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