Welland Tribune e-edition

A glimpse down King Street in the 1860s

DENNIS GANNON DENNIS GANNON IS A MEMBER OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF ST. CATHARINES. GANNOND2002@YAHOO.COM

This week’s article considers downtown St. Catharines as it was over a century and a half ago.

Our old photo likely was taken in the late 1860s. It looks down on the city centre from a window in the clock tower atop our Old Courthouse, at the corner of King and James streets. Specifically, it looks eastward down King Street.

King Street in those days was muddy and unpaved, marked with the hoofprints and ruts caused by passing carriages and wagons and the horses that pulled them.

Flanking the street are wooden sidewalks for pedestrians to use. There are no signs yet of the telephone poles or street lights that would later mark the downtown streetscape.

The area we see in the photo seems to have been almost entirely residential in those days. The easiest building to identify is the one in the foreground, St. Catharines House, on the northeast corner of King and James streets.

After starting out as a tavern in the early 1840s, the building was converted into a hotel in the 1850s — initially called Commercial Hotel, then St. Catharines House from the 1860s to the mid-1930s, then the New Statler, and finally Harding House from 1949 until it was demolished in 1987.

In the following year, Royal Bank built the building that stands on that corner today, to house the bank’s City Centre branch on the first floor and offering commercial rental space on the second floor. The bank branch was short lived — to almost everyone today the building is synonymous with the Tim Hortons restaurant that operated there until just a few months ago.

Elsewhere in the old photo we can make out only one building that rose more than two storeys in height — and it’s also the only building in the photo that still stands today, at 164 King St. It was the home of wealthy shipping magnate, mill owner and politician Sylvester Neelon, built in 1862 on the southwest corner of King and Academy streets.

If you look carefully at the two photos you can make out the Neelon house’s three-storey tower in both of them. Almost everything else from the old photo is gone.

That three-storey tower on the Neelon house was the tallest structure visible in our old photo. Today the view is marked by a number of much taller structures — at the right edge of the “today” photo we see the 11-storey MTO building, opened in 1996, and the Garden Park/Carlisle Street parking garage.

At the horizon on the left in today’s photo there are two tall apartment buildings, 137 Church St. and 141 Church St., respectively 12 and 13 storeys tall, adjacent to the ChurchKing streets intersection.

One further note about the old photo — what looks like a white band extending vertically through the middle of the old photo was the tall white flagpole that late in the 19th century stood in the small parkette on that James-King corner, just a few yards behind the Oille Fountain.

LOCAL

en-ca

2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://wellandtribune.pressreader.com/article/281595244557938

Toronto Star Newspapers Limited