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.
| 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
