http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/624526
At 21, Amanda Green isn't ready to give up on Weston. She wants spaces like the former employee building on the Kodak land, where she's pictured above, retooled for "green collar" jobs instead of being turned over to a mall developer.
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Most of the factories in Weston-Mount Dennis shut down years ago. Now, residents are hoping an abandoned industrial site becomes ground zero for a green jobs renaissance
Forty years of economic boom and bust have shattered the industrial foundation of Weston-Mount Dennis.
For decades, these neighbouring communities northwest of downtown Toronto flourished, with their Victorian and post-war homes, small shops and a major rail line that fed one of the most industrious parts of the city.
But what was once the manufacturing backbone of Toronto – a thriving working-class hub where everything from bricks and bicycles to stoves and steel was built in local factories – is now an industrial wasteland. Companies that produced iconic Canadian products like CCM skates, Moffat stoves and Dominion Bridge steel closed or moved off-shore while subdivisions, shopping centres and fast-food outlets moved in. Locals figure up to 20,000 jobs have been sucked out of the area over the years.
Today, the landscape is one of abandoned factories, derelict storefronts and high unemployment. Youth crime is on the rise. A rash of shooting deaths and a chronic lack of municipal services have put it on the list of the city's 13 "priority neighbourhoods" in need of attention. The 2005 demise of Kodak Canada's photographic film and paper factory – a victim of the digital age – was the final blow. In the plant's heyday during the 1970s, it employed up to 3,000 people, most of whom lived a short stroll, streetcar or car-pool ride away. About 800 jobs were lost when the plant closed. To residents like 21-year-old Amanda Green, this is a "make or break" moment for Weston-Mount Dennis.
The 23-hectare Kodak lands, by virtue of their size and potential, represent a chance to recapture the spirit and energy of the area's industrial past.
Green and others believe that, as one of the city's last major pieces of available industrial land, it can become a showcase for how Toronto and other once-vital manufacturing centres in Ontario can retool for the future – especially in the wake of today's recession.
"What are we doing?" Green asked during a public meeting last month when a developer presented plans to build a mix of shops and offices on the abandoned Kodak lands.
"I am someone who watches the news and sees the loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector," she told more than 150 area residents. "We keep building things people can't afford. The majority of families in this community are single mothers. They'll never be able to shop here."
Green is a member of a new, environmentally conscious generation that is fighting urban sprawl, big-box shopping, consumer-oriented development and part-time, minimum-wage work with no security and no future.
They believe the Kodak site, which takes up the equivalent of 23 city blocks at the corner of Eglinton Ave. W. and Black Creek Dr., should become a city hub for green manufacturing.
They point to Pennsylvania, where more than 2,000 unemployed steelworkers have found new jobs building wind turbines in two retrofitted steel factories as an example of what could happen here. They look to American leaders like Dave Foster, the steelworker who heads the Blue-Green Alliance, which is spreading beyond Pennsylvania to other Rustbelt states and turning blue-collar manufacturing jobs into "green collar" employment in the emerging economy.
They believe Weston-Mount Dennis should be building solar heating cells, energy-efficient light bulbs or new streetcars to service LRT lines slated for Eglinton Ave. and Jane St. And they are talking to Ryerson University about opening a centre of environmental innovation on the site.
It's not all pie-in-the-sky. TTC officials at the public meeting said they want to build a storage and maintenance facility on the site for its new energy-efficient streetcars. If that happens, Bombardier, the company that just won the contract to build those streetcars, might assemble the new transit vehicles there.
For her part, Green, who works part-time as a receptionist in a local business, is trying to find full-time work to help pay for college or university so she can improve her prospects.
"You can't live on the kind of jobs that are available in this community," she said after the meeting. "And that's the problem."
Weston and Mount Dennis sprouted during the late 1790s around saw, wool and grist mills built by settlers along the banks of the Humber River north of what is now Eglinton Ave. W.
When the Grand Trunk Railway built its major northwest line through the area in 1856, industry set up nearby to take advantage of rail service to access raw materials and to transport products to market.
For more than a century, scores of Weston and Mount Dennis factories made products that were household names.
If you owned a bicycle or a pair of skates before 1983, they were likely manufactured at the CCM plant, which opened in 1917 on Lawrence Ave. W., east of Weston Rd.
The Moffat Stove Company, which moved to Denison Ave. west of Jane St. in 1893, is credited with inventing the first electric ranges for the domestic market. And although the Moffat family sold the business in 1953, stoves and refrigerators continued to be built at the Weston plant until the early 1970s.
The Dominion Bridge factory, which operated from the 1940s to 1990 at the corner of Jane St. and Trethewey Ave., forged steel trusses for downtown skyscrapers and the Rogers Centre's retractable roof.
Until 2005, all Kodak film and photography paper used in Canada were manufactured at the company's Mount Dennis plant.
People walked to work and to church. Their children attended the same schools. Shopkeepers knew customers by name. Local sports were dominated by company teams and employees' kids got priority for summer jobs.
One by one, the factories disappeared.
As industrial shipping switched from rail to truck, many plants relocated to highway sites, away from Weston's narrow residential streets. Weston's amalgamation with the former borough of York in 1967 pushed up local taxes, causing others to move to neighbouring municipalities with lower rates. Some businesses succumbed to changing markets, foreign competition and tough fiscal times. Others, mismanaged, drowned in red ink.
Production of Moffat brand stoves moved to a more efficient plant in Burlington in the 1970s and then off shore. CCM went bankrupt in 1983 after a bitter strike and charges of financial mismanagement, although the brand was bought by a Montreal firm that continues to use the name. Dominion Bridge folded in 1990 when construction methods changed, eliminating the need for steel trusses in office towers. And digital photography killed the Kodak plant in 2005.
Tim Hortons coffee is now sold on the site of the CCM plant. A Sobey's grocery store is under construction where Moffat stoves were once built. A housing development occupies the old Dominion Bridge site. The Kodak site is a pile of dirt awaiting development.
All of those well-paying manufacturing jobs have been replaced by low-paying service jobs or housing.
Allan Chard, 78, who worked at Kodak for 32 years, came to the same public meeting to hear about the future of the photography plant lands out of curiosity, but left early to catch the hockey game on TV.
He liked the look of the proposed European-style shopping complex with pedestrian streets and plazas covered by a retractable glass roof. And he welcomes the promise of some 2,000 retail, office and service jobs, many of them part-time, entry-level positions for area youth. But he, too, has his doubts.
"It looks nice, but it won't give people the kind of living we had," says Chard, who comes from a family of seven brothers and sisters who built their lives around stable, full-time factory jobs that formed the backbone of Weston-Mount Dennis.
In 1955, when Chard started with Kodak, everyone living in the working-class area between the Humber River east to Black Creek, and Eglinton Ave. north to Hwy. 401, wanted a job there.
"It was an excellent place to work – probably one of the best," says the retiree, who raised four children in the area. "They looked after their employees."
Sitting in the comfortable living room of the modest bungalow he and his wife, Gail, purchased in 1959 just west of the Humber River, Chard recalls Kodak's good times.
Salaries were above the industrial average. Most workers got five weeks' holidays and a week when the plant closed for Christmas.
Kodak had a defined benefit pension plan that was fully funded by the company. And it paid generous wage dividends to employees every February, Chard says.
Employees enjoyed shuffleboard or lawn bowling on the Kodak property over lunch. They returned after supper to play basketball and volleyball in a gymnasium with hardwood floors. And on Friday nights, they brought their families to movies in the company auditorium.
For years, Kodak fielded industrial league hockey and baseball teams that played against workers from CCM, Moffat, Dominion Bridge and AVRO, the former airplane manufacturer in nearby Malton.
All four of Chard's children had summer jobs at the plant.
Chard and his older brother, Donald, who also worked at Kodak, took retirement packages during the late 1980s when competition from Japan's Fuji Film forced the company to downsize.
Chard's older brother Gordon, 82, worked for 40 years at CCM, another landmark employer in the community.
He was foreman in the tool and maintenance departments when the 84-year-old company went bankrupt in 1983, throwing some 600 employees out of work. Gordon stayed until the bitter end, overseeing the removal of equipment as it was shipped for sale.
Weston residents could set their watches to the CCM factory whistle that signalled plant shift changes. And whenever there was a fire in town, the CCM whistle would blast a code that alerted volunteer firefighters to the location of the blaze, Gordon recalls.
The factory also brought glamour to the community, since most National Hockey League players wore CCM skates and regularly visited the plant to have their blades ground and their kangaroo-leather boots custom fitted. Platinum blades were handcrafted for post-war figure skating darling Barbara Ann Scott. And a special bicycle was made there for French movie star Maurice Chevalier to ride during Expo `67 in Montreal.
In the mid-1980s, after CCM closed, the local business improvement association paid tribute to the area's cycling history by installing iron silhouettes of an old-fashioned, big-wheeled bicycle on lampposts along Weston Rd. But a plan to build a cycling museum and velodrome to attract tourists and athletes never got off the ground.
Too much had already been lost.
When Kodak cut its lunch hour to 30 minutes in the 1970s, workers no longer had time to shop on Weston Rd. And as manufacturing jobs at factories like CCM disappeared, so did the small local shops and restaurants that animated the street.
Other businesses also drifted away.
At one time, there were five car dealerships within several blocks. The last of those, Cruickshank Motors – a family-run business on Weston Rd. that opened in the 1850s building carriages and wagons – was sold in 2006 to another Ford dealer. But locals fear the dealership may soon fold to make way for condominiums.
Kresge's, Loblaws, Canadian Tire and even the LCBO have abandoned the community's main street for shopping malls like the Crosstown Centre near the 401, leaving beauty salons, barber shops and dollar stores in their place.
Today, one in four storefronts along Weston Rd. is vacant. One long-time realtor says pretty much everything is for sale.
But testaments to the industrial past of Weston-Mount Dennis remain.
In the kitchen of Chard's 84-year-old sister Marg Brown, an original white enamel Moffat stove gleams like the day in 1953 she and her husband Walter moved it into their new home. The original burners still glow red-hot seconds after Brown turns the knob to demonstrate.
Her pride is well-placed: She assembled burners for Moffat for most of her 29 years at the Denison Ave. plant just down the road from her home near Jane St. and Lawrence Ave. W.
Like many Weston factories operating during the 1940s, Moffat re-tooled for the war effort and hired women like Brown when she was still in her teens.
"Women were paid less than men in those days," she says. "It didn't seem like much at the time. But when you compare it to what people make now, maybe it was heaven."
Even though the company has been gone for more than 30 years, Brown still remembers the 15- to 20-minute walk to work and her favourite lunch, sardine sandwiches.
Seeking another job never occurred to her.
"I never wanted to move around too much," Brown says. "I never wanted to go too far from home."
It's a sentiment shared by young people like Green, who grew up here and desperately want to see it prosper again.
The Kodak lands are Weston's chance to re-invent itself, Green says.
Instead of approving the developer's plan for a shopping mall on that site, the city should be focusing on turning blue-collar jobs of the past into green industry employment for tomorrow.
"It would be an investment in the future of the community," she says, "as well as in the future of the planet."
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