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.
| 3 | IN ANDREW CARNEGIE’S FOOTSTEPS
In many ways, the plight of downtown Brantford in the 1990s was epitomized by the condition of the 1904 Carnegie Library on the border of Victoria Square. Like much of historic Brantford, the building tied the city to a famous historical figure. Today, Andrew Carnegie is still revered as one of America’s “rags to riches” heroes. In 1848, his family emigrated from Scotland and he found a job working as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory for $1.20 a week. When he retired fifty-three years later, he was famous (and, in the world of unionized labour, infamous) as “the world’s richest man.”
Inspired by a “Gospel of Wealth” that dictated that the rich should help others, the retired Carnegie decided to spend his remaining years giving his wealth away, sometimes worrying that he would fail to do so.1 His most famous gifts were the libraries he established. According to Joseph Frazier Wall, who wrote a biography of Carnegie, his Library Foundation established 2,811 libraries.2 The great majority (1,946 of them) were given to cities across the United States, but 106 were given to Canada. In the spring of 1902, James Bertram, the secretary who oversaw requests for Carnegie library funds, received a letter postmarked Brantford.
Carnegie’s interest in libraries reflected his own experience as a boy, an experience he recounted on a monument he erected in front of the Carnegie Library in Allegheny, New York. The inscription reads:
To Colonel James Anderson, Founder of Free Libraries in Western Pennsylvania. He opened his Library to working boys and upon Saturday afternoons acted as librarian, thus dedicating not only his books but himself to the noble work. This monument is erected in grateful remembrance by Andrew Carnegie, one of the “working boys” to whom were thus opened the precious treasures of knowledge and imagination through which youth may ascend.3
In his autobiography, Carnegie wrote that “This is but a slight tribute and gives only a faint idea of the depth of gratitude which I feel for what he [Anderson] did for me and my companions. It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good to boys and girls who have within them the ability and ambition to develop it, as the founding of a public library in a community which is willing to support it as a municipal institution.”4
In Brantford, the first library was organized by Dr. Charles Duncombe in 1835, when he set up the Brantford Mechanics’ Institute. Duncombe, born in Connecticut in 1792, moved to Upper Canada in 1819. Although he lived in Burford Township in Brant County, he also owned property in Brantford. An ardent Reformer, Duncombe became a member of the provincial legislature in 1830, and worked actively in support of progressive ideas in education, prisons, health, and other areas. In 1824, he established Ontario’s first medical school in St. Thomas. In Brantford, the Mechanics’ Institute he founded was located in a small basement downtown and circulated one hundred donated books put on loan to the public. Duncombe sowed the seeds of its and his own undoing in 1837 when he supported the Mackenzie rebellion, gathering a force of five to six hundred men, who quickly abandoned him when they met real troops, failing to achieve anything of significance. In the aftermath, he fled back to the United States.
When Duncombe left, the Mechanics’ Institute closed but it was revived in 1840, and merged with the Zion Church Literary Society in 1866. The church’s minister, William Cochrane, one of the founders of Brantford’s Young Ladies’ College, served as president for twelve years. After a fire destroyed the Institute and most of its books in 1870, it was relocated above an early YMCA building on Colborne. The Institute operated in this location until 1884, when it was dissolved by a city council motion that replaced it with the Brantford Free Library. The motion passed by a decisive majority, though some worried that the library would turn Brantford’s wives into “novel readers.”5
It was Judge Alexander Hardy who brought a Carnegie library to Brantford. A brother of Ontario Premier Arthur Sturgis Hardy, Alexander was a prominent local figure who was dedicated to public education, and to the library in particular. In March of 1902, at a meeting of city council, Alderman J. Inglis forwarded a motion to petition Andrew Carnegie for a library, a city hall, or both. The motion was defeated, but Judge Hardy had already written Carnegie on behalf of the Library Board. In April, Hardy heard back from Carnegie’s secretary, James Bertram, who offered funding of thirty thousand dollars. As soon as the offer was received, any doubts about the building of a library appear to have