Crossing into Leslieville at the underpass on Queen Street near McGee, you immediately see a big blue building, the Jimmie Simpson Community Centre. You don’t see a  densely packed terraces of houses on narrow streets or the giant factory that replaced them. But maybe you catch a faint bad odour? It isn’t old tires burning. It’s the ghost of the Dunlop Rubber & Company factory where hundreds of people worked from 1905 to 1970 when the plant abruptly shut down. This is a visual record of that plant, a gallery that tells a story of an industrialized East End that no longer exists except in the memories of older members of the community, in stories passed down, and lives lived.  There are other traces. I’ve been told that the rails from the tracks that served this giant plant are still in the basement of Jimmie Simpson Community Centre.

Here is the story of that plant in pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

Operating their own factory in Ajax; after they lost their jobs in the shutdown of the Dunlop of Canada Ltd. plant in Toronto last May; Phil Japp (second from right); 43; and Walter Merkel (right) check production line. With three other partners they are turning out rubber escalator handrails; one of many products Dunlop claimed it could not make profit on when it closed down its Queen St. plant.