In front of the Andrew’s Manor Apartments at 896 Eglinton Avenue East, is parked this fine TTC bus decorated for the Christmas season, 1958. The program was run between 1955 and 1960. The bus above was doing duty on 38 Eglinton East and was the one that whisked tenants of the walk-ups to the Eglinton subway station in minutes. It was right up until 2008 that the 3-storey walk-up appeared as it did upon completion in 1953. The building was given an EIFS makeover in 2009.
Outside of the specific commercial mix, the built form of the intersection of Richmond Road and Churchill Avenue in Westboro has not changed dramatically in the last 60 years.
When I wrote about the recently demolished TD Bank branch on Sparks Street, I had noted that the one-storey midcentury gem necessitated the demolition of existing buildings. Here is a view of the facades taken on August 8, 1956. It’s all academic now, but I still prefer Mathers and Haldenby’s work to what it replaced.
Another photograph that caught my eye from the “Meter Maids” collection: this time, one of the new recruits writing a ticket at the corner of Elgin and Frank. One thing that stood out to me here is the Kenniston Apartments in the background, previous to the conversion of its basement to commercial and restaurant spaces.
Having recently referred to Imbro’s Restaurant twice recently, I figured that it would be a good idea to share its Rideau street context in 1968. Note the Parkway Motor Inn (1957) in the distance.
I recently wrote a bit about the adventures and misadventures in development experienced by Bernard Herman’s City Parking Ltd. (Citicom) in Ottawa. The photograph above was taken by Bill Cadzow of the CMHC in February 1973, just before City Parking announced its Canada Centre project. For all it could have been, the Canada Centre was permanently iced when the National Capital Commission purchased the developer’s entire downtown portfolio in 1976. It would not be until 1984 that the site would be constructed on, with the Manulife Place office being completed in 1987.
Another photograph from Ted Grant’s series “Meter Maids“. This time looking north on Bank, half way between Laurier Avenue and Slater. Outside of James Strutt’s rather disappointing renovation of the Jackson Building, one thing to notice in the shot of the Stage Door Restaurant. It’s difficult to make out on the southwest corner of Bank and Slater: just beside the third car parked on the left.
Continue reading Ted Grant Photographs Ottawa’s new ‘Meter Maids’ at Bank and Clarey
I’ve always been a fan of this picture. One of the busy Ottawa street scenes captured by Gilbert A. Milne & Co. on June 17, 1957. I wrote a bit about one of the shots previously, and Robert Smythe has taken the whole series in turn.
Here is a quick hit Then-and-Now from my hometown.
In spite of passionate community opposition, the Timmins Daily Press (Thomson) building was demolished in 1997.
But in Thomson’s world, sentimentality can only be stretched so far. In Timmins, where father Roy got his start, some of the old-timers still fondly remember young Ken from his stint as a reporter in 1947, says Syl Belisle, publisher of the now Hollinger-controlled Timmins Daily Press. Thomson returned in 1984 to donate the old press building as a historic site to the city of Timmins. It later fell into disrepair and was demolished. But The Daily Press is thriving since the Thomsons sold it in 1996, Belisle says. “We’re bigger now. We’re up to 16 pages minimum. We’ve added more staff, new products. We’re even putting out a phone book.” There is still life after the Thomsons move on. [1]
Although the paper survived (and perhaps thrives) without the Thomson family, the physical history of their empire did not.
The words about Timmins were touching, the town and the paper, one would think, corporate icons. But the empire’s origins had already been extinguished by the bottom line.
Susan Goldenberg visited the isolated town in her researches in the ’80s and found the Press, by then a daily, in total disarray, the look of it Dickensian. Blue paint peeled off the newsroom walls, torn pieces of plastic served as window blinds, reporters in a computer age still pounded away at wounded typewriters. In 1996 the Timmins Daily Press passed out of the Thomson fold like a ship in the night, sold quietly with a group of expendables. If the queen of English-language journalism, the Times of London, couldn’t survive Thomson’s bottom-line economics, how could the Daily Press? Emotion paid fewer dividends than front-page sewer stories. The founding paper was dismissed without even a note in the corporation house organ, the Thomson News, which handled the obituary as part of the sale of 14 unnamed Canadian papers “east of Thunder Bay, Ontario.”
“They don’t have an emotional bone in their body,” says Bill Sternberg, Thomson’s former Washington bureau chief who now works at USA Today. Sternberg spent seven years building up the bureau, then saw it gutted in one night over dinner at the J.W. Marriott Hotel, the staff to be told in the morning. The Washington bureau is now down to two reporters, one writing for Thomson’s Arizona papers, the other for the Wisconsin group. “Just look at Timmins. They sure had enough money to have kept the paper for sentimental reasons. But they didn’t. They don’t have sentiment and they don’t have ideology. The ideology is dollars.”
By the time of the bureau upheaval, however, in January 1997, both the overarching Thomson Corp. and Thomson Newspapers had moved into a dramatically new corporate era.
Historically, the newspaper business has been remarkably recession-proof. Fortunes were made off screaming headlines during the Great Depression and, despite constant hand-wringing, the business had a Wall Street reputation for holding up throughout the periodic recessions since the end of the Second World War. The recession of the late `80s and early ’90s was startlingly different. [2]
Doubtlessly, an inglorious end to a building that deserved better.
[1] Sheppard, Robert. 2000. “A License to Print Money.” Maclean’s February 28, 2000.
[2] Prochnau, William. 1998. “In Lord Thompson’s Realm.” American Journalism Review. October 1998, pp. 45-61.
Located at 1860 Bank, the Brewers’ Retail warehouse and retail outlet was completed in 1958 and its design is credited to John B. Parkin & Associates.
Then somewhat isolated along Bank St. and south of Walkley, the facility was sometimes an attractive target for theft.
It remains a Beer Store outlet to this day, while the warehousing facility has since been moved out to 2750 Swansea Cr.