Lister Block

Lister Block happens to be on the top 10 list of the most endangered list  of Historical buildings. Its located right in derelict downtown Hamilton, conveniently placed between five other well known Hamilton abandonment’s within a 4 block radius, including the now demolished HMP (Hamilton Motor Products), the old Federal Building, Lyric/ Century theater, the Connaught hotel, and the Tivoli theater which will all at some point make it onto this website.

Lister Block’s greatest feature was the ‘arcade’ (which is an enclosed area of shops in an L shaped configuration) with a row of skylights that gave the hallway an otherworldly quality light, rain, plaster and mould rained down from above. The arcade got more interesting looking every time I visited it as it always past a level of dereclict-ness that I thought wasn’t possible. I had never seen such decay before, and was amazed when a portion of the ceiling fell down as a storm downpour was leaking into the area I was in. The rest of the building wasn’t in much better shape either, with the upper levels actually being in better shape than the ground level’s arcade. Each floor had small offices, for doctors, lawyers and accountants and although the furniture was long gone, the remnant of junkie supplies in the form of needles riddled certain areas. Each of the floors were pretty similar, some broken doors, loads of peeling paint and enough mold to send those with allergies running. The roof offered a nice view and the place remained most unchanged until  2009 when work finally started on restoring the building after a building next door ‘mysteriously’ collapsed one night.

Lister Block always seemed to have issues, even when it was first completed in 1886 by Joseph Lister, there was a brief depression and the building wasn’t fully rented out. It did however have more modern methods of heating, a boiler house and an elevator. In 1922 an arcade was integrated, however a fire ripped through Lister Block at 2:30 in the morning on Feb. 2, 1923. The fire was aided in part by the interior walls and floors being wooden. The fire, as it turned out did not even originate in Lister Block, but rather a small building next door. Quickly a new building was erected which was about 32,000sq. ft. The ‘new’ Lister Block remained faithful to the original classic renaissance design with terra cotta pilasters, the store fronts finished with copper and wrought iron grills, and arcade with three skylights with the outside finished with tapestry brick. The upper floors were identical to the lower level, minus the arcade. The basement also had a bowling alley, pool and billiard room, which even after being cleaned out and gutted I still couldn’t tolerate with my allergies.

In 1950, the city wanted to expropriate Lister Block as they were short on space in Hamilton’s city hall. City council ended up deciding to build a new city hall instead which sits not too far away from Lister Block. With the building of Lloyd D. Jackson Square an enclosed mall next door , many of the retail shops on James Street closed in the 1970’s. Things didn’t get much better from there. In 1984, a large 3 metre section broke off Lister Block and the building needed repair work as deferred maintenance work had been neglected for far too long. In June of 1985, Sam Matsos, president of Corham Development, purchased five downtown properties whose total value was $5,000,000. The buildings included in the purchase were: the Lister Block, Zellers, and the Mills store. Only four years later, the complex was again sold to a large Toronto area developer, Metrus. The value of the sale was estimated at $1,000,000. In the early part of the 1990s, eviction notices were issued to all the tenants of the Lister Building (the beauty salon, the hearing aid shop, the drug store, the music store, and the optometrist), as well as to tenants in adjoining stores (Fabricland, Marvel Beauty Salon, and Pioneer Cleaners). Interestingly in 1995 city council voted in favor of giving the Lister Block a special historical designation for the building, thus making it reasonably impossible to demolish the building.  Several interesting proposals were put forth which included turning it into student housing for McMaster and Mohawk college students. Lister Block instead turned into a squat for the city’s many drug addicts and transient youth. Not surprisingly in 1996 there were three separate fires that damaged the Lister Block, all intentionally set to damage or destroy the building.

In 1999 it was purchased by L.I.U.N.A. (the Hamilton local of the Labourers International Union of North America) for $1, 600,000 again with plans to revitalize the building; however nothing was done until a decade later to restore the building. My last visit in 2009, I took someone back and realized that not only has every level been gutted, including the infamous basement with the ’aids’ pool, it looks nothing like what it did three years ago when I first went, and how most remember this place. It was bare, open and for once I must say the space feels smaller being open than when it had small rooms and had bits of strewn junk everywhere.  As of August 2011, the project was completed, and photos will be added in the coming weeks when I visit Hamilton again.

Photos by Kathy and Jan.

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Tank Farm

We had seen this plant be active off and on for over 4 years before we decided to try out access since the place was very derelict. As abandoned as the place looked, it was attached to a building which exhibited flurries of activity from time to time.  Generally when you look at images on this website, you get the impression and mood of a location, but the one thing you never get are certain cues, in this case, the smell. This location smelled really, really bad. The stench seemed to linger in the inner yard like a heavy cloud that shortened our stay considerably. Once inside, no one could see you. There were no windows in the perimeter buildings facing inwards so you could walk around without worrying about being seen by some nosey busy body. One of the holding tanks had a huge hole 7 M/20 ft high by 7 M wide that had been cut with welding torches exposing it’s interior. Inside it looked like there was a crude attempt at cleaning up the mysterious petro-chemical sludge by pouring sawdust into the tank.

This company started out as a waste management facility handling waste materials from the petroleum industry. The site was operated by Canadian oil, which was a subsidiary of Shell Oil Company. It was involved in re-refining until 1999 when it was revamped to operate a full service waste management facility. Apparently the new company inherited a huge quantity of waste that could not be processed (several million liters). It operates today as a liquid waste facility handing all types of industrial waste. We certainly didn’t feel comfortable entering such a place because we did not know what could be inside. After about an hour we decided to leave as we were beginning to feel the effects of the fumes from the waste even though we were outside.

Photos by Kathy and Jan.

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Emory Creek – Weston Wastelands

There are parts of the city that are wastelands, and the Emery creek corridor is probably the least attractive  of them all.  A hydro corridor runs close to a highway, and a rail line also runs North through the area into a light industrial area.  An abandoned mall sites empty on a huge lot next door as well. Emery creek also runs through the area and is partially buried as it runs underneath an apartment complex. It is a part of the humber watershed.  I’m not quite sure why the buildings are built right onto a watershed, but it accounts for the large size of the culvert, one of the largest in the city, and certainly the only one that  is made of corrugated metal.

I’ve visited this several times and have always found it photogenic and enjoyable. Its pretty short at around 700m but has a few changes in it where it goes from corrugated metal to a mix of concrete and cmp and concrete before going back to concrete and cmp again.  The scale of the culvert is what I liked about it the most. You don’t generally see something quite this short, and large very often. The first time I went in via the outfall and decided to leave via the inlet we emerged from the valley all we saw were dead logs, heavy machinery and random bits of junk.  We had no idea where we were! We even discovered that we had good cell phone reception inside the drain itself and met up with some other drainers in the pipe. The city of York has a pretty interesting topography, and although I’ve never been found of seeing houses built right next to industry, or apartments directly on watersheds, it makes for some interesting photography.

Further reading :

AOTU

Photos by Kathy.

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Port McNicholl – Chicago North

Victoria Harbor or rather Port McNicholl (as it was renamed in 1912) was originally touted at the “Chicago of the North”. You might find this amusing if you had ever been to this small Hamlet of about 300 just outside of Midland Ontario. Not only is the town non-existent, there is only one small convenience store and nowhere to stop for a bite. We visited the silos twice, and both times we ran short on usable light as the first trip was a hasty weekday trip out before sunset and another was on a nice sunny day which went grey and bleak at our arrival.

Construction of silos, 1910

What the town certainly lacks is made up for in the silo tenfold. We have visited quite a number of silos of different configurations but I liked this one best simply because of its size. This silo was huge. It was about half a kilometer long and almost 100 feet high. It doesn’t look quite this large in pictures because there is no other landmark around to provide proper scale. It also doesn’t look as old as it was because of the more modern use of steel reinforced concrete. When the first silo was built in 1910 by the Canadian Pacific Railway to store grain it was a smaller building with 63 bins. As far back as the 1880’s CPR had been looking for a more prime location to store and move wheat from the west. In 1905 the site was surveyed, and between 1909 and 1910 this site was built and in operation, capable of storing 2.2 million bushels. In 1912 a second building was built right next to the first elevator which had a total of 126 bins (4 million bushel capacity) and the site was finally expanded to its final size in 1927 to its current mammoth size and has an estimated 210 individual silos and 6.5 Million bushel capacity, just half of what was originally supposed to be a 12 million bushel capacity silo. During peak times, 165 people worked around the clock to keep everything moving along. The silo really started slowing down in 1956 when St.Lawrence seway opened up, however it managed to operate on reduced capacity until 1990 when it closed down once a rail subsidy was cancelled in 1989.

Loading Grain onto ships

Workers skating on the frozen Ice channel next to silos, 1914.

Access to the silo was from a basement area where one had to climb in over huge concrete remains of what was another structure on site that was somewhat effectively dumped along the base of the whole silo. There was only one way in and all of the ladders outside had been welded off long ago. Once inside you were hit with a damp skanky mist and an enveloping darkness. In the basement remained the rails used with smaller carts used to haul grain and equipment around, but the actual carts, machinery and related materials have been looted long ago. A super torch comes in handy when surveying the size of the space as you can actually see from one of the silo to the other (all 500’) end. I found the vastness of the space to be the most interesting feature, apart from the rooftop view which we could not access because we spent a good two hours looking around for a stable enough ladder to climb up. No one was willing to go up the sketchy, 7 or so story rusty ladder that actually broke off at one point when a friend put his full weight on it.

The silo was demolished in 2009 to make way for a development that takes advantage of the deep water harbor.

Only time will tell if the development will be fully completed. Maybe Gil Blutrich’s $100 million bet will finally make Port McNicholl the Chicago of the North.

Photos by Kathy and Jan.

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Bolton Kids Camp

Upon first glance, an abandoned kid’s camp sure doesn’t sound exciting, especially considering the sleepy town it was located in.  However once we arrived and realized how old and extensive the place was we spent two whole days there. This camp must have been a pleasure for city kids to visit while it was operational from the 1930’s onward. It’s actually for sale, and it’s to be hoped that it doesn’t see much traffic other than the local juvenile vandals we ran into who were smashing windows.

Its located on a 340 acre site of varying topography with a water feature for teaching kayaking and swimming. It’s fairly hilly with about a 500 ft elevation change from the top near a recently built school which is now decommissioned, to the lower camp section with 32 wooden cabins, a large main lodge with dining area and auditorium, a repair shop, a caretakers house, a gym and large pool. There are other buildings used for training and dining. The school alone is over 10,000 sq. ft.

Map of school and Camp.

We found the kitchen and the dining hall to be the most interesting spaces, since they contained complete kitchen facilities and the tables and chairs for the eating areas. Additionally there were the old pan-abode cabins which still had odd prizes and trinkets lying around like plastic “champion trophies” and dolls awarded to studious kids who were “model campers”. It was quite surprising that the buildings were almost all open and accessible. Sadly this gave an opportunity to some ‘kids’ and the kitchen and mess hall area were totally trashed between our two visits, probably less than two weeks apart.

This is what the children who were selected to be campers experienced. This camp provided that “ outdoor camp experience” for over 70 years for Toronto children who couldn’t go up to the cottage areas like the Muskokas and Kawarthas during the summer holidays. Considering it sat idle for more than a decade,  it’s truly amazing that it managed to stay in the overall good condition it was in. This is most likely due to the fact that no one knows it’s there, so there is no vandalism attributable to “visitors”. As is the case with all good locations, as soon as it ended up on a certain UE website, the place was picked, trashed, and vandalized to the point it’s now unrecognizable two years later. Remember kids, keep quiet.

Photos by Kathy and Jan.

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NRI

Seems like the rubber industry in Toronto has gone and all but vanished. Two years ago another rubber manufacturing operation, Viceroy Rubber, very close to this location was converted to a self storage facility. National Rubber Industries / NRI also had another, small operation near this location which was also in the junction that closed up before this one Symington Ave. This site was previously known as W.D.Beath & Son Ltd in the 1920’s and NRI was established in 1927. Before it was demolished this past winter it was a large 200,000 sq. ft facility that once produced several hundred different rubber based products and recycled a few million tires a year. Apparently NRI was a “green company” recycling tires into other products using a unique “tire recovery technology“. It was located next to an active rail line on Symington Avenue which has a mix of everything, industry, schools, commercial buildings, houses and artists’ lofts.

When you walked through the building it quickly became apparent that you were walking through several different buildings that were all connected together, each built in different time periods. The offices, lab, warehouse and loading area were all located adjacent to each other. At some point it came to be owned by National Rubber (NRI Industries) which was a substantially larger company with another small location in the “Junction” near Keele Street. This operation also closed when they moved operations to Mississauga at their Cawthra plant. From online public sources, it appears NRI had a dismal safety record in the early 1990’s which lead to the heftiest fine that could be leveled against a company by the Workers Compensation Board (WCB) for half a million dollars. We also found some nuclear warning signs up, but don’t really know how “Americum 241″ is related to manufacturing processes of rubber. If someone could clarify, that would be great. Of the many locations in Toronto that sit and languish with demolition signs for years, this specific series of buildings came down quickly, in less than three months from when the first demolition signs were posted in late December, 2008. It’s the fastest I’ve ever seen a plant get demolished. It was abandoned in late 2007 and I remember going to look at it in 2006 when it was still active.  Symington isn’t a major roadway, so you can easily miss it. I explored NRI early New Years Eve in 2008 and by February 2009, half the building was gone. Although the building had a few charms, and the loading dock reminded me of Tower Automotive, I’m not quite sure why everyone else seemed to be so crazy about this place. As of August 2011, the lot still sits empty awaiting further development.

Photos by Kathy and Jan.

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City Renewal Project

A City Renewal Project was a brilliant project hatched by Dan Bergeron (Fauxreel) and Gabriel Reese (Specter). This installation collaboration recreates some of their personal landmarks in Toronto with a twist. In the Queen West area near Dovercourt, at Lisgar St, is the wall of a long blue warehouse complex that has been demolished for a yuppie condo project. It’s here that “A City Renewal Project” was installed, in an abandoned building. At street level is a façade of a constructed storefront, “Mr Loogie”., a play on the “dollar store” Mr Loonie, itself a bit of Canadiana since the “loonie” is slang for a Canadian dollar. You enter through the store, to a city street, which is the installation itself. The streetscape is comprised of constructed storefronts on both sides. There are real and fake tags and graffiti on the walls and a real TTC shelter along with a bus stop post. Just past the bus stop is a Viacom billboard advertising “Condos for Babies” on the wall. Washrooms, street vendor stand, park bench and an accountant’s office are at the back of the warehouse. At the back, a wall is covered by an enormous print from car tire tracks made and contributed by artist Matt Janisse.

Some additional features of the exhibit include a zoo preservation sign, leaves, bins and bags of garbage accumulating on the cement floor.  The storefronts inside 39 Lisgar are near life-size scale black-and-white portraits of store fronts of closed or derelict stores from all over the city. The photographic interpretation is by Fauxreel / Dan Bergeron. The stores were constructed from recycled materials including condo placards. The actual signage was constructed by Gabriel Reese an urban artist who installs his work in locations to reinterpret the urban environment. The graffiti on the warehouse walls is by Bergeron, Reese, and countless other street artists and friends who helped with the installation over the four months of construction.

A City Renewal Project was described by Reese as “a work you look at more than once,” because there are “so many little subtle things.”  This warehouse was filled with the images of the city amassed by Bergeron and Reese. Everything in it is material that was used by them. Along with those who helped them was Bergeron’s dad Don who rolled up his sleeves to help in the construction of the space for the installation. . Dan Bergeron is not against that change, but this latest project contains the ambivalence towards a changing city that his recent Luminato project of Regent Park portraits did. His concern is the ongoing life cycle of real estate in the city will keep producing “new ghettos”. Bergeron sees the landscape’s uncontested demolition and reconstruction as proof that “we don’t do anything to ensure we remember our past.”

Gabriel Reese, a low profile artist who uses the nom of Specter has kept his identity secret. He splits time split between New York, working through a Canada Council grant, and Toronto, working on the”City Renewal Project” and believes in “restoration, not destruction” as the way to go. He views A City Renewal Project as a “monument, archive and validation” of the spaces that the two artists have fabricated. This piece provides the work’s name: “we’re renewing spaces using objects and artifacts that are on the street.”The project was made possible, in part, with Red Bull sponsorship and Gallery 381. Some Toronto media have been critical on a personal level regarding the intent of the installation. There was discussion in the press that the project was compromised by corporate sponsorship however the artists’ view is all projects need money so receiving financial support from Red Bull, who provided the only detectable bit of branding, a Red Bull umbrella, at Bergeron’s initiative. They believe it is the same as receiving funding from the L’Oréal sponsored Luminato or Scotiabank’s Nuit Blanche.

Bergeron, is capable of navigating the rocky water that is a mix of art and business. His position is the project wouldn’t, have been possible without funding from Red Bull. The show’s other sponsors include Show & Tell Gallery and Grolsch. It should be appreciated that both men poured their own money into the exhibit so there is a piece of them in this commitment. Bergeron and Reese are considering taking this to Vancouver. Bergeron says that he would like this for Vancouver which is undergoing similar changes to Toronto but which are being driven by the upcoming Olympic Games in 2010. A City Renewal Project ran from , November 7—to November 23, 2008 and was taken apart shortly afterwords after the famous closing party where drunk hipsters had the police come out in full force to shut the party down. The building has now sat empty and quiet for a full year, but demolition started in April 2010. As of the summer of 2011, a half built condo stands on the property.

Photos taken by Kathy and Jan.

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TTC Greenwood Yards

The Greenwood shop is one of the TTC’s (Toronto Transit Commission, for those not local) two heavy repair facilities. The Greenwood shop, located at Greenwood and Danforth, and the Harvey shop (Bathurst & Davenport) which is located on the old MacNamara market garden. The two shops provide major vehicle overhaul work and component rebuilds (everything is made on site!)  for the Subway, LRT lines and the streetcars. Its quite a large complex at 31 acres and the shop covers  approximately  190,00 sq. ft of space and employs 200 people. The Greenwood complex is divided into 8 cost centres including Vehicle overhaul and body repair, truck/axle/gearbox/re-wheeling, millwrights/machinists/electricians, shop services, electrical repair, pneumatic repair and a work car section. The greenwood yards seems somewhat larger then the Harvey shops, but that is just because the greenwood yards also have a large subway yard.

Photos by Kathy.

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