The houses on Clark Street
James M. McBride (1857-1947) was a prosperous local business man and government figure.
While he was still a child, his father, a cooper, or barrel maker, moved the family to St. Catharines. There young Mr. McBride himself entered the cooper’s trade, and later established his own business as a lumber merchant and builder. He initially had his lumber business on the triangular lot at the intersection of Church and King streets, where the attractive IODE parkette is today.
When McBride sold that property in 1913 he moved his lumber business a few blocks north, to where he had his planing mill and storage facilities, on George Street just above Welland Avenue. At the same time he was doing all this, he was also actively involved in civic affairs, serving on city council in 1908-09 and then serving a term as mayor, 1910-11.
Following that he applied his skills as a contractor to the job of providing much needed residential housing after the First World War. Later he got involved in the local beverage business, becoming in the early 1920s the owner of Mack Mineral Springs Co., until it folded during the Depression.
There is one interesting story about how Mayor McBride was able to apply his insights as a contractor to his job as mayor.
One day he went out to take a look at some paving work that was being done on Queenston Street, and he didn’t like what he saw. He took a closer look and concluded that the concrete had not been properly mixed — too much sand and not enough cement had been used. He did a little investigating and found that the city engineer had been taking sacks of cement home for his own personal use. The city engineer was promptly sacked.
All of this profile of Mayor McBride is by way of introduction to our photo today. Among the jobs McBride did as a contractor was the construction for himself in 1906 of a series of eight identical wood frame houses on the west side of Clark Street, extending from First Presbyterian Church north to Raymond Street.
That row of identical houses stood there on Clark Street for over 70years, until they were purchased by Lifestyle Homes Ltd. in the late 1970s. The Standard reported in April 1978 that the firm intended to replace the row of bungalows with a 60-unit apartment building, with commercial space on the ground floor and one and two bedroom apartments above. Work on the new building was to begin the following month.
Our old photo this week shows the scene at the corner of Raymond and Clark in April 1978 as a wrecking vehicle picked one of the houses up off its foundation and prepared to demolish it. That photo is paired off with a photo of the Hillcrest Terrace apartment building, which occupies that stretch of Clark Street today.
Dennis Gannon is a member of the Historical Society of St. Catharines. He can be reached at gannond2002@yahoo.com.