Kitchener’s vibrant shopping core in the mid-1950s
Before the big box stores, we shopped at Goudies and Kresge on King Street
I loved the phrase “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be” when I first heard it years ago. It is attributed to legendary New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra but, as usual, facts get in the way of a good story.
Others had used it earlier: movie star Simone Signoret, author Peter De Vries and British comedian Tommy Handley. Nonetheless, that saying came to mind when looking at these two mid-century photographs of Kitchener’s King Street.
Let’s call one the “Goudies” photo as the camera looks west along King Street from Queen. The other one will be the “CKCR” photo, looking east along King from atop the Mayfair Hotel at Young Street. The car in the Goudies view has a 1954 licence plate and the photo is probably from autumn 1953. The movie playing at the Lyric in the CKCR scene is 1957’s “Peyton Place” with Lana Turner and Hope Lange.
This is downtown Kitchener in the midst of the 1950s postwar boom. There is no Amazon promising immediate delivery and there are no shopping malls drawing people to the city’s outskirts, so these five or six blocks along King show lots of signs and few empty stores.
We could shop at national chain stores such as S.S. Kresge (two locations on King West), Reitmans, Tip Top Tailors (with its sign’s rotating ‘i’ and ‘o’ which we called “re-vowelving”), United Cigar, Grafton Men’s Wear, Laura Secord Candies, Weston Credit Jewellers, Eaton’s and Niagara Loans. Homegrown businesses had a strong presence: La Vogue Ladies Wear, Home Dairy Cafeteria, the Lyric and Capitol movie theatres, the Queens and Palladium restaurants, Waterloo Trust and Savings Company, CKCR 1490 Radio, Mundy’s Shoes, H. Wolynetz Ladies’ Wear, Staebler Insurance and, of course, Goudies Department Store.
Six decades later, some of those names remain in business although perhaps not in Kitchener. Nationally, we can still find Reitmans, Tip Top (now owned by Grafton), United Cigar Stores (now Gateway) and Laura Secord, while locally Staebler Insurance, CKCR (now 570) and Waterloo Trust (part of TD Canada Trust) are around in some form.
Probably the most lamented losses shown in these photos would be the two magnificent movie theatres whose interiors made patrons think they were in a New York or London movie palace. Goudies remains vivid in the minds of anyone who ever shopped or sat on Santa’s knee there, watched the pneumatic money tubes in amazement, ate in the Grill Room or stood for hours trying to figure out how the city’s first magic-eye doors worked.
Take these photographs and walk down King some sunny day as I did recently and compare the scenes. Many buildings are still in place, familiar by their architecture if not their business names. Other structures have succumbed to fire or demolition or redevelopment while others have received new facades. That two-storey building under the CKCR sign burned out and is now the patio and volleyball court for Bobby O’Brien’s. The Lyric site across the street is part of the Centre Block redevelopment. In the Goudies photo, the three-storey Waterloo Trust building flying the flag at the corner of Ontario was replaced by a Kitchener skyscraper. Where the camera in the CKCR photo was located is now thin air: the Mayfair Hotel building was torn down in a controversial move several years ago. Also long-gone are the trolley buses with their overhead wire network.
We cannot — and I doubt anyone would really want to — turn back the hands of time. But we can, from time to time, take a few minutes to peek behind our make-believe clock to recall or envision days from decades ago.