Historic building comes with a car test track on the rooftop
Why does a café at Dupont and Christie Sts. Have a test track on the roof? The building at 672 Dupont St. has a storied history. 1915 The Ford Motor Company invited the public to check out the facilities when the new plant formally opened at the corner of Dupont and Christie during the week of Feb. 22. Originally bearing the address 548–558 Dupont St. (it switched to the current street number later that year), the building’s first floor served as a public vehicle showroom and a freight elevator took finished vehicles to the roof for test drives, where a four-foot-high wall prevented them from flying off. 1924 As the auto market grew, production shifted during the mid-1920s to a new, larger plant at Danforth and Victoria Park Aves. on the site currently occupied by the Shoppers World plaza. A real-estate ad published in the Globe in 1924 offered potential buyers for the Dupont site “immediate possession” of a facility with two high-speed elevators and a railway siding. 1925-1940s Over the next two decades, companies occupying the building included textile manufacturers, construction material suppliers, food companies, and head offices for tool producers. 1948 Planters bought 672 Dupont and Mr. Peanut kept watch over the assembly line until production moved to Smiths Falls, Ont., in 1987. 1988
The building was placed on the city’s heritage inventory and underwent a year-long renovation to restore the site to its appearance circa 1916, which required un-bricking many of its windows. The location ended up being used by a hotel-furniture liquidator. 1994 When Faema bought the building in 1994, the coffee company respected the site’s early history. Plaques placed by the main entrance illustrated the building’s days as a car-manufacturing site. The showroom was transformed into a café, and freight-elevator access to the test track was bricked off, which prevents anyone too hopped up on caffeine from taking an antique vehicle for an illicit rooftop spin.