Welcome to the personal website of Andrew Turnbull. This outpost features tons of stupefying and trivial things pertaining to various and diverse interests of mine. Chances are, if there's something I know about or like that doesn't much other representation on the 'net...there's a bit of it here.

July-September 2019 Archive

30 September 2019

Last year, I wrote a post titled "London's bygone Dundas Street markets." A few afternoons of digging through microfilms has made me abundantly clear of one thing, however: While doing local history research, you never fail to run into surprises!

What was one surprise? Take 831 Dundas, the site of a bygone 1950s A&P grocery store. 831 doesn't appear on the city's parcel map, so I figured that the building had been torn down years ago. Then I found a grand opening picture from the London Free Press...and noticed that the angled corner of the building matches one that still stands on the block today! Yet, the brickwork has been changed and the address has floated from 831 to 809. Mysteries...

I knew from directory research that a Dominion store had operated at 124 Dundas through at least 1945 before closing. I had no comprehension of why it closed, however...until I stumbled across this image on microfilm! Surprisingly, 124 Dundas Street was gutted by fire on the evening of 19 December 1946, destroying $12,000 worth of "canned goods and other food." The blaze must not have completely ruined the building, however...since it still stands today. Another mystery...

An added bonus: The discovery that the Loblaws stores at 94 and 688 Dundas both opened the same day on 20 Nov. 1947! Why was this a surprise? Because both addresses were also listed as Loblaws stores in the London city directory from 194...5. Yet another unsolved mystery on my hands...

With all of this new research in tow (not to mention the fruits of a road trip or three), it's a great time to give my idiosyncratic Supermartifacts project a toot of the horn. New and updated locations:

The Artifacts of A&P, Part 1

831 Dundas St., London, ON
69 Downie St., Stratford, ON
145 Erie St., Stratford, ON
48 Wellington St., Stratford, ON

The Artifacts of A&P, Part 2

1486 La Salle Blvd., Sudbury, ON

The Artifacts of A&P, Part 3

980 Franklin Rd., Cambridge, ON
1030 Adelaide St. N., London, ON (New picture added)
1070 2nd Ave., Owen Sound, ON

The Artifacts of Dominion

1500 Royal York Rd., Etobicoke, ON
124 Dundas St., London, ON (Historic picture added)
496 Dundas St., London, ON (ditto)
577 Hamilton Rd., London, ON (ditto)
1154 Hamilton Rd., London, ON (New and historic pictures added)
215 Wharncliffe Rd. S., London, ON (Historic picture added)
1120 2nd Ave. E., Owen Sound, ON
2 Douro St., Stratford, ON
477 Huron St., Stratford, ON (New picture added)
2208 La Salle Blvd., Sudbury, ON
149 Sherbourne St., Toronto, ON
171 Ingersoll Rd., Woodstock, ON

The Artifacts of Loblaws, Part 1

205 Kent St., Lindsay, ON
688 Dundas St., London, ON (Historic picture added)
407 Hamilton Rd., London, ON (ditto)
179 Wortley Rd., London, ON (ditto)
19 Frood Rd., Sudbury, ON

The Artifacts of Loblaws, Part 2

4380 Wellington Rd., London, ON
82 Lorne St., Sudbury, ON
1485 La Salle Blvd., Sudbury, ON

The Artifacts of Loblaws, Part 3

472 Bayfield St., Barrie, ON
150 Holiday Inn Dr., Cambridge, ON
180 Holiday Inn Dr., Cambridge, ON
111 Charles St. E., Ingersoll, ON
1350 16th Ave. E., Owen Sound, ON

23 September 2019

What do I do when I'm feeling down, and I have an afternoon to burn? The same thing I always do: I'll go to the library and look at old microfilms for FUN.

Is this London, England or London, Ontario? No kidding around here: British Leyland actually imported the Rover SD1 into the North American market for one model year (1980). No, I've never seen one in my life.

Is this London, England or London, Ontario? Yes, this is Boots, the quintessential British chemist founded in Nottingham in 1849. I had no idea that they had ever operated stores in Canada until I found this page. Supposedly, most of them turned into Pharma Plus in the 1980s.

Hmm. I'll pass...

Back in January, I exhumed the tale of the Superstore Mall...a mostly-desolate development on the south side of London. It turns out that names don't lie: There really was a Loblaws Superstore on the site at one time (1979 to be precise), and it sported an all-out bizarre slanted facade decked out in enormous lettering. Dave Nichol looks so pleased!

Creeping back in time another 25 years, there's...this. What can I say? The 1950s were weird.

16 September 2019

I wonder how long it'll stay like this.

8 September 2019

Wellington Street, Stratford, Ontario. The ghost sign on the side wall of the two-chimneyed building is a bygone advertisement for "H. Ubelbaker & Son, established 1855." I'm guessing that 1855 was still a milestone of the living past at the time this was painted on the wall!

Speaking of milestones of the past, the low-tech facsimile of a weblog that you're reading now went online two years ago this week.

I've also celebrated my second year of living in Canada...the anniversary of that fateful day in 2017 in which I pulled into customs with a car packed to the brim and a ledger's worth of paperwork in tow! Yet when I reconstruct the steps of how I came to be here, that isn't the moment that sticks in my mind. That honour goes to my memories of the week I spent in Winnipeg, Manitoba in September 2015. That was the moment I arrived in Canada...in spirit, anyway.

I was a tourist visiting Winnipeg for a few days' sightseeing and an atheist conference (back when I was still convinced that the atheist movement would save the world). Yet crossing the border from North Dakota, it somehow felt transformative. Ever look around you and find yourself saying, "This is the place I could live for the rest of my life?" That's the way I felt in Winnipeg.

Part of the reason why the city felt so compelling was because Manitoba was under the governance of a strong and stable NDP government at the time. It doesn't have one anymore. I'm keenly aware of Canada's imperfections and failings; its bigots and its bullies. But a country with an imperfect track record is still better than one where I don't have the freedom to live without being written out of the constitution by 70% of my neighbours or shot. I don't regret coming to Canada. And I'll never forget the way I felt those special days in Winnipeg, four years ago.

2 September 2019

This week's post is a spiritual follow-up to this one from the green days of 2017. (Yes, I celebrated my second anniversary of living in Canada a few days ago.)

Obviously, it's a speed-limit sign...but this isn't just any speed-limit sign. This is an old sign that contains an obvious paste-over and repaint of the original speed number...almost certainly an artifact of Canada's metrication in the 1970s. I'd bet my life that "20 km/h" is covering over a "15" in imperial 19th-century miles.

This blast from the past clings to life on the grounds of London Hydro in London, Ontario. The chances aren't high that anything like this is still posted on a public road, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

26 August 2019

Once upon a time long, long ago, there was a business that called itself the National Tea Company...National for short. Like Jewel, they were founded in Chicago in 1899, and their business consisted of selling tea. They expanded into dry goods, and by the 1920s they were one of America's leading grocery chains.

There was a catch, though: National was rarely a leader; rarely an innovator; rarely a first mover. In the 1920s, A&P aggressively moved into cities, blanketed neighbourhoods with thousands of stores, and used scummy tactics and vertical integration to put the squeeze on independent competitors. Kroger was also quite aggressive, and shored up its presence in the midwest through a series of rapid-fire acquisitions. National...did not. Though they did manage to establish critical masses of stores in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago, the places where they thrived were dwarfed by the numbers of places where they showed up late, trailed competitors in store count and development, and were run out of town.

National wanted to compete in Michigan. But National had a terrible track record of competing in Michigan. The company had tried to expand into Grand Rapids in the late 1920s, where they opened up two stores...in a city where A&P had 51 stores and Kroger had 99. National had been crushed, creamed, humiliated in the market. But two decades later, they still wanted a piece of the action. So what did they do? They went shopping.

Between 1952 and 1955, National opened up its corporate chequebook and bought four supermarket chains in Michigan:

Dole Super Markets of Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, with 6 stores.
George T. Smith's Market Basket of Lansing, with 6 stores.
C.F. Smith Stores Company of Detroit, with 211 stores.
H.A. Smith Markets of Detroit, with 9 stores and 1 meat packing plant.

These acquisitions gave National a retail presence throughout the lower palm of the state. It was a patchy one, though...and there were cracks in the picture. Dole, Market Basket, and H.A. Smith weren't strong companies by any stretch. C.F. Smith had a far stronger competitive position (in Dearborn in the 1940s they had more locations than A&P and Kroger combined), but with a stable of older stores that were getting outdated by the day.

So what did National do? They opened the corporate chequebook again, and started building new stores. Lots and lots of them, especially in the Detroit Metro where it really mattered. Never mind that by building new stores, they had more or less nullified the financial advantages of buying a pre-existing company (or two, or three, or four) in the first place.

[former National supermarket in Ypsilanti Michigan]

The stores that National built seldom varied: Glazed blonde brick construction, with bowstring-truss barrel roofs. Modest footprints of 10-15,000 square feet. And wide, flat brick pylons protruding above the roof, serving as a handy place to put the diamond-shaped National sign.

[former National supermarket in River View Michigan]

Did it work? No. Detroit's grocery-market competition was heating up in the 1960s, with local competitors like Food Fair/Farmer Jack and Wrigley taking on national chains like Kroger and A&P in service and price...and National was left out in the cold. National itself was no longer an independent company: They had sold out to George Weston Limited of Ontario in 1955, which owned the Loblaws chain and was taking its time merging the two together. Moreover, they were in trouble...with declining profits, low-volume and outdated stores, and market share in free fall...not only in Michigan, but even in places like Chicago where the company had operated since day one. Worse, Loblaws in Canada had financial problems of its own. Something needed to be done...fast. And about the only thing to do was to start cutting limbs.

[former National supermarket in Wyandotte Michigan]

So it came to pass, and in 1966 National exited Michigan (again) after fourteen tumultuous years. Its physical legacy...its actual stores...were dispersed to a host of competitors, including Chatham, Farmer Jack, and A&P. And over half a century later, a remarkable number of those buildings are still there...though almost none of them are still selling food.

It's time to give Supermartifacts a modest update, with the latest captures and information from the summer's road trips on both sides of the border: