Then. Women munitions workers play a game of baseball at the John Inglis Co. Bren gun plant. May 10, 1941.

Now. May 2012. 'Liberty Villlage' neighbourhood. Looking west at the northwest corner of Liberty and Pirandello Streets.

Lots of history in these two photos. As this is a daily thing for me, I'll condense/distill it as best I can. In the old picture that is 'Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl' at bat. A famous lady; Google her, lots of info and pictures. She worked for the John Inglis Co. in 'war work' producing Bren Machine Guns. The John Inglis Co. factory complex stood just to the south (left) of both pictures. A section of Central Prison (1873 to 1991) can be seen in the old picture. All that is left today is the prison chapel, which I have used as my Now picture. The chapel windows and the brick treatment on the building corners aren't a match up to the windows in the Then picture so I believe the Then picture shows a now demolished part of Central Prison. So consider this Then and Now to be a simulacrum, if you will.

Bren guns, for the uninitiated, were a 'light machine gun' designed to be carried and fired by an individual soldier - as opposed to the kind you see in the war movies where you have a second soldier to carry an ammunition box and tripod and feed the weapon via a 'belt' of bullets while both soldiers are lying behind sandbags or in a foxhole, etc. The name 'Bren' comes from a conjunction of Brno, the Czechoslovak city where it was originally designed and Enfield [UK], site of The Royal Small Arms Factory [the Brits adopted the Bren after a competition in the 1930s]. The whole point of a light machine gun [LMG] was it could put out a lot of bullets and keep an enemy pinned down while soldiers - some carrying the LMG and some carrying lighter 'individual' weapons - advanced leap frog style to close with the enemy. That's where the military term 'fire and movement' comes from.