The canning factory downtown
For St. Catharines, the largest municipality in the Niagara Peninsula, becoming a centre for the canning industry was a natural development. The city had the rail and marine connections to distribute the produce.It just needed a way to preserve it for shipping.
The first firm engaged in canning in the city was the Niagara District Fruit Preserving Company, Ltd., founded in 1892 and operating from a plant located on the northwest corner of Lake and Wellington streets in the city centre. That firm was soon acquired by the Simcoe Canning Company, and in 1903 when Simcoe and other Ontario canning companies united to form Canadian Canners the Lake Street plant became Canadian Canners Branch No. 15, by then one of four such canning facilities operating in the city.
A write-up in the Standard in 1907 described the Lake-at-Wellington facility as including the factory itself, a warehouse, a loading platform, an office unit, and apartments for its 80 employees, who were then engaged in producing the “Simcoe” brand of fruits and vegetables.
And so it remained, ultimately operating there on Lake Street for some 65 years. Production ceased in 1957 and the facility was sold in 1958. After that the plant was subdivided into units leased to a variety of local firms.
Our old photograph of the former cannery was taken in 1966. The occupants then included a fuel oil dealer at the corner, the License Bureau, an office equipment dealer, an auto supply store, a publishing company, a glass and paint supplier, and, at the far end (in the wing perpendicular to Lake Street) an auto body shop.
Perhaps the most unusual tenant — still fondly remembered by some baby boomers in this city — was The Castle, a “teen night club” intended to provide entertainment for the 14-20 age group, open four nights a week and featuring nonalcoholic drinks and wholesome entertainment by local bands. In our old picture you can spot the entrance to it about midway down that row of businesses — the dark façade, at the top of which you see The Castle’s crenelated roof line, mimicking a medieval castle’s turrets.
The old canning factory’s afterlife as a sort of Lake Street strip mall came to an end after the city got the idea that they would buy the site, level it, and build in its place a central bus terminal for the city. The city did buy it in 1975, and demolition of the plant began in December of that year.
This new open space could provide some much needed downtown parking spaces for a while as details of the bus terminal were worked out. Result: no central bus terminal, at least not there. The former cannery site simply remained a parking lot until the Penn Terra Group in 2015-2016 built the 258 bed Regent student housing facility that today stands where the old cannery once was.