American Canning Company
The American canning Company (ACC) in Simcoe Ontario located on Robinson street at Queen street north was one of the few places I visited and really enjoyed even though it was just a mere shell of its former self, devoid of all interesting machinery. I purchased a photo from Kendall of invisible threads that initially peaked my interest in the building. There is something quite surreal about a building which is partially intact, yet slowly decomposing over time, and one which looks like a surreal dream with walls, and exposed beams and no roof certainly got me excited.
Can Propaganda 1
Can propaganda 2
The ACC Simcoe plant was built in 1929 in Art Deco styling, not typical for industry at the time, and was one of the main plants in the town of Simcoe for almost 60 years. The plant had such a high output of production, that at one point it was producing one out of two cans in Canada . During the war the plant was employed in war production, making artillery casings. At the time, a large number of women were employed at the plant, contributing to Canada ’s war effort. The plant continued to grow and peaked in 1977 when it employed 600 people at the Simcoe, Montreal and Vancouver locations. ACC was purchased in 1988 by Ball Packaging, and soon after in 1991 it closed, where the remaining 210 employees were laid off.
Sometime in the late 1990’s a developer was interested in redeveloping the location as a condominium; however the project never seemed to get off the ground. A quick search shows almost all of these other locations in the US, including Jersey City , San Francisco, New Orleans, San Jose, Baltimore, and Ogden were successfully converted into condos and mixed use spaces. The Simcoe building itself is now so dilapidated, I seriously doubt that it could safely be used in any viable way. During our first visit in 2006 we found evidence of squatting by a fair number of people inside the building, where they had hoarded everything from a weight bench to children’s toys and placed their clothes in Ziploc bags, presumable to keep them dry. The area has a large tobacco industry, with migrant workers whom you see as you drive through the area. Pretty interesting to see squatters in this small industry Ontario town as it illustrates that such social problems don’t only exist in city centers as much as rural residents insist to the contrary.
I liked the building so much that I made a second visit back a year later only to find that the migrants’ belongings had been removed. While walking around for a few hours I ran into several locals who made good use of the open gate. I later discovered that the plant had a ‘sister’ location in Montreal , located at 2030, boulevard Pie-IX, at the intersections of Jeanne d’Arc and Pie-IX which had not seen the same neglected fate as the Simcoe plant. The plant in Montréal was identified by several conservation groups as a heritage building and with the assistance of the a government grant they conducted some renovations, and converted the building into a cultural and residential space with affordable rental units, opened the Therese Sainte Marie theatre and even opened a grocery store on the main level. This was all made possible by the Corporattion de developpement de L’est (CDEST) which promotes beneficial development for the Hochelaga Maisonneuve area of Montreal, with financial support from Federal, Provincial and Municipal levels of government.
Now, it would have been nice to see this happen in Simcoe, but then again it’s not Montreal.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Manufacturing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.