dried up decades earlier, in the 1870s. That meant by the outbreak of the war, four out of five "German" residents in Berlin had been born in Canada, not Europe.

"What their tie is to Kaiser Wilhelm I is rather difficult to understand," McLaughlin said. "He didn't have much to do with them or the First World War."

Emotions were not yet high at the outbreak of the war. When the kaiser's replica was toppled, it was long before any locals had been killed in the conflict. The men charged in the toppling — Fred Bolton, Allan Smith and John Ferguson — got off because they skipped town and joined the army.

"(The vandalism) seems to have become much more important since it happened than it was at the time," Mills said. "Back then, the story ran in the newspaper right beside a story on the strawberry social. They had equal billing."

Many of Waterloo County's residents with Germanic heritage were either Mennonite or from southern German regions where the kaiser was less admired, Mills said. Other families had split loyalties to both Britain and Germany, often split along generational lines.

The kaiser's bust was hardly a beloved civic landmark, Mills said. He stared out imperiously at the park but was largely ignored, his marble pedestal providing a good bench for children changing into their skates.

Erecting the bust in the first place was largely the idea of one man who never really settled into his adoptive country, he said. Karl Müller, an artist who lived on Roland Street across from Victoria Park, ordered the bust from a catalogue and had it personally shipped all the way from Germany.

The bust, made by famous Prussian sculptor Reinhold Begas, was intended to honour the formation of a unified Germany 25 years earlier. It was a last-minute addition to a larger memorial project organized by the city's business community.

"He decided they also had to honour Kaiser Wilhelm, so he ordered it on his own," Mills said. "Karl never liked it here. He thought things were always better under the kaiser. He wasn't happy in Canada."

Müller moved back to Germany in 1910, and never returned.

***

For readers of the city's German weekly newspaper, the Berliner Journal, the First World War was an unsettling time. From the moment the kaiser went splashing into the lake, it signalled Berlin was changing in ways no one could have predicted.

People were proud of their German heritage, but for the first time, they had to hide it. Speaking their language in the streets was suddenly met with suspicion. Celebrating their culture was viewed as disloyal to Britain.

In these tense times, German-speaking readers across southern Ontario turned to the Journal for guidance.

The newspaper called the bust's vandalism "Wiederum ein Bubenstuck," or "another piece of villainy" in English, and spent much of its energy trying to help its readers make sense of the changes happening in Berlin.

The Journal condemned the attack on the kaiser's bust but cautioned its readers not to protest it, understanding that the German community was being closely watched.

"Do not allow yourselves to be dragged to demonstrations of any nature; avoid arguments with people of other nationalities," the newspaper warned, according to translation by Wilfrid Laurier University history student Maria Featherstone in 1977.

"Remain quiet; bear the difficult times with dignity and show that you are true Germans, thankful to the country that accepted you and where you found a new homeland."

The newspaper also tried to explain to German-born immigrants why Canadian-born German-speaking citizens were loyal to Britain, rather than the fatherland.

"The German immigrant believes that he can assume that native-born Canadians have the same deep sympathy for the fatherland as he feels," the paper explained, in a translated editorial that ran Sept. 14, 2014.

"We must not forget that our fellow German citizens are, for the most part, second and third, even fourth generations born under the British flag."

The Journal also defended the rights of German-Canadians in Ontario, including the right to fly the German flag and to be taught in German in school.

But the newspaper was being eyed with increasing suspicion. By 1818, the newspaper was shut down, forced out of business by a federal government that banned publication in "enemy languages."

As the Journal defended Berlin's German community, other newspapers in Ontario saw a city that could no longer be trusted. They wrote editorials that inflamed tensions and attacked Berlin's split identities, criticizing the city's poor recruitment levels, despite leading the country in war fund contributions.

Even the city councils of Guelph and Brantford piled on, asking the government to block Berlin from rebranding itself as Kitchener. They were unsuccessful and in May 1916, voters here cut formally ties with the name Berlin.

According to a passage in Kitchener: an Illustrated History, which McLaughlin co-authored with John English, outsiders were unimpressed.

The Kingston Standard newspaper huffed: "Kitchener is filled with Hun sympathizers and is, in spirit, if no longer in name, a German city."

***

Mills, who wrote a book on the history of Victoria Park, says the bigger question surrounding the story of kaiser's bust is what happened to the statue.

What's known is that the day after the bust was thrown into the lake, it was hauled out and taken to the Concordia Club on King Street for safe keeping. At the time, the mayor promised to repair it immediately. But as the war dragged on, the bust remained out of sight.

The kaiser stayed put at the Concordia Club, reportedly in a closet, until the night of Feb. 15, 1916, when soldiers from the 118th Battalion broke into the club and ransacked the place. When they left, they dragged the bust down the stairs, urinated on it and paraded it through the snowy streets.

The bust was held at the soldiers' barracks for a while, where it was reportedly used for target practice. Later, Mills believes it was taken to the Camp Carling army training base in London, but likely abandoned when the battalion shipped overseas.

The army held an inquiry, but no charges were laid. Instead, it offered a justification for the break-in and theft, saying the Concordia Club's celebration of German pride became something "loyal British citizens found impossible to tolerate."

After that, the kaiser's trail went cold. The bust hasn't been seen publicly since.

Multiple explanations have surfaced over the years. One story held the bust was melted down into napkin rings for the battalion's 800 members. Another had it tossed back into the lake. A third suggested it was buried in someone's backyard in Kitchener.

None of those stories hold much merit for Mills. Only a handful of bronze rings have ever surfaced, despite 150 pounds of bronze allegedly melted, the lake has been dredged and drained multiple times, and it's hard to believe the ever-growing city has never unearthed a buried kaiser.

But the historian is captivated by a story, relayed to him years ago, by a now-dead TV camera operator who claimed he'd seen the bust in a shed at a farm somewhere outside the city.

Mills said the man had no reason to mislead him, but couldn't remember many details of the sighting many years prior. The location had long since faded from memory.

The kaiser's bust may simply be gone for good, Mills said. Or, perhaps, it's hiding out of sight in a potato sack, waiting for the right moment to return.

"Would I want to know the answer on my death bed? Maybe," Mills said. "But I think it's a mystery that will never be solved."
Reply
#3
I know, I know, really long article. But this is definitely a cool story, I think one that not a lot of people know about. Maybe it's just cool to me because I'm a history nerd.
Reply
#4
[Image: VictoriaPark-Kitchener-KaiserBust-1914.jpg]
[Image: WatPL46562f.jpg]
_____________________________________
I used to be the mayor of sim city. I know what I am talking about.
Reply
#5
Interesting write up in today's Record about the original pavilion at Victoria Park. It was a beautiful building. Unfortunately someone decided it needed to be burned down and we all suffered for it.

[Image: pcr-1090.jpg]
This photo courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.



Original park pavilion was an architectural beauty

[Image: B821863733Z.1_20150219153551_000_G1E1E4O...ontent.jpg]
Victoria Park Pavillion
COURTESY VICTORIA PARK GALLERY
Victoria Park neighbour George Lippert took several photos - this one showing chief Harry Guerin (in white coat) and his men preparing to fight the blaze that demaged the Victoria Park Pavilion.
Saturday February 21, 2015


2/
Waterloo Region Record
By rych mills
"That building was in Kitchener??!!!"
During the Victoria Park Gallery's first 20 years, that's been a commonly heard comment. To encourage this reaction from visitors, we always display several photographs of the original park pavilion.
Our answer? "Yes … but no!"
"No" because the structure burned six months before Kitchener became the name of the city.
"Yes" because it was a familiar Victoria Park attraction in Berlin, Ont., from 1902 until 1916.
Postcard manufacturers loved the pavilion and at least 25 different views are known.
The original pavilion came about following visitors' complaints that there was no shelter when rainstorms spoiled picnics. Back then, it was not uncommon for companies, churches, social groups, schools etc. to plan huge picnics in a distant park close to a rail line. 
Special excursion trains on the electric railway connecting Waterloo, Berlin, Preston, Galt, Brantford and Port Dover often brought 1,000 or more people to a platform stop at the edge of Victoria Park. 
In order to foil nature, the park board engaged Berlin architect Charles Knechtel to design a structure that would function as a picnic shelter and serve as a meeting hall, restaurant and dance hall. Many of Knechtel's architectural plans and drawings were recently donated to the Region of Waterloo archives but, sadly, the pavilion drawings were part of the gift.
In early 1902, construction began at the end of Schneider Avenue. In the 21st century, people take pride in recycling, but the Berlin Park Board was doing that 115 years ago. It dictated that most of the wood used in the building had to come from an agricultural/exhibition hall that was being torn down at nearby Town Park (a.k.a. Woodside) on Queen Street. 
By mid-August, the turreted pavilion was ready, with its façade facing directly across the park toward Berlin's downtown.
In summer, all the shutters (visible in the postcard scene) would be removed to create a large sheltered space, while a restaurant at the rear served favourite park treats such as ice cream, hotdogs and soda pop.
While there is no one alive with vivid memories of the pavilion, I do savour the late Dorothy Russell's (1900-2006) recollection of the pavilion as the best place to play hide-and-seek. 
For her and her friends, the multi-level stairwells, turrets and all the nooks and crannies were great hiding spots. From the belvedere, she and many others took eye-catching photos looking out over the park with industrial Berlin in the background.
Like many things in Berlin, the pavilion came to an end during the troubled First World War era. On March 24, 1916, flames engulfed part of the building but Berlin's fire department was able to save a substantial portion of the all-wood structure.
Footprints in the snow hinted that an arsonist had set fire to gasoline splashed inside the restaurant portion. Theories abounded in the press: it was an "anti-German" act by someone upset that the park superintendent was a German-born national; or, it was an "anti-British" act by someone angry that the local 118th Battalion had used the shuttered hall for drill practice; or, it was just a run-of-the-mill arsonist. 
The Ontario fire marshal investigated but claimed there was no proof of any of those theories. (Inquiries to that office in the 1990s were told that no records from that far back existed.)
The pavilion was too damaged to be reconstructed, but not everything disappeared. One intact turret served many years as a Victoria Park concession stand. Salvageable wood was reused (yet again) when the park superintendent's new house was built a year later at the end of Richmond Street.
The site stood empty for eight years until the second pavilion (now more than 90 years old) was erected to a design that honoured the original Knechtel drawings. A historical plaque is mounted on the west end of that "new" 1924 pavilion.

The Victoria Park Historical Committee, of which rych mills is a member, operates the Victoria Park Gallery, located close to the pavilion. It is open weekend afternoons from May until October. There is much more information about the pavilion in the book, “Victoria Park: 100 Years of a Park and Its People” or by contacting Flash from the Past via rychmills@golden.net . He would be pleased to see any photos of the pavilion from old family albums.
_____________________________________
I used to be the mayor of sim city. I know what I am talking about.
Reply
#6
Wow, quite the building indeed. Shame it's no longer around.
Reply
#7
There are some nice pictures of it in the little museum across the parking lot from the current pavillion. I've only seen that little museum open on long weekends in the summer but if you're the area it's worth a look just for the incredible amount of history they have about the park.
Reply


#8
rych mills deserves a lot of credit for the way he mans that museum on summer weekends (not just long weekends).
Reply
#9
Upon reviewing this thread, I note that the pavilion is actually in the left background of the Kaiser monument picture. How cool.

Hats off to Rych Mills.
_____________________________________
I used to be the mayor of sim city. I know what I am talking about.
Reply
#10
Beautiful day in the park today - it's good to see how busy it has become. The new Roland St. footbridge to Roos Island is being installed (love the "Kitchener green" colour!)

[Image: dzczo0.jpg]

[Image: fu5lq9.jpg]

Something I had never seen before - there was a school of quite large (16-18 inches, I'd say) fish in the water below the old Roos Island bridge. Carp perhaps? I know there have always been fish in the pond, but the number and size of those I saw today really surprised me.
Reply
#11
Those carp are well-fed by all the morons that feed the ducks and geese too.
Reply
#12
All it takes is a few abandoned gold fish and the populations explode. Does anyone know of a few pelicans for rent who could clear up the problem?
Reply
#13
(05-07-2015, 10:32 PM)nms Wrote: All it takes is a few abandoned gold fish and the populations explode.  Does anyone know of a few pelicans for rent who could clear up the problem?

Pelicans take care of morons?  Wink
Reply


#14
I'm missing something. Why are fish in the lake a problem?
Reply
#15
(05-07-2015, 11:36 PM)BuildingScout Wrote: I'm missing something. Why are fish in the lake a problem?

Agreed, fish in the lake is a good thing. and it is really a problem that they are gold fish?
Reply
« Next Oldest | Next Newest »



Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 3 Guest(s)

About Waterloo Region Connected

Launched in August 2014, Waterloo Region Connected is an online community that brings together all the things that make Waterloo Region great. Waterloo Region Connected provides user-driven content fueled by a lively discussion forum covering topics like urban development, transportation projects, heritage issues, businesses and other issues of interest to those in Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and the four Townships - North Dumfries, Wellesley, Wilmot, and Woolwich.

              User Links