Ontario Street Tenements

Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about the destitute and detritus-filled desert of desolation that was industrial-era Ontario Street. By industrial-era, I mean pre-condo! When the shipyards, stations and CLC plant lined this lakefront street, it was decidedly not a tourist mecca. In fact, some well-photographed tenements made their way into the Whig and a major city planning report, always garnering the same reaction - this, in our Kingston? The tar-paper shacks of Rideau Heights, well maybe, but here, somewhere near the current Empire Life Insurance property?

Another photo from November, 1967, before the adjacent tenement's windows were boarded up:

Being two blocks west of City Hall, it's not as if these tenements were hidden from view. In fact, then-Mayor Bob Fray was accompanied by a Whig reporter and photographer in 1965 and 1968 for two stories tracking progress made in low-income housing. 

For the 1968 report, walking down Ontario Street, the former Anglo-American Hotel at 172 Ontario (and Johnson Street), the McNevin property next-door "rat-infested, boarded-up' and the 'just a stiff breeze away from falling-down' tenement from which the Mayor appears to be running while the reporter tarries (top photo). In 1968, two families still lived in the laundry-lined building with its neighbouring building with its boarded up windows, with the other two units empty.

Yes, this was really realty reality.

Photos in this post from Queen's University Archives.