A busy east end corner
When the brothers John W. King and G. R. King in the mid-1870s combined to establish a butcher shop they chose to have it at the east end of St. Catharines’ downtown business district.
While that site was away from the very centre of the city’s business life, it did have the advantage of being on a very busy intersection — on a wedge-shaped lot formed by the intersection of Geneva and Niagara streets, but very close also to the east-west traffic on St. Paul/ Queenston street.
Any calculations they may have made about the visibility of having their shop on that corner seem to have been confirmed — they remained in business with their East End Meat Market from 1875 until midway through the first decade of the twentieth century — with their shop on the ground floor and living space on the second floor for themselves and later for tenants.
The old photo accompanying this article was taken sometime between 1920 and 1928 when that Geneva-Niagara corner was occupied by the St. Catharines Tire Company, owned by Thomas Paget. The three people in the photo are, left to right, owner Thomas Paget, salesman Ernie Wilson, with Paget’s son Thomas Jr. on the right.
In addition to his specialty, Goodyear tires, Paget also sold gasoline from those two pumps they are standing next to, and provided all the other services enumerated by the signs on the building — oil changes, grease jobs, battery charges, and help in changing tires.
In 1928-29 Paget moved his business less than a block away, to 8 Queenston Street. It remained there for a few years, and it was continued by his son at 30 Queenston later in the 1930s.
Meanwhile, the old King Brothers/St. Catharines Tire Co. location at Geneva and Niagara found new tenants — first a barber shop, then a beauty shop, and finally in the late 1940s a soap company.
But the end came for the old King Brothers building as a result of City’s decision to build the new Central Fire Hall on a large plot of land lying between Geneva and Niagara, and including this property. The wedge-shaped building at the south end of the new Fire Department site was torn down sometime in 1949, and the new Fire Hall opened at the beginning of 1950.
According to recent newspaper reports part the property, left vacant since the opening of the Fire Hall, will be modified to re-locate the Geneva-Niagara intersection entirely, with Niagara commencing further up Geneva, opposite the end of Centre Street.
Dennis Gannon is a member of the Historical Society of St. Catharines. He can be reached at gannond2002@yahoo.com