Meaning in Old Buildings (Papers and Records, 1977)

Meaning in Old Buildings is an architectural-history article by Patricia Vervoort, coordinator of the Thunder Bay Architectural Inventory, in Papers and Records, Volume V (1977), pages 1–11. It reads Thunder Bay's older buildings as evidence of how the city grew and who built it. The research was funded by the Thunder Bay Foundation and Young Canada Works.

Key Thunder Bay facts

• Downtown Cumberland and Simpson Street buildings are brick and individually owned; Henderson Glass at 325 Simpson Street was designed by J. C. Stinson and built by contractor A. H. Dale.
• Early wooden buildings had false fronts; the Thunder Bay Sentinel praised a new "Gothic front" on J. B. Ward's billiard parlour and the painting of McLaren's store in 1876 by Mr. Tall.
• By-law 43 of 1876 required each building to keep a ladder and two buckets, and a 1906 law banned new wooden buildings between Cumberland and Court Streets.
• Most major buildings before 1930 were by outside architects: the Prince Arthur Hotel (for the Canadian Northern Railway, by Warren & Wetmore), the Custom Houses and Port Arthur Armoury (by the federal architect Herbert E. Matthews), the Court House, District Jail and the Registry Office, later the Thunder Bay Museum (by provincial architect Frank R. Heakes).
• The Chronicle-Journal building at Arthur and Water Streets is a Chicago-school-style steel-frame building clad in Tyndall limestone and brick.
• Port Arthur Collegiate Institute and the Cornwall and St. James Street schools were designed by Henry Simpson of Toronto; in 1914 the local firm Hood and Scott enlarged two of them and matched the original brick.
• The bank at 409 Victoria Avenue (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) was designed by V. D. Horsburgh.
• Ethnic church styles: St. Vladimir's Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Transfiguration and St. Mary's Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church, which was built in 1912 as the North End Baptist Mission of the First Baptist Church.
• Buildings were reused and moved: the Hymers men's wear building on South Cumberland (designed in 1900 by James Ellis of Toronto for the hardware merchants Wells and Emmerson, sold in 1913 to the Bank of Hamilton, a bank until 1939); Knox United Church was originally St. Andrew's Presbyterian and was moved 0.8 mile; the city's first telephone exchange was moved to 910 Donald Street.
• Manitoba Pool Elevator No. 2 stands on the site of King's Elevator, the city's first; its first nine concrete tanks, finished in January 1904, are described as Canada's first poured-concrete storage bins. A National Grain Company elevator (formerly Grand Trunk Pacific) was one of those pictured by Le Corbusier in 1923.