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.
