The HEART of the CITY
Our five-part series examines downtown’s good times and bad, and looks to the future
There is arguably no better vantage point to observe the shifting tides of downtown St. Catharines than Orhan Kerim’s shop.
On any given weekday, Kerim can be found standing outside Erroll’s Shoe and Luggage Repair on St. Paul Street, wearing his battered apron and greeting passersby.
His is an antiquated way of doing business. No mascots standing in the street waving people in. No brightly lit marquee. No gimmicks. Just Kerim’s gregarious charm and his craftsmanship, both of which he learned from his father, Erroll Kerim.
“Three generations my family has been doing this,” Kerim says. “We’ve seen everything that has happened downtown.”
The store has remained virtually unchanged since the elder Kerim opened the downtown shop in 1987. In a district where the only true constant has been change, Erroll’s has been a rare, immutable fixture.
From the shop’s front door, a stone’s throw from the Meridian Centre, Kerim has seen the fall and subsequent rise of the core.
He witnessed the twilight of the downtown’s retail heyday, when stores and restaurants that were once the staple of the area closed their doors or left.
He lived through years of economic malaise when the downtown was marked by empty storefronts, vandalism and a poor reputation. And he has watched energy and life return, with construction of the Meridian Centre and performing arts venues on St. Paul Street.
When Erroll’s first came downtown, there were eight other shoe retail and repair shops in the area, nestled between several clothing stores. Shoes and bags from Erroll’s were featured in the display windows of clothing shops.
“The businesses down here, they all wanted downtown to succeed, so inasmuch as we might be competitors we helped each other out,” Kerim says.
Then the downtown economy utterly collapsed.
No singular event brought it low. Rather, an array of forces conspired against businesses in the core. The growing popularity of shopping malls. High interest rates. Crossborder shopping. The GST.
The decline began in the late 1980s and accelerated over the following decade. By the mid-90s, most of those shoe shops were gone, having permanently closed or moved to a strip mall elsewhere in the city.
Not even spots that were a second home to generations of St. Catharines denizens, like the popular Diana Sweets diner, could resist the march of time and the whims of market forces.
A popular restaurant beside Erroll’s closed and the building eventually became a soup kitchen. Storefronts along St. Paul Street were boarded up. Downtown St. Catharines was dying, a fact that alarmed many.
The health of downtown is often regarded as a litmus test for the rest of the city.
If the core is vibrant, St. Catharines itself will do well. If it fails, so does the city.
So it’s no wonder that each time the downtown faces a period of decline, city residents from business boosters to politicians proffered schemes and ideas to breathe life into it.
“I’ve always believed that a healthy downtown is a key to a strong community,” said former St. Catharines mayor Brian McMullan. “Expressions you’ve heard before, ‘Downtown is the heartbeat of the city,’ and things like that. We talk about smart-growth principles and urban centres — the need for strong urban cores, I’ve always believed in that.”
That kind of belief fuelled an array of revitalization plans over the years, ranging from the mundane to the absurd. Often focused on the lower-level parking lot area, these ideas included building major office buildings, condos, an observation tower and even a model of Lake Ontario on the lower level.
One of the more spectacular schemes was suggested by the owner of the now-defunct minor league baseball team the St. Catharines Stompers, who wanted to build a baseball stadium on the lot.
“I just believe in the downtown. The way you used to talk about the area was different. You were going ‘uptown,’ not ‘downtown,’” said Terry O’Malley, who still has an office on St. Paul.
“I wanted to see the kind of pedestrian traffic and activity that I remembered from years before.”
O’Malley’s plan didn’t get past the conceptual phase, but the overall idea of revitalizing the downtown with a major sports attraction did eventually happen. The Meridian Centre, the home of the Ontario Hockey League’s Niagara IceDogs, the new FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre and Brock University’s Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts have acted as the long-awaited catalyst to reinvent the core.
“Art creates economic activity. So does athletics. And now we have both in downtown St. Catharines,” said former mayor and current regional councillor Tim Rigby.
But the story of downtown doesn’t end with its economic rebirth. Lurking beneath the new face of downtown St. Catharines are systematic problems that have been with the city for years.
Some 3,329 people live in the downtown core, an area that has some of the highest rates of unemployment, lowest levels of income and education and highest numbers of working poor in Niagara.
The new downtown economy has not filled their pocketbooks.
“The recession isn’t over for many people,” says Betty-Lou Souter, CEO of Community Care of St. Catharines and Thorold, headquartered on North Street, a few blocks from St. Paul Street.
The food bank has never left the downtown area because that is where most of the need in the city is found. Souter said most Community Care clients live within 2.5 kilometres of her office.
“This is not something unique to St. Catharines. You’ll find this in just about any urban downtown. People tend to move to the downtown because that is where the action is, so to speak,” she said.
“That is where all the services they use typically are found.”
Housing costs, she said, make life difficult for many downtown residents, who spend so much on rent they have to use a food bank to survive.
But even those who acknowledge these issues concede there is activity and life in downtown that hasn’t been seen in decades.
“I think we need a heart for the city, and I think it’s starting,” said Susan Venditti, executive director of Start Me Up, a downtown agency that works with the poor.
“There are good things happening downtown and I don’t think we should get swept away by all the fallout. Let’s handle the problems as they come along.”
Venditti said the downtown today is nothing like it was 10 years ago.
“I notice on Sunday, I’m coming over to the centre after church and there’s people sitting in front of one of the cafes having coffee and the burger place is open. That’s new stuff. The city has two vibes now. It has the daytime vibe, and then it has the night vibe. To me, something’s happening here.”
Rosemary Hale, Brock’s former dean of humanities and a key player in bringing Brock’s fine arts centre to the downtown, said the area is blossoming and becoming a place that attracts people.
“I think when you have a vibrant downtown, I think it’s an indicator of a vibrant community and a vibrant region as well,” she said.
“When I first came here, I wouldn’t call it dire, but things were a little disappointing. People were afraid of walking downtown.
“I remember going to a lot of committee meetings at the city where people talked about not wanting to go downtown at night. I don’t think people feel that way now.”
From the vantage point of Erroll’s Shoe Repair, the downtown has been completely transformed. And from Kerim’s point of view, the elements that allowed his store to survive the hard times may be instructive to the long-term success of the area.
“We need more retail and shops downtown, but you can’t do what they do at the shopping malls. It will never work,” he said.
“We offer a unique service you cannot get anywhere else. We have good relationships with our customers going back three generations. That is the kind of thing that makes stores a destination for people to visit and keeps bringing them down here.”
With downtown in a better position than it has been in decades, Kerim says the future will be whatever the community decides to make of it.