Good history hiding at 206 King St. W.
A new life for the building at King and Caroline reveals past
What’s behind the siding?
Many years ago somebody decided to hide the four-storey building at the northeast corner of King and Caroline behind a great expanse of dark brown metal siding. The result was a big, ugly box — an eyesore of the first order.
And still it sits. The developer who turned the Pigott building into condos in the ’90s announced big changes a couple of years ago for the longtime home of Hamilton Store Fixtures.
The plan was to preserve the front part, with “brick and beam” office space. At the rear, a 15storey condo tower. The project was supposed to have started some time ago, but is apparently still proceeding. The idea is a good one, and let’s hope it happens.
In the meantime, we can probe the past of this place, a time before someone covered it with all that brown. Right there on the street, there is now a hint of how 206 King West used to be. The siding over the top left corner is stripped away. There are windows there. Who knew?
Head into the alley behind this building and you’ll discover that it’s not just a plain square block. It’s U-shaped, with windows up and down both sides.
On this day, the back door is wide open. (And since, sealed up again.) I have a look around. The old wood floors seem in good shape on each level. The basement, high and dry.
At the top of the front stairs is the entrance to the Hamilton Store Fixtures showroom. On the counter, a glass ashtray with the butt of one final smoke.
And at the front door, a black carpet that looks to be hiding something on the tile floor. I pull the carpet back, and there is spelled out what this place was called in the 1960s – the Radio Arts building.
But that’s not the beginning. For that, we must turn to an ambitious man named Robert Burlington McGregor of West Flamborough. He came into the city in 1889, age 18, and started working for clothing manufacturer William Eli Sanford.
It wasn’t long before McGregor set up his own retail men’s shop, but it burned down after five years. The “Dictionary of Hamilton Biography” tells us that, in the early 1900s, he worked as a commercial traveller for the Van Allen Co., a Hamilton shirt manufacturer, where “his extraordinary efforts tripled the company’s business across Canada.”
By 1908, McGregor had found some investors to form the Regal Shirt Company, and had a plant built in no time. That’s the building we’re looking at today. And the Regal Shirt Company operated right there through the 1920s and ’30s.
By 1940, the company was known as McGregor Shirt. Textiles were big in Hamilton for the first half of the 1900s. This city was the country’s third-largest textile manufacturing centre after Montreal and Toronto. Some of the names – Hamilton Cotton, Imperial Cotton, Eagle Knitting, Mercury Mills. But lower manufacturing costs on the other side of world eventually killed the trade here.
In 1960, the old shirt factory went into the entertainment business and became home to brand-new radio station CHIQ. “We will broadcast no rock ’n’ roll,” it promised. Instead, Perry Como, soft jazz, classical piano.
(They didn’t keep the no-rock pledge. CHIQ became CHAM, which is now Funny 820, an endless loop of comedy routines that radio ratings show is listened to by virtually nobody.)
Finally, there was the long reign of Hamilton Store Fixtures, which arrived at that address some 50 years ago and filled the floors with everything the kitchens of Canada would need except food – from pots and pans and chef coats to toothpicks and stoves, more than 100,000 items.
May the promise of yet another life come true for the building at King and Caroline – and may it be an ugly duckling no more.