The cover of the 1897 catalogue for the Goold Bicycle Company presents an idealized image of rural living at the end of the nineteenth century. The caption under the stamp reads: Brantford Bicycles Are the Highest Standard of Excellence the World Over. The printing on the barn reads: Brantford. The Home of Good Manufacture.
Ride The Brantford. They are the best.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Massey-Harris was world-renowned for the quality of its products. This advertisement displays a Russian farmer harvesting his grain with Massey- Harris machinery.
Brantford never experienced the growth that characterized cities like Toronto and Hamilton, but it enjoyed a robust blue-collar prosperity until the 1970s. The citizens of Brantford were proud, even self-satisfied. They celebrated their participation in the World Wars; built monuments and parks and grand buildings; established a historical society dedicated to the history of Brant County; honoured Alexander Graham Bell, Pauline Johnson, and other Brantford notables; nurtured institutions like the nationally celebrated Ross McDonald School for the Blind and the Brantford Golf and Country Club; embraced social clubs, fraternal societies, and churches; promoted charities; formed unions; debated local, provincial, and broader issues with intensity; and had their significance (and the significance of Six Nations) repeatedly confirmed by royal visits.15 In the historical core of the city — the core from which Brantford sprang — stately public buildings, an elegant Victoria Square, and a vibrant downtown reflected the city’s history of success.
The unravelling of Brantford’s self-assured demeanour began with the collapse of its industrial economy in the early 1980s. A history of good fortune began to reverse itself abruptly when a confluence of economic forces undermined the market for agricultural machinery. The casualties included the manufacturing operations that had traditionally defined Brantford. The starkly pessimistic attitudes that Holly Cox and I encountered when we met with Brantford high-school students in 2000 were a direct descendant of a series of developments that sent Brantford’s economy — and with it, its downtown — spiralling downhill.
| 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