New downtown park should be called Gurney to honour history
King William structure should be looked at as symbolic of Hamilton’s bygone industrial era
The recent discovery that a crumbling, graffiti coated rectangular structure at the south east corner of a downtown parking lot deigned to become a City park has historical and cultural value is an understatement, to say the least.
The moulding shop of the original E.C. Gurney Company is the oldest part of the industrial and commercial complex that stood in the city block bounded by Rebecca, Catherine, King William and John St. Research may even reveal it is the oldest building in the downtown core.
The squat building, which besides its present ignoble usage also served as The Hamilton Spectator garage, when the latter was located on King Street, was added to the city building inventory with Architectural and/ or Historical interest in 2014, part of a flurry of designations as the controversy over preserving the pre-Confederation building across from Gore Park was heating up. My friend Carole Primo, who lives in the Film Lofts directly across from the old moulding shop and was part of the team to preserve the Gore buildings was quoted as saying the city has a habit of knocking down its best heritage while preserving those of low value.
The decrepit structure at 77 King William preservation should be looked at as symbolic as much as saving a pile of chipped bricks and flaking mortar. Its cause needs to be zealously promoted and brought to the attention of City departments such as Public Works, Parks and Recreation, Culture and Tourism and the Municipal Heritage Committee. The first step of course is legal expropriation of the property.
The Gurney brothers, Charles and Edward, came to Hamilton from Utica, New York in 1842. The following year, with $1,400 of capital, they erected one of the first brick factories in Hamilton, handmaking cast iron stoves. John Fisher, who in partnership Calvin Fisher made the first threshing machine in Canada at a nearby foundry on James Street, helped the brothers out of a messy financial jam in the recessionary years of the late 1850s. From two employees, making two stoves a day, the E.C. Gurney Company grew to a workforce numbering in the hundreds.
The E.C. Gurney factory took up an entire city block by 1875.
Two of their lines of iron stoves were called John Bull and Kitchen Witch. A full-page advertisement boasts that the old Central Collegiate Institute was heated with hundreds of steam radiators made at the Gurney plant.
A short lived partnership with patternmaker and patent holder Alexander Carpenter, whose house, the Rock Castle still stands on Arkledun Avenue, dissolved in 1863. The Gurneys were part of the industrial elite of Hamilton, founders of the Bank of Hamilton and directors of Hamilton and Lake Erie Railway. Hundreds of people attended Charles’s funeral in 1884.
Gurney branches were opened in Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg. After the deaths of the two Gurneys, a nephew John H. Tilden became director and by the 1890s the plant became the Gurney and Tilden Company. By 1921, it was known as The Hamilton Stove and Heater Company.
Commercial enterprises and city services such as CKOC radio station and traffic court would occupy the high-traffic John Street side of the Gurney complex. Many photos show the ornate mansard roof, at the corner of Rebecca and John where the Gurney offices and showroom were located and the vibrant city life around it, including by the 1950s the bus station.
In the 1970s nearly all of the old factory was demolished and made into a parking lot, joining adjacent levelled sites and creating a veritable sea of monochromatic asphalt.
City of Hamilton landscape architect Meghan Stewart says that the old moulding shop needs to be opened up to retain it key features. The old city of Galt offers an example of ‘opening’ its rich industrial heritage to public use. Mills lined both sides of the Grand River in the 19th century, producing an array of clothing apparel which earned gave Galt the sobriquet of Manchester of the Canada, long before Hamilton became symbolically equated with the other great city of the English Midlands.
The better preserved and original rubblestone walls have been exposed and left standing while the poorer and newer construction have been cut away. A series of asymmetrical stepped walls is interspersed with walking/ cycling trails and historical plaques, creating a visually appealing and interactive landscape that draws visitors and residents alike.
Would such an approach be suitable for 77 King William? The public might just see a series of jagged red bricks walls but the moulding shop of the E.C. Gurney Company is a potent symbol of our city’s early industrial past, when small street fronted factories existed next door to residences, city services and stores, when the East and North End were quiet orchards and farm fields and still part of old Barton township. I believe with some imagination we can create a city park that is both an oasis downtown and a reminder of our rich manufacturing past.