When I was a kid I believed that downtown Brockville was where it all happened. It was my New York.
We'd often flip through old family photo albums, black and white, and I would marvel at the well-dressed newspaper folks nursing highballs and waving their cigarets in the air. There was a picture of her mother with the Prime Minister, or meeting Princess Elizabeth. It all seemed so jazzy and important.
The Eastern Ontario portion of the 401 was finally completed in the mid-60s, but when I was little, a lot of traffic still went down Highway 2, right past my front door. Brockville's downtown was the centre of the universe. The main mall had not yet been built, the one shopping centre in town was not large enough to displace the services that gathered in the old downtown core. There was still industry on the waterfront: canaller ships docked at the Reynolds Coal docks or at Central Canada Coal to load and offload coal; the Ault Milk plant churned out butter. The big oil tanks by St. Paul Street were still there.
The architecture of the main drag spoke to the city's stature. On either side of the main commercial area on King Street were substantial residential areas. On King St. East was Millionaires Row, a line of Georgian, Second Empire, Queen Anne and Greek revival piles erected by our very own Gilded Age Robber Barons with last names like Fulford, Hardy and Comstock. They tended to make their fortunes off of dodgy medicines like "Indian Root Pills" or "Pink Pills For Pale People (which were still on sale when I was a kid, amazingly).
On King Street West, the houses were not so grand and didn't have river access, but they were solid, often substantial. At the western gateway to the city was the Phillips Cables plant. To the east, it was the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, each in their own ways, foundations of the local economy.
But it was the downtown that always impressed me. The late-Victorian facades that hung over King Street symbolized wealth and industry. To a boy, they were high-rises. Walkers, an Eaton's offshoot, sat on the southwest corner of King and Broad Streets. It had an elevator, an unheard of luxury, but then it had four floors of shopping. Every spring and fall my mother would do a massive shop there, laying in our summer clothes in May and my fall and winter wardrobe in early September. When I got older had a bit of money to spend, I would buy LPs in their record shop, or drool over the possibilities if I was short on cash. Even the newer buildings, like the Woolworths, had their own cachet, in its case, a fabulous lunch counter and an awesome neon sign out front.
(There was great neon in the downtown, at night the place positively glowed, from the blinking ball in front of the New York Restaurant to minimalist neon at Ker's Mens Wear.)
When you stood at the corner of King and Court House Avenue you had a view of the four points of the local compass. To the north, the limestone courthouse; to the south, the St. Lawrence River. East was City Hall, the Manitonna Hotel, the newspaper, and the rise in the street that led toward the Cavalcade of Huge Houses. Look west, and it was the rest of the main commercial district; busy, vital, alive.
It isn't like that anymore. The retail core has moved north, where there is land for big stores and parking for the people who drive to them. The vacancy rate for downtown storefronts is around 15 per cent. My last trip into Walkers must have been in 1977 or 78. Now the building is cut up into various offices, retail and administrative. There is a pool hall in the basement. The flats that are above the shops no longer provide homes for the shops owners. In many cases, the apartments are empty or provide low-rent housing, with its intendant complications. Fire and decay have removed many landmarks from the streetscape in the last 30 years from the old Capitol Theatre, to the Manitonna, the Revere Hotel, to Dailey's Leather Goods. Many of those buildings have been replaced, and served to freshen and modernize the look, but without much reference to more ornate architecture which they replaced.
Most of the neon is gone too (The New York Restaurant being one big exception there), as businesses have gone low-tech retro with carved and painted heritage signs made of wood.
The big houses on King Street are still there, but some of them are cut up into apartments now, and the lots which once reached the river have been severed and developed.
Most of all, the downtown is quieter. There are fewer people living and working there. The energy that animated it when I was a boy has dribbled away as the coal docks were turned into parkland, the milk plant demolished and a condo erected where it once stood. Even the newspaper packed up and moved into an industrial park. More importantly, that energy picked up and moved to another part of town along with new stores that people preferred to shop at.
Gone is that sense of specialness, or uniqueness that was possible in the days before globalization and the chain store. We once had our own specialty food shop, the Gourmet Court. It went up in flames with the Revere. Furniture you could get at Sheridans or Babcock's. Now it's Leons. The busiest restaurants are the chains now: Kelsey's, Boston Pizza, East Side Marios, all in the north end. There are some laudable locally-owned holdouts downtown: Boboli and Thousand Islands Pizza among them, but I bet the Pizza Pizza does more business than both.
The downtown is what it is and it is a lot better than it was in the late 1990s when it seemed it was going to evaporate before our eyes. It is being reinvented as a slower, prettier and more eclectic alternative to the familiar commercial experience in the north end. The days of downtown by default are long gone now. The facades are still there, but a child seeing it now would never imagine it as his own New York as I once did.
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