To the heritage-enlightened residents of Kingston, Samuel R. Bailey’s brooms and the building he chose for their manufacture were an important piece of the city’s industrial heritage, writes Dave LeBlanc.Kristen Jahnke/Kristen Jahnke
For the purposes of manufacturing brooms, elaborate architecture is not required. Broomcorn, wire, and wood need nothing more than a long, unadorned building where the various stages of assembly can be performed. Proximity to a railway line for shipping is a must and, for the workers, a series of windows for light and ventilation is required. That’s about it.
So, when Imperial Oil put its long, utilitarian, one-storey, 1894 building along Kingston’s Cataraqui Street up for sale in 1903, Samuel R. Bailey jumped on it. Here was the perfect place to locate his family’s broom-making business. And, with business booming a few years later – the little factory produced 1,680 brooms per day – Mr. Bailey hired local architect William Newlands to add a small flourish to the front corner: an office. This gave the building a proper entryway with a tiny pediment above, a bay window facing Rideau Street, and two tall windows on the Cataraqui façade. It was an architectural gesture that allowed the broom factory to rise, just a little, above its workaday status.
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Sadly, the broom business went bust in the 1920s. A subsidiary of Imperial Oil bought the building, and a roofing supply company would follow in 1959. Finally, a fuel storage company would occupy the space in 1994. And then, abandonment.
“The city purchased it because they wanted to build a road,” says architect Jon Jeronimus, picking up the story. “They wanted to build a main arterial road [the Wellington Street extension] into the downtown … and then they were going to demolish this building. And the community got really upset by that.”
When Toronto-based RAW Design finally gained ownership of the 1894 building, it was in such bad condition that even small-scale plans looked optimistic.Jonathan Sabeniano/Jonathan Sabeniano
An outcry for an old, falling-down broom factory? Yes, because to the heritage-enlightened residents of Kingston, Mr. Bailey’s brooms and the building he chose for their manufacture were an important piece of the city’s industrial heritage. And, besides, a road can bend, can it not?
According to a July, 2014 story in The Kingston Whig-Standard, the city granted a “stay of demolition” that would “run out at the end of 2016” and, additionally, that the building might be offered “for a dollar.” And that is exactly what Toronto-based RAW Design paid in 2016. They then added another $3.7-million to transform the building into a buzzing hive filled with rock concerts, film showings, comedy and a café. Oh, and a little office for RAW in Mr. Newlands’s pedimented addition, of course.
More on that in a moment.
Despite setbacks and escalating costs, Toronto-based RAW Design pushed forward with redeveloping the building.Jonathan Sabeniano/Jonathan Sabeniano
First, it’s worth noting that a cultural juggernaut that has become much bigger than bricks-and-mortar wasn’t always the intention, says RAW partner Mr. Jeronimus: “We wanted to get some work in Kingston and we just felt like, what better way to do it than to have a physical presence … get to know all of the municipal staff, all of the local consultants [and] all of the local trades.” Maybe add some co-working space and a small coffee bar.
When the 1894 building became theirs, it was in such bad condition that even that little dream seemed far away.
“The stabilization efforts took place while we were also cleaning the site, taking all the hazardous soil out,” remembers Mr. Jeronimus. “We’re stabilizing the walls while we’re in hazmat suits, shipping the soils out to Moose Creek [waste treatment facility], spending a gazillion dollars to deal with all that; I think when COVID-19 hit, we were pouring the slab … it didn’t totally derail us, but that was a big problem.”
RAW transformed the building into a buzzing hive filled with rock concerts, film showings, comedy and a café.RAW Design
No matter. Despite setbacks and escalating costs, RAW pushed forward: old bricks were cleaned and repointed; new openings were added along the Cataraqui façade; old wooden trusses and central columns were replaced with thick metal frames that now take all the roof’s weight. A roof that, once solar panels are added, will complete the building’s journey to net-zero (there are already radiant floors supplied by electric boilers, great insulation, energy recovery ventilators, and other energy-saving technologies).
When the building finally opened, and the pandemic was in retreat, RAW’s first tenant, Marc Garniss and his Kingston Canadian Film Festival, let his eye wander and his grey matter produce an idea. “He’s a concert promoter as well,” Mr. Jeronimus says with a smile. Sitting, often, in the front office with his friends at RAW, he was “looking down at that [big] room and saying ‘do we want to make this into a concert venue?’ and I said ‘yes.’” Besides, adding a few more bathrooms to make it legal for large audiences would be a cake walk compared to the effort that had just spent to prevent the building from falling over.
Architect Jon Jeronimus has even bigger dreams for the site, which includes vacant land RAW has christened 'Broom North.'Kristen Jahnke/Kristen Jahnke
It turns out the time was right for an old broom factory to become a new cultural boom factory. The day this writer visited, Hamilton’s Arkells were sound-checking for a sold-out concert as band T-shirts were being neatly folded onto a merch table and cases of beer were being loaded into a fridge. And Mr. Jeronimus – who lives in Toronto but meets with RAW’s Kingston staff once a week – talked of even bigger dreams for the site, which includes vacant land RAW has christened “Broom North.”
“Option one, just a big concert venue taking up the entire thing, with some education stuff in there and some rehearsal spaces,” he says. “Option two, dig the whole site out, ship it off to where dirty soils need to go, put the venue in the basement, a giant vaulted basement, have at-grade a workshop, commercial, retail, artist studio spaces, and, above that – we can go six storeys here – artist affordable housing.”
Architects as culture-makers and affordable housing suppliers? Why not? Sometimes a dream turns into a building, and sometimes a building turns into a dream.