{"id":62020,"date":"2020-05-29T07:00:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-29T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=62020"},"modified":"2020-06-04T09:06:30","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T13:06:30","slug":"888-dupont-conversations-with-an-old-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2020\/05\/29\/888-dupont-conversations-with-an-old-building\/","title":{"rendered":"888 Dupont: Conversations with an old building"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went over to see 888 Dupont Street earlier this month. \u201cI hope you haven\u2019t come to criticize me,\u201d said the old building, aware of the rough face it presents a gentrifying neighbourhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t be embarrassed,\u201d I replied, as you do with old friends. The area is not fully chic yet, and we\u2019re family here, at Spacing<\/em>. There is love. \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m tired,\u201d said 888. \u201cLook at my green cladding, dented and faded.\u201d I see red dust, even, from spalling brick, falling from under the tin.<\/p>\n

The building\u2019s concrete bones have always been visible, but there\u2019s more now. \u201cSee my cracks? Are some of my rebars showing?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes.\u201d I comfort the 1921 building with an adage from my father, who at 97 is barely younger. He says about aging: \u201cIt\u2019s for the lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m still standing,\u201d 888 says.<\/p>\n

Much is said without words at 888\u2019s corner, a messy junction with Ossington.<\/p>\n

As late as the 1990s, trolley-bus lines criss-crossed under a spider web of overhead wires. The rusty poles that carried the infrastructure remain.<\/p>\n

Dupont Street, \u201cso flat, long and gritty\u201d I once wrote in Taddle Creek<\/em><\/a>, makes a jog here before straightening out again. The zig-zag is a legacy of traffic engineers who spliced east-west streets that didn\u2019t quite meet into cross-town Dupont. They wanted to speed traffic. Dupont is wretchedly busy, only a little less so during a pandemic.<\/p>\n

I cut to the chase with 888. \u201cIn a century, you\u2019ve had a few jobs. What was your most interesting one?\u201d<\/p>\n

The building\u2019s eyes and eyebrows are wizened, expressive openings. Its large industrial windows are made of narrow steel to hold small glass panes. The sash can never have been very airtight.<\/p>\n

Old 888 grumbles. When Dupont was lined with foundries, coal yards, bakeries, and a gear-cutting plant, when Ford Model Ts were assembled at Christie Street, in a factory designed by master industrial architect Albert Kahn, and the Toronto Telegram<\/em> was printed across the street, \u201cyou wanted heat to get out, not stay in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Memories of industrial might here bring to mind the district of \u201cSouth Zenith\u201d of Sinclair Lewis\u2019s 1922 novel Babbitt, \u201ca high-colored, banging exciting region: new factories of hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass windows, surly old red-brick factories stained with tar, high perched water tanks, big red trucks like locomotives, and, on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering freight cars \u2014 \u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was there,\u201d says 888, feeling a bit chuffed, as if it starred in a movie.<\/p>\n

The boxcar thought brought to mind one Jack Colyer.<\/p>\n

Long ago, Colyer and his crew manufactured brooms at 888. It was no mean operation.<\/p>\n

In 1955, The Toronto Star<\/em> reported, \u201cIf a Canadian soldier near the Arctic Circle cleans his snow boots, a sailor swabs the deck of a merchant vessel in the Suez Canal, or a housewife in Nassau begins her spring cleaning today, there is an excellent chance that the brushes, mops and brooms involved were manufactured by the 100 blind men and women who guide themselves around the Dupont St. Blindcraft Industries building by means of overhead wires which they grasp with their hands, trolley fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Colyer was the sighted manager who, wrote Samuel Campbell in The Toronto Star<\/em>, \u201ccan take a glance at several railway carloads of broom corn and tell you which came from Italy or Oklahoma.\u201d<\/p>\n

The broom, brush, and mop-making business was created many years earlier by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, established after World War I to help soldiers lost their sight in combat and which became the nation\u2019s leading advocate for blind citizens.<\/p>\n

A move to 888 Dupont from quarters on Queen St. E. took place in the fall of 1952. At the first Christmas party held at the plant, \u201cshop members provided a carol singing after dinner,\u201d The Globe and Mail<\/em> reported. A retiring broom maker Tom Murray, 76, \u201cplayed the violin.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the mid-1950s, the factory was producing a quarter million pieces a year, a \u201cbeehive of industry,\u201d Campbell wrote, where the blind operated such equipment as a \u201cbroom winder, a motor-driven machine that wires the corn to the handle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some tasks were dangerous, though everything is relative.<\/p>\n

A veteran \u201cwhose sight was blown away at Dieppe . . . runs a machine which staples horse hair into circular brushes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn another corner another young man, who lost his sight and three fingers in an explosion when he was a boy, operates a metal-shearing machine which could take both hands off with one false move.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet danger was not the reason processing corn and horsehair into brooms and brushes came to be seen as a harvest of mixed blessings.<\/p>\n

The problem was more existential. You can pick it out in an historic fact Colyer alluded to, that broom shops \u201cwere the first industry of the blind.\u201d<\/p>\n

An Internet search turns up organizations still helping the blind via employment to make brooms and brushes, and caning chairs, and also to references to the blind doing so ever since antiquity.<\/p>\n

But the age-old leg up had, in the opinion of the blind themselves, elements of a leg-iron, into which they were being snared.<\/p>\n

Charitable organizations were exempt from Ontario\u2019s minimum wage. In the 1960s, by which time broom-making had moved north to the CNIB\u2019s new headquarters on Bayview Avenue, the CNIB\u2019s broom-makers said they\u2019d supplied enough cheap labour. Although non-union, they went on strike.<\/p>\n

And so the \u201cbroom questions,\u201d as blind Ruth Biron said in the 1970s, became an emblem of frustration. \u201cShe\u2019s tired of explaining to people that she can type, file, answer the phone and run an office just as well as any other secretary,\u201d The Globe and Mail<\/em> reported 1979. (To which I add now, \u201cwhat\u2019s a secretary? And, \u201cwhat about the blind who do almost everything?\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, you asked for interesting,\u201d old 888 mused, and we go easy on the benevolents and benefactors of other ages.<\/p>\n

CLICK ON THUMBNAILS TO ENLARGE<\/h3>\n
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