Click on each image for a closer look!
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I recently came across some slides I took of the roundhouse area on July 22, 1993. The roundhouse had been closed for five years at that point. Numerous proposals for turning the site into a railway museum had been put forward, none with any feasible plans for how to finance it.
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#1 shows the badly deteriorated northwest corner of the roundhouse. This was taken from behind the fencing advertising Southtown. This was a $1.1 billion planned redevelopment by Marathon Realty of the Canadian Pacific yards east of the roundhouse. It is believed that one of the reasons that CP donated the roundhouse to the City of Toronto was to secure their cooperation for this project. Relations between the city and the railway had been poisoned by CP’s demolition of West Toronto station in 1982. The recession of the early 1990s put an end to the Southtown project and it’s only in the past few years that this area has been redeveloped.
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#2 was photographed from the area surrounding the CN Tower. Cabin D can be seen in its first relocation around the turntable pit before it was moved adjacent to the machine shop around the back. The southern expansion of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in the mid-1990s required the dismantling of the eastern portion of the roundhouse and the stores building, the long, low structure seen on the left. The roundhouse was restored and later occupied by Steam Whistle Brewing. Although the stores building was never re-erected, the income from these projects provided the funding to restore and stabilize the entire roundhouse.
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#3 shows the east end of the stores building. Bremner Boulevard now runs
across the centre of this view. This image was photographed from behind glass,
hence the reflection.
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#4 shows the coaling tower in its original location, now the southwest corner of Bremner Blvd. and Lower Simcoe Street. The stores building is on the right.
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#5 shows the coaling tower sits in isolation two years before it was moved 600 feet to its current location, now by the Leon’s entrance. All this area would be excavated in 1996 to make way for the Convention Centre. If anyone has access to photographs of this excavation, the TRHA would greatly appreciate seeing them and possibly sharing them on this website.
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Posting and pictures by Derek Boles, TRHA Historian
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