Corktown is one of those areas of the city where getting in touch with T.O.’s industrial past is as easy as walking down the street.
The cottages inhabited by the workers who toiled in the factories that marked Toronto’s arrival into the industrial age, have been lovingly preserved by their current occupants.
The dark, red brick industrial buildings that housed the furniture and appliance makers are mostly gone or have been converted into lofts, condos and artists studios.
But one is still etched with clues of its place in Toronto’s rich industrial past: the spooky number on St. Lawrence, right across the street from where the West Don Lands redevelopment is slated to rise in the years to come.
The building dates back to at least the turn of the early 1900s, judging by the tall, narrow architectural stylings common to industrial buildings of that era. A remnant of a so-called “ghost sign” painted on the side suggests it was once a furniture factory.
But not much is known about the building’s history before 1949 when, according to research by Sonja Carr, a painter and documentary filmmaker who rents a live-work studio in the building, it housed the Monarch Knitting Company.
What I’ve been able to uncover from a search of the Toronto archives is that the building housed the Simpson’s Knitting Mills during the 1920s. The single “S” painted in stone near the front entrance seems to support the idea.
Established by Joseph Simpson in 1871, the company’s original factory a little further west on Berkeley just north of the Esplanade, was the first knitting mill in the city. According to the Toronto Historical Board, the Berkeley operation was also sold to Monarch Knitting in 1945, around the same time as the St. Lawrence location.
(Joseph Simpson’s brother Rupert, a co-founder of Simpson’s Knitting Mills, lived in the Romanesque Revival style beauty at 2 Wellesley Place, appropriately known as Rupert Simpson House).Textile outfits, a greeting card manufacturer and a pant company have occupied 52 St. Lawrence since the end of the Second World War. The industrial-age gem was converted into live-work studios in 1997.[rssbreak]
