[URBAN NOTE] "Dupont at Zenith"

[rfmcdonald]

I linked over the weekend to Alfred Holden's Christmas 1998 article for Taddle Creek, "Dupont at Zenith", looking at how Dupont Street--my stretch of Dupont Street, at that--was a hearth of industry in Toronto back in the day.

Enterprises, as great as Eastern Airlines or as lowly as a corner store, will often die pathetically, with no ceremony or celebration of their achievements. Dupont Street in Toronto at the close of the twentieth century is an open graveyard of such industries, most of which collapsed without so much as a pauper’s funeral. Their skeletons lie exposed. They are the parking lots, warehouse loft condos, and retail joints of the post-industrial age: the soulless and struggling Galleria Mall at Dufferin Street, on the site where Dominion Radiator Company once made the pipes that warmed peoples homes; the more meritously recycled McMurtry Furniture factory at Bartlett Avenue, which churned out sturdy pressed-back chairs by the gross but where developers lately spotted a new beauty (and perhaps dollar signs) in rough brick walls and thick wood beams2; the empty hulk of Mono Lino Typesetting, a victim of publishing’s shift from industrial plant to desktop; the Blockbuster Video at 672 Dupont at Christie, where you may rent copies of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times in the very showroom where the Ford Motor Company of Canada sold Model T automobiles that it built upstairs and tested on a track on the roof.3

Indeed, the twentieth was supposed to be Canada’s century, and you’d be hard-pressed to find another street in the Dominion where people worked as industriously to make it so. At scales minute and massive, Dupont created: “Davenport Works, Toronto, builds power, distribution, welding, furnace, instrument, control and street-lighting transformers,” declared General Electric, describing, in a nineteen-thirties-era booklet, the sprawling factories between what is now Dupont Street and Davenport Road, along Lansdowne Avenue. In the illustrations, which include a bird’s-eye view reminiscent of nineteenth-century line drawings which greatly exaggerated the size of factories, smokestacks and even clouds of smoke, G.E. showed eight railroad tracks servicing its smoke-belching complex of buildings and yards next to the Canadian Pacific Railway’s North Toronto line, paralleling Royce Avenue, today’s Dupont Street.

Electrical transformers weighing up to two hundred and thirty tons, whose cores and coils could be hung like mere meat on hooks and jigs from the factory’s beams, were manufactured here. One publicity picture showed a “thirty-six-thousand kilovolt-ampere three-phase transformer” emerging from the Davenport Works on C.P.R. flatcar No. 309926 which, due to its cargo’s height and weight, “had to be routed over more than one thousand additional miles to reach its destination.”4 Such freight may have had something to do with the P.C.B.s whose toxic presence later held up the site’s redevelopment—one price ultimately paid for the utility derived.

Not noted by G.E. was the Davenport Works’s previous lifetime as Canada Foundry Company, whose metal products were poured, hammered and molded under earlier, more Dickensian circumstances, but had more delicate, aesthetic applications. Two fanciful dragons (or “grotesque animals” as the inch-thick, cloth-bound Canada Foundry catalogue called them) once guarded the grand stairway in Old City Hall’s lobby. Part horse, part fish, and dressed in flowing vegetation, they were designed by Toronto’s foremost architect of the Victorian age, E. J. Lennox, and “executed in hammered iron,” here. Lost, then found by a city bureaucrat in an antique store, they are now back near Dupont Street, at the Toronto Archives on Spadina Road, presiding over the entrance to the reading room.