Kingston's lost waterfront:

It once was a vibrant industrial area that hummed with activity and offered employment to many Kingstonians

by George Dillon, published in the The Kingston Whig-Standard
Sept 13, 2004

On occasion I wish I had been born in a different era and had been raised in a different part of town. If I had, I believe that I would have had a different image of the Kingston I call my home town. Some time ago I was given a series of air photographs of Kingston taken in 1919. These photos, credited to Billy Bishop and his air photography company, show a much different Kingston waterfront than exists now. Recently a series of meetings have been held related to what has become known as Block D (the major portion of which once housed the Canadian Locomotive Works) and the Large Venue Entertainment Centre that, it has been proposed, would be built on what remains of Anglin Bay and the small drydock there. I attended several of these meetings and was surprised by the rather disparaging and uninformed comments made by some speakers as to how pleasant it was that the former industries that occupied those sites have vanished. Those who made these comments ignored the vibrant history of the Kingston waterfront. People have conveniently forgotten that until the completion of the Grand Trunk Railroad in 1856 and the construction of its spur (the Hanley Sub) in 1859 to what was to become the Canadian Locomotive Works, Kingston's main transportation link with the rest of the continent was the waterfront. In fact, it was only with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1960, which diverted most marine traffic to the American side of the river, and the closing of the Canadian Locomotive Works and the drydock in the late 1960s, that the Kingston waterfront went through a dramatic change. The series of photographs, which were taken from the south looking north-northwest from the harbour and the Cataraqui River, show a much different waterfront than today's. Dominating the harbourfront were two grain elevators, one at the foot of Princess Street (now the Holiday Inn site) and one at the foot of Barrack Street (the site of the Wolfe Island ferry dock). Just out of the picture to the southwest was a third grain elevator, now the location of the Admiralty condominium building. In the middle-left foreground is the large complex of the Canadian Locomotive Works, which became, for a time, the largest steam locomotive manufacturing works in the British Empire. It was the major source of employment in Kingston until the mid 1950s. Immediately to the south of the locomotive works was the drydock that, until the 1960s, built and repaired smaller ships that plied the Great Lakes. During the Second World War, several corvettes and smaller ships were built and launched for the Royal Canadian Navy. Most of this site has been made into a museum. At the southwestern end of Ontario Street, at West Street, stands what was the original water-pumping station for the city. Closed after 1944 when the city opened its new water-purification plant, the two large steam-driven pumps only survived because when the city put out a tender to have them dismantled, it found it was going to cost money to have them removed. Thank God for Jack Telgman and his associates, mainly retired steam engineers from the lake freights, who convinced the city to turn the old pump house into a steam museum. If you look closely at the old pictures, you can see that the site in front of City Hall had become the Canadian Pacific Railway passenger, baggage and freight rail yard. In the 1870s, the City of Kingston, which had been given the redundant Market Battery, was so poverty-stricken that it sold the site to a new commercial enterprise, the Kingston & Pembroke Railroad Company. It's said that the K&P station, now the Tourist Information Centre, and the two gatehouses at the Royal Military College were built from the dismantled limestone blocks of the Market Battery. The La Salle Causeway, which had replaced the original "penny bridge," was only two years old in 1919. Just beyond it in the pictures are several small ships anchored in the Inner Harbour. From the size, they were probably canallers whose lives would be ended with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Even these ships provided work for the local population. It was common for bricklayers to seek employment rebricking the fireboxes of the steam boats when they were tied up at the La Salle Causeway in the winter. My maternal grandfather was one of those who crawled on his back inside the boilers in the dead of winter to do this nasty but necessary job. In the closer view, one can clearly see the gas works across the street from Fort Frontenac, the Canadian National freight shed along Wellington Street, the rail yards of both the Canadian National and the Canadian Pacific (now occupied by the OHIP building), the Anglin lumber yard and sash and door factory, the small drydock (slated to disappear under the LVEC), the original causeway across Anglin Bay built by the Grand Trunk Railway, the CPR four-stall roundhouse at the foot of North Street, two oil tanks and vacant land that are now part of Rideaucrest, and the Woollen Mill, and, beyond it, the Davis Tannery site. The Belle Island Park landfill site was nothing but a swamp in 1919. In the early 1920s, the CN and CP proposed that they build a series of huge grain elevators on the site, but instead a new elevator was built at the mouth of the Cataraqui Creek, near what is now Lake Ontario Park. Rideau Street can clearly be seen in the photos, as well as its intersection with Montreal Street. Railway Street, which was to connect Montreal Street with Division Street, hadn't yet been built. In the distance one can make out a small village that had grown up around the Outer Station. This was Kingston in 1919, its main industries and businesses located along the harbour and the CN/CP railways that came in from the Outer Station and the north. All provided jobs for the residents of Kingston. If workers weren't employed as engineers, firemen, brakemen, conductors and section crews on the railroads, they were probably busy transforming pine logs into lumber and sash and doors at Anglin's. Many would have been employed along the docks in the grain mills and as stevedores for the general boat traffic that still served the city. Some would have been employed on the coal docks of Anglin's and Crawford's and later Rosen's, first shovelling coal into horse-drawn wagons and later into the dump trucks that delivered the coal to the new octopus-like hot-air furnaces citizens were installing in their basements. At the drydock, the staccato of the air guns hammering the heads onto the rivets of ships being built and under repair would have shattered the early-morning hours. Workers, mainly women, would have piled off the Bagot-Montreal streetcar at Cataraqui Street to walk to the Woollen Mill to start their shifts. By far the greatest group of workers would be found at the locomotive works. The noise of cranes, the constant earth-shaking thud of the hammer forge and the noise of sirens and steam whistles would have permeated the air. In the offices, draftsmen, architects, engineers and secretaries would have been bent over their drawings and typewriters. Beyond the waterfront, not everyone lived in the huge brick or stone mansions on King Street. Many of the houses on Wellington, Bagot, Sydenham and Rideau streets were, to use the modern expression, townhouses; in the more practical language of the time, row housing. The main source of income for the occupants of these homes probably came from waterfront jobs. I suggest that few citizens of the period gave much thought to the fact that the harbour and the Cataraqui River were crowded with industrial sites and that there wasn't total access to the waterfront. I believe that the Kingston waterfront was, to citizens of the time, a vibrant, active place -a place of snorting, belching steam locomotives, whistling steam boats, pounding forge hammers and clacking woollen looms. Certainly it was a place that provided work for many Kingston residents and, on occasion, for my ancestors. I think that waterfront would have been more vibrant than it is today with its streets dominated by high-rise condominiums that offer little in the way of a welcoming nature. Only by a little bit of luck and the intervention by the federal and provincial governments has the area immediately in front of City Hall been reopened to the general public. The grain elevators are gone. They burned in the 1920s and '30s. Gone is the oldest documented building that existed in Kingston, the Lines Building, which was moved from Ontario Street to the site near the old roundhouse and left unprotected, to be torched by vandals. Gone are the coal docks; furnaces were converted to oil and gas. Gone are the lumberyards. Gone are the railways and the CP roundhouse (at least the turntable was saved - it's now in use in Wakefield, Quebec). Can we not save something of our past? How is it that Kingston can't even provide enough money to fire up the boiler to run two unique steam water-pumping engines in the steam museum? Why does this city not even have enough money to keep Steam Locomotive 1095, the Spirit of Sir John A., from deteriorating into a pile of rust? How is it that Smiths Falls could save its crumbling railroad station? This city was afraid to spend a dollar to buy the Outer Station site. It made no effort to approach local groups that might have volunteered funds and labour to restore the station. How is it that we don't have a museum that continuously shows pictures of our historic past? Why can the various groups that have an interest in things historical in this city not stop their petty territorial bickering, end their isolation and act together to save what can be salvaged of our heritage? As I wrote at the beginning, I sometimes wish I had lived in an earlier age, when the waterfront was a vibrant industrial site. And to those who are thankful that it no longer exists, think carefully. Remember that the waterfront provided Kingstonians of another era with what people of the time would have considered to be a good living. Is the waterfront doing that now?