DOWNTOWN’S DOWNTURN
Longtime merchants could see the fall coming Part 2 of our five-part series
People didn’t just come in to shop. You came to visit with your friends or talk about what was happening in the community.” Frank Coy
Frank Coy is surrounded by the past.
It’s been 25 years since his name was synonymous with a vibrant business community in downtown St. Catharines. Twenty-five years since the downtown many remember, as its glorious heyday came to an end.
There is a large glass cabinet in Coy’s living room filled with carefully hand-painted toy soldiers — redcoats standing at the ready to defend king and country.
On the facing wall is a faded Coy Bros. calendar, featuring art more in keeping with the era of Norman Rockwell than anything found in popular art in 2016. Beneath it hangs an old metre stick, marked with the name Coy Bros.
And under that is a drawing of what was — the two-storey, red brick building that for 140 years was the home of Coy Bros., a popular hardware store and keystone business in the downtown.
“Those were great years,” Frank Coy said. “Christmas time was really special. So many people were shopping downtown, coming and going from the store. It really was something.”
Coy Bros. was more than just a store. Employees were like family, working at the store for 50 years or more.
It was also a community hub. A place for neighbours to catch up.
“People didn’t just come in to shop. You came to visit with your friends or talk about what was happening in the community,” said Coy, who ran the store with his wife Gail Coy
The store was Coy’s life, as it had been for his father and his father’s father. It carried as much of the family’s history as the blood in his veins.
The secret to Coy Bros.’ longevity was a prognostication of the commercial variety. At its heart it was a hardware store, but the family was always on the hunt for the things customers wanted.
What could they put on their shelves that people wanted to buy but could not be easily found elsewhere?
So the store expanded from hardware into a mini-superstore that included housewares, toys, clothes, a wedding registry and other items. “We were very proud of that,” Coy said. “We spent a lot of time really working hard at it, and we really enjoyed it.”
But you don’t learn to read the market tides without knowing when they might sink your boat.
No matter what they did, no matter what was on the Coy Bros. shelves, revenues were falling. Interest rates were rising. The store was bleeding customers to crossborder shopping and shopping malls.
“We considered taking out a loan to keep the store running. But we realized that wouldn’t solve the problem,” Coy said. “We could tell where things were headed. So we decided to sell, and frankly, got out before a lot of other business owners downtown did.”
Coy Bros. was founded in an era when ships sailed past the downtown. It survived the turmoil of two world wars and the Great Depression. But in 1991, that history came to an end when Coy shut down and later sold the building to John Fulton, who converted it into a gym.
Frank built a second career in real estate, and Gail in interior design.
Coy wasn’t the only business owner to fret over the rapid decline of downtown in the 1990s. Several businesses closed. Not even popular locations, like Diana Sweets where Coy took Gail after dancing classes when they were dating as teenagers, could survive.
Boarded-up storefronts became the hallmark of a district once bustling with commercial activity. For many residents of the city for whom the shops and restaurants in the core were a part of their lives for as long as they could remember, the ’90s were the end of the glory days of downtown.
Of course, when downtown was in its actual heyday depends greatly on your point of view.
“If you really want to talk about the heyday of downtown, when it was really at its most vibrant, I think you have to go back to the 19th century, during the days of the first Welland Canal,” said St. Catharines museum historian Adrian Petry. “That is when things were really going, if you want to talk about money and economic activity being downtown.”
It was an era well beyond the fringes of living memory, when downtown St. Catharines was not an array of shops and restaurants but a manufacturing hub.
Today’s Highway 406 traces the path of the old canal. Petry said St. Paul Street was home to factories all geared toward ship building to feed the growing merchant fleets moving through the shipping lane. The lower-level parking lot, which today houses the Meridian Centre and the performing arts centre, was a shipyard.
Shipbuilding created a nouveau riche class of businessmen and culture of economic activity to serve them sprung up downtown, Petry said. Tailors. Shoemakers. Haberdasheries.
At one point, Petry said, St. Paul Street was home to three opera houses.
If the history of St. Catharines demonstrates anything, it is that change is constant. The licence to print money that was the shipbuilding era came to an abrupt end when the canal was moved.
Petry said the manufacturing that one serviced the shipping lane had become something of an impediment. Pollution from the factories was a navigational hazard and costly to remove.
But the core adapted. Some business managed to survive through the changes. New ventures popped up, and downtown shifted into a retail district.
In time, it evolved into the community known for Coy Bros., Diana Sweets, Honeys and numerous other commercial icons.
While many left the downtown in the ’90s, others refused to knuckle under, finding a way to navigate the hard times.
“It was busy. It was a lot of business. A lot of stores. St. Paul was full of everything, actually — the bad days came after the late ’80s, I guess,” said Nick Kosilos, who with his brother Tom opened the Blue Mermaid restaurant on Market Street in 1976.
In those days, the restaurant was a popular haunt for a kaleidoscope of managers and downtown business owners.
“You couldn’t get into the restaurant back in the ’80s, day and night, because of all the businesspeople here, but it doesn’t happen anymore,” Kosilos said. “Corbloc was sold out, full of business people of all kinds … the ’90s to 2006, everybody disappeared.”
While the malls pulled people from downtown retail shops, new restaurants in Niagara, including the explosion of the Niagara wine sector and the Niagara Falls casinos, did the same to the Blue Mermaid’s customers, Kosilos said.
The restaurant endures, but Kosilos said most of his old clientele are gone and aren’t being replaced by enough new customers. Rising costs for food and hydro are a constant pressure and there is no guarantee the next generation of Kosiloses will keep the restaurant running when the brothers retire. For now, at least, they endure. A few others who lived through the fall of downtown found a third option. Rather than close their doors or struggle through, they chose to leave.
John O’Connell opened Honey’s, a women’s fashion boutique, in 1979 in the then newly opened One St. Paul building.
“The One St. Paul complex was brand new and there was probably about 10 boutique-type stores. It was a great corner and that was a very fresh look for downtown at the time,” O’Connell said.
“There definitely was a buzz at the time, but over the years — we were there 34 years, so we saw a lot — it just started to deteriorate.”
Honey’s held its ground through the ’90s and into the 2000s, but eventually O’Connell faced the same economic reality as Kosilos and Coy.
“I think we went through a lot downtown with the two-way traffic changes and the construction. The last few years we were there, it wasn’t very good for business,” he said. “We just needed a change and our lease was coming due and we decided we’d make a move.”
In 2013, Honey’s relocated south to Glendale Avenue near The Keg restaurant. It turned out to be a move for the better, said O’Connell. The new store was a new beginning, with free parking that is close to the highway.
“I’d say 95 per cent of our customers have followed us, and we probably gained 25 per cent new customers that wouldn’t maybe go downtown,” he said.
Both O’Connell and Kosilos say the changes to downtown — the Meridian Centre and the arts centres in particular — have breathed badly needed new life into the area. But both retail and restauranteering remains hard.
“The Meridian, then the hockey, then the theatre (is good) but still there’s not enough businesspeople,” said Kosilos.
For those like Coy, who attends events at the performing arts centre and the Meridian centre regularly, worrying about the state of downtown is left to a new generation. Closing the family business was the right choice, even if it was heartbreaking.
“When we knew we were going to close the store, I had all the department managers and our office managers have a meeting and we told them and everyone just cried,” Coy said.
“It was a great place to work. They loved their customers. There was real personal feeling about it. I miss the store the way it was in the and ’70s and ’80s. It really was fun. Gail and I were a good team. We liked what we provided to the people of St. Catharines. It was very rewarding.”
But in a home where his living room is a tribute to those days, the past is not dead.
Along with the toy soldiers and the mementoes on the wall, Coy has a large binder filled with letters, cards and notes written by staff and customers after he announced the decision to close.
“I could spend half a day reading those and get weepy and think about what people thought about our store,” he said.
Whenever he feels the tug of melancholy, Coy pulls out the binder and reads. One letter was written by a young woman who worked as a clerk at Coy Bros. The job, she wrote, changed her life and set her on the right path.
She eventually went on to university and now has a career and family in Edmonton, Coy said.
“When I read these notes, it’s a reminder it was all worth it.”