Canadian chaos

I’ve blogged abandoned sites before, and WebUrbanist posts before, but what especially caught my eye on the ‘Great Blight North: 7 abandoned wonders of Canada’, was the shot of the deserted shopping plaza/mall, there’s something really incongruous about shops set up for customers just no people, remarkable when you realise it’s been that way for more than 30 years! So here is a selection of the Great North Blight.

I want a grand bank foyer like this

Toronto’s Forgotten Neoclassical Banks, Ontario

A historic landmark in downtown Toronto is the bank at 205 Yonge Street boasting a beautiful neoclassical facade that has darkened to a gloomy grey over the past century. Built in 1905, the Bank of Toronto and the adjacent Canadian Bank of Commerce, seem starkly out of place in all their aged gothic dilapidation, surrounded by the glittering glass of more modern buildings. Both banks have been empty for some time. The Bank of Commerce has been vacant since 1986, while the Bank of Toronto was occupied by Heritage Toronto until roughly 2001. Developers recently purchased the property and supposedly intend to restore the Bank of Commerce as part of a hotel project, though the fate of its neighbour is still up in the air, and none of the plans are final.

Canada Malting Plant, Montreal, Quebec

One of the last remaining sets of industrial silos in Toronto sits on the edge of the harbor, offering urban explorers who manage to gain access and ascend to its rooftops a stunning view of the skyline (including the city’s iconic CN Tower.) Built in 1928 to store malt for the Canada Malting Company, the complex includes stark modernist concrete towers housing 15 wooden silos. It was abandoned in the mid 1980s but protected by the city due to its historic and architectural value, and officials have considered adapting it for all sorts of interesting new uses, from a museum to a theme park. Most of the secondary buildings have been demolished, but the silos still stand.

Interior of the malting plant

Toronto Power Generating System, Ontario

This ornate power station immediately reminded me of the South Fremantle building. Built in 1903, this Beaux Arts hydro-electric power station was designed to power the city of Toronto. It’s located on the banks of the Niagara River just upstream from Niagara Falls. It closed in 1974 and was designated a national historic site in 1983. Despite still being filled with industrial equipment, the inside looks like a palace, the rusting remains of turbines contrasting with intricately scrolled marble trim. It has been described as a massive stone crypt standing majestic and alone beside the raging water… 

Note the seepage icicles

Riverview Hospital, Vancouver, British Columbia

Chances are, you’ve seen the Riverview Hospital before as it has appeared in dozens of movies and television shows, including The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, Psych, Caprica, Fringe, Halloween: Resurrection and even the Christmas movie Elf. It didn’t close until 2012, but many of its historic buildings were already abandoned by that time, and its decline has been swift. When the hospital opened in 1913 as ‘The Hospital for the Mind,’ it housed just 350 patients, but that population grew to 4,500 by the 1950s. Like so many other large mental health facilities, Riverview lost patients rapidly during the ’60s and ’70s as the approach to simply put mentally ill people ‘away’ for life came to be seen as inhumane. 

Kitsault Ghost Town, British Columbia

Abandoned towns are always eerie, especially when belongings are still strewn around as if the residents had to evacuate in a life-or-death scenario. But Kitsault is made even creepier by the distinct lack of every typical marker of abandonment other than the simple, stark lack of people in its homes, shops, schools and pubs. It’s impeccably well-kept, looking exactly as it did when it was abandoned in 1980, as if you could step back in time and experience that year again – the shag carpets, the prices in the grocery store window, the wooden pub chairs stacked on tables waiting for patrons that haven’t returned. There’s very little decay and no vandalism. The town site as it exists today was built in the late ’70s to house workers of the nearby molybdenum mine and includes roads, residences, a hospital, a curling rink and a swimming pool, but abandoned entirely just eighteen months later after the collapse of metal prices. A single caretaker (who is presumably mowing the lawns etc) is the only resident. A developer recently bought the town with an eye to transforming it into a wilderness resort or exploiting natural gas resources..

Kitsault's Shopping Plaza

 

Either being restored or demolished

Farmhouses of Ontario

Ontario is packed with abandoned farmhouses,churches and schools that have been left behind as rural residents moved from isolated locations to more urban settings. Sad rusting swing sets in overgrown yards, stately brick homes with broken windows, boarded-up lakeside log cabins and once-elegant estates overtaken by vines with their roofs caved in.

Impressive brick home near Wasaga

 

Empty eyes of the factory

Babcock Factory, Montreal, Quebec

The Babcock & Wilcox Boiler Plant in Saint Henri, Montreal is so altered from its original state, it’s barely recognizable – due to both decay and human intervention. Just outside the borders of one of the city’s poshest neighbourhoods, this relic of a factory is little more than a brick and concrete shell that now serves as a veritable graffiti gallery, empty cans of spray paint littering the floor.

Babcock interior

 As always see more photos and some videos at the WebUrbanist site.