Читать книгу Reinventing Brantford - Leo Groarke - Страница 11
Оглавление| 2 | THE WORST DOWNTOWN IN CANADA
In Brantford, the fall of the downtown was rooted in the collapse of its manufacturing sector. In the early 1980s, low commodity prices and high debt charges produced an economy in which farmers could not afford to buy expensive farm equipment. The financial constraints this produced wreaked havoc on an economy built on the manufacture of agricultural machinery. One of the signs of trouble was local jokes about the rise of Brantford’s own “red sea.” It consisted of ever-expanding waves of Massey Ferguson’s distinctive red combines, which rolled off factory production lines and, in the absence of buyers, accumulated in city parking lots.
Before Brantford’s economy collapsed, the major employers in the city were White Farm and Massey Ferguson. Between them they maintained a workforce of more than seven thousand people in a city of eighty thousand. The unimaginable came to pass when their plants closed and they ceased their operations. In the wake of their demise, the companies that supplied them drastically reduced their workforce or shut their doors entirely. Mayor Mike Hancock, who was the manager of the local Human Resources and Development Canada office, remembers “desperate times” as unemployment soared to 24 per cent and he and others looked for ways to revive a defunct economy.1 Speaking to the Canadian House of Commons in January 1994, the Brant member of Parliament, Jane Stewart, spoke of the problems that continued to persist. “Not very long ago,” she said, “the city of Brant[ford] boasted having five thousand of the highest-paying manufacturing jobs in North America … those jobs are all gone. Those companies are all closed and we … are trying to rebuild our economy.”2
It took years for Brantford to recover from the collapse of its economy. Downtown, the problems were compounded by the trends that have adversely affected downtowns everywhere. In the twentieth-century city, the rise of the automobile made transportation easy, making the suburbs the place to live and shopping malls the place to shop. In Brantford, the flight from the city core exacerbated the problems already evident downtown, producing derelict buildings and empty streets. In the 1980s and 1990s, the construction of Highway 403 began to revive Brantford’s economy by placing it on a major thoroughfare that linked Brantford to Hamilton and Toronto to the east and Windsor and Detroit to the west. Like the Grand River during an earlier period, the highway became the major transportation corridor that spurred business, warehousing, and employment, but its benefits were localized in the city’s north end, where they were manifest in outlying industrial areas, in sprawling suburban neighbourhoods, and in box-store retail outlets. Instead of helping to alleviate Brantford’s downtown woes, the building of the 403 made them worse, drawing more people and businesses away from the city centre.
By the 1990s, the result of these developments was a downtown in a state of ruin. The city’s once grand past was still reflected in Victoria Square, a historic square arranged in a Union Jack pattern in 1861 by John Turner, a famous Brantford architect. The celebrated statue of Joseph Thayendanegea Brant in the centre of the square was first proposed by the hereditary Six Nations chiefs in 1874, during a visit from His Royal Highness Prince Arthur. Sculpted by Percy Wood, it was cast from the bronze of thirteen cannon used at the Battle of Waterloo and the Crimean War. Brantford’s population was twelve thousand when the statue was unveiled in 1886, but more than twenty thousand gathered to watch the unveiling by the Honourable J.B. Robinson, the lieutenant governor of Ontario. The ceremony included a poem written by Pauline Johnson. The poem was read by William Cockshutt, a member of one of Brantford’s most distinguished families, who served as the president of Cockshutt Plow and as the local representative in the Canadian House of Parliament for fifteen years.
By the late 1990s, the Brant statue in Victoria Square was showing signs of wear. The square was still encircled by inspiring heritage architecture, but the historic pattern was abruptly interrupted by a centennial project — a 1967 city hall built on the northeast corner of the park. It is ironic that the City of Brantford chose to celebrate Canada’s one hundredth birthday by demolishing two buildings from the Confederation period — a classic 1877 church that had been turned into the Brantford YWCA and a heritage house locally known as “Old One Hundred.” The city hall that replaced them has been hailed as an example of an architectural style that is tellingly called brutalism.3 It looks like a concrete spaceship that has, by some strange twist of fate, landed on a heritage Victorian square.
The brutalist aesthetics of the new city hall were disappointing, but they were the least of the downtown’s worries at the end of the twentieth century. On the east perimeter of Victoria Square its problems were more sharply evident in two empty historic buildings that bordered the park — the city’s former public library, a 1904 gift from the Andrew Carnegie Library Foundation, and Park Church, a Gothic revival building that dated from the 1880s. Their architectural details included a large silver dome on the library and a unique stained-glass window built above the church vestibule in 1910. The architectural merit of both buildings was still obvious, but both were vacated in the course of the downtown’s decline. As businesses and people migrated outward, it proved impossible to attract new occupants. Because “location, location, location” is what matters in real estate, the asking price for the church was seventy-five thousand dollars — half the cost of a modest suburban home.
On the south side of the square, across the road from Park Church, one could see the downtown crumbling. The Wyatt, Purcell & Stillman Law Office on the corner was still doing business, but it was located in a once-grand but now decaying Second Empire pre-Victorian home built by Edward L. Goold, an important Brantford industrialist involved in the manufacture of bee keepers’ supplies, windmills, gasoline engines, tanks, lookout towers, concrete mixers, pumps, and bicycles. The look of the building had been undermined by age and wear, and by the addition of an out-of-place concrete block extension that lacked the character of the original home. One-half block to the west of the law office was a forlorn and dilapidated mansion that had been built by the Wilkes family, one of Brantford’s founding families. In its later incarnations the building had served as an Odd Fellows Temple and the Brantford Boys’ and Girls’ Club. A once stately dwelling soaked in Brantford history had acquired the look of a haunted house, complete with broken and boarded windows and doors, peeling paint, sagging wrought-iron railings, unkempt lawns, stray animals, and overgrown weeds.
The old YWCA on the northeast perimeter of Victoria Square, circa 1900–05, was replaced with a “brutalist” city hall in 1967. Built as a centennial project, the city hall was a stark sign of Brantford’s declining interest in its own heritage and history. Some embellishments and greenery were subsequently added, but they could do little to soften the radical move away from heritage architecture.
Brantford’s 1880 post office and customs house was situated on the same block. A superb example of Second Empire architecture, the building was designed by T.S. Scott, the federal government’s chief architect in the Public Works Department. While the building operated as a post office, it was a source of civic pride. When an even grander post office was built in 1913, the Post House was bought by Holstein-Friesian Association of Canada and used as their national headquarters until 1989. In this instantiation the building underscored the agricultural significance of Brant County. At some point during its occupancy, the Holstein Association extended the original post office by adding an art deco extension. They left the building in good condition but it deteriorated quickly when they left in the late 1980s. Ten years later, it was bereft of major tenants and in a state of poor repair. By the year 2000, it and the law office beside it looked like an ailing old couple standing, or rather sagging, together on the southeast corner of the park.
South of the 1880 post office lay Dalhousie Street. (Locally, the Brantford pronunciation — Da-loo-sey — is taken as proof that someone was a Brantfordian.) A thriving farmer’s market established in 1860 used to be located on the south side of Dalhousie, across from the post office. In 1985 the outdoor market was replaced with a downtown Eaton’s mall which quickly failed. John Winter, a Toronto retail consultant who has studied malls, included the mall in his list of Ontario “ruins of failed downtown shopping centers.”4 Rod McQueen, author of the definitive history of Eaton’s, grouped it with others that were opened in the 1980s, as part of “a wrong-headed Ontario government experiment that drew Eaton’s in to help revitalize downtown urban cores that had been disemboweled by suburban malls.”5 McQueen concluded that “the idea was a miserable failure.” So did Pierre Filion and Karen Hammond in their study of downtown malls.6 In Brantford, a local twist attributed the failure of the downtown mall to a Mohawk curse cast when it extinguished the Six Nations’ traditional right of access to the earlier market it replaced.
Across the street from the empty mall were a dilapidated old hotel, a row of rag-tag buildings, and a smoky bar called Rumbles. On an early trip to Brantford, one of the campus’s first professors, Gary Warrick, and I looked for a place to drink a beer and ended up in Rumbles. We smiled when one of the characters in the bar came over and asked us if we were bikers, in town for a motorcycle rally. With few options available downtown, we sometimes returned to Rumbles, but quickly developed two key rules of engagement. The first was to stay away at night, when the owners hired four or five young women to dance simultaneously on the downstairs bar. The second kept us away from the second floor, where so much smoke accumulated that it was difficult to see, much less breathe.
Like Rumbles, some businesses found a way to survive downtown. Most of them were marginal, but one of them was the city’s most successful redevelopment project, the Sanderson Centre. Located east of Rumbles and the empty Eaton’s mall, it opened as a vaudeville house in 1919. The architect was the celebrated Thomas Lamb, whose buildings included New York’s Ziegfeld Theatre and the original Madison Square Garden. He designed a theatre with acoustics and lavish looks that could compete with theatres around the world. When it ceased to operate as a vaudeville hall, it was turned into a movie house — known first as The Temple Theatre and then as The Capitol. In an attempt to save a deteriorating heritage building, the city acquired ownership in 1985. Despite some public criticism, a six-million-dollar restoration project lovingly restored the building, recreating a dazzling theatre complete with ceiling murals, wood panelling, and a magnificent chandelier. In honour of a local family known for philanthropy, the city renamed the restored building The Sanderson Centre for the Performing Arts.
As impressive as the restored Sanderson Centre was, it struggled to attract patrons when it opened in 1990. It sustained itself with an annual subsidy from the city. One of its problems was the stark contrast between its spectacular interior and the bleak city blocks that surrounded it — blocks dominated by crumbling asphalt parking lots and a seedy strip club (Moody’s) located across the street. Circumstances were even bleaker one block further south, where the downtown’s fall from grace culminated on Colborne, Brantford’s original main street. Older Brantford residents could remember a time when Colborne was a series of bustling shops and businesses that were “the place to be” on Saturdays. But retail trade was fading already in the 1970s. In a move that was a sign of the times, the Stedman bookstore that had operated on Colborne for almost ninety years closed its doors and went out of business in 1974.
As retail shopping moved away from the downtown, Brantford’s weak economy provided nothing to replace it. On Colborne, the problems were compounded by two renewal projects — the mall and a new office building — both of which failed, reinforcing the conviction that Brantford’s downtown was a lost cause with no future. In 1997, the Royal Bank built an eye-catching branch at the end of Colborne, across from the Lorne Bridge spanning the Grand River, but a single building could not revive a street caught in a precipitous decline. With the exception of the bank, the half-kilometre from the bridge to Market Street — an intersection locals called “Crack Alley” — was made up of block after block of crumbling, boarded-up buildings. It was this line of more than fifty decrepit buildings that was uppermost in Mayor Chris Friel’s mind when he described downtown Brantford as “the worst downtown in Canada.” It was a label the city could not shake.
One of Laurier’s student ambassadors, Sarah Innes, in the Sanderson Centre for the Performing Arts today, after its restoration. The centre opened on October 2, 1986, with a performance of Evita. The restoration of the theatre won a Theatre Preservation Award from The League of Historic American Theatres.
When I went to Brantford, the urban blight on Colborne Street was a shock to see. I had walked through slums in Toronto and Montreal, but they were not as hopeless as the blocks of boarded-up buildings on Colborne. They reminded one of the worst streets one sees, not in Canada, but in cities like New York, Detroit, and San Francisco. This kind of streetscape seemed eerily out of place in a small Canadian city with a proud heritage. When the directors of the 2006 horror film Silent Hill searched for a bleak setting for their movie, they decided to feature a block of dilapidated Colborne buildings. In the trivia included in a listing for the film, The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) writes that “Filming in Brantford,
Some sections of Colborne Street were still in decline in 2004. Vacant and dilapidated buildings lined downtown streets when Laurier arrived in 1998.
Ontario, Canada, lasted four days. The decaying downtown strip that was used for most of the film is a section of Colbourne [sic] St. It was picked as such because not many modifications were needed as that area of the downtown was already in a state of decay … and consisted mostly of abandoned buildings that could be ‘dressed’ easily for filming.”7
The desperation and disillusionment on Colborne was especially intense in a few scattered restaurants and businesses that continued to try and eke out a living in the midst of the decay that surrounded them. Most had moved to Colborne in the good times and could not afford to leave now that the state of their street and the downtown frightened away customers and undermined their property values. The owners I spoke to were bitter. They felt trapped, with nowhere else to go. When I asked other Brantford residents what the city should do to address the problems downtown, a number of them told me that the best idea was a fire or a bulldozer “let loose on Colborne Street.” As fate would have it, Colborne got both within the next few years, when arsonists set some of its empty buildings on fire, and the city bought and demolished a sequence of vacant properties.
Colborne Street demarcates the southern end of downtown Brantford. Beyond it, the land slopes down to a flat that was the location of the canal the Grand River Navigation Company8 constructed to ferry goods to the Grand River. Many years later, the waterway is gone. The flat that has replaced it is the site of a multi-storey concrete parking lot that exits onto a major thoroughfare called Icomm Drive. It was named after the Icomm Centre, a twenty-four-million-dollar project built with funds raised from the provincial government, Bell Canada, the City of Brantford, and local fundraising. Originally planned as a telecommunications museum that would house the Bell archives, the building is located on a field beside the river. At one point both it and a provincial government centre for electronic processing on Colborne Street were parts of a two-step plan to bring a new kind of development to downtown Brantford.
Like other plans to resuscitate the downtown, this one failed. The provincial plan for an electronic processing centre in Brantford was abandoned by Bob Rae’s newly elected NDP government after the 1990 provincial election. The construction of the Icomm Centre proceeded until Bell Canada decided to pull out of the project in a period of financial difficulty. The result was a centre that never opened. With the Province of Ontario giving up on the processing project and Bell giving up on the Icomm building, Brantford pessimism had another leg to stand on.
The silver lining in the dark cloud was the interest that the empty Icomm Centre generated outside Brantford. It was the building that caught President Rosehart’s eye when Wilfrid Laurier University was first approached about expanding into Brantford. Rosehart had come to Laurier from Lakehead University determined to expand his new university. During his ten years in office he initiated a series of construction projects that earned him the moniker “Bob the Builder,” an epithet that pleased him. When approached about the possibility of a Laurier campus in Brantford, he was interested but skeptical of the university’s ability to persevere downtown. The Icomm Centre was not exactly what he wanted, but he was intrigued by the suggestion that the university could create a campus in a just-constructed, never-used building beside the river. One of its principal advantages was a location that removed it from the intimidating streets, dilapidated buildings, deserted sidewalks, bars and strip clubs that infested downtown Brantford.
