Toronto Local History 3-Book Bundle. Scott Kennedy
noted that the exterior of the store was as useful to the community as the interior. Shortly after the building was completed, a porch was added that offered shelter on the east and south sides of the building. The porch was built to shelter passengers who boarded stagecoaches and later, radial cars and buses on Yonge Street. The combination of the porch and the precise fit of the building to the intersection served to keep customers dry in bad weather, an important consideration since the store also functioned as a waiting room and ticket agent for the various types of transport down through the years. Local dairy farmers also used the porch when shipping pails of their milk. They would drop them off in the morning to be conveyed into the city for sale, then pick up the empty pails in the afternoon, or in the case of the early days of the stagecoaches, whenever they could make it back through the treacherous depths of Hogg’s Hollow.
In 1866, the Shepards added another feature to the store when they were granted the rights to operate a post office. The name Lansing was suggested by Joseph’s daughter, Saida, and was soon adopted by the entire area around the crossroads. The store was popular from the outset and before long it was the focal point of the community. In 1870, Joseph E. Shepard (Joseph III) took over the operation of the store from his father. He also assumed responsibility for the operation of the family’s mills over by Bathurst Street, making his father, who had been born in 1815, an early exponent of “freedom fifty-five.” Joseph Shepard II had many good years of retirement to look forward to, although one wonders if men like Joseph ever really retired. He died on April 24, 1899, at the age of eighty-four.
In 1888, Benjamin Brown took over the operation of the store on a rental basis. He changed the business from a general store to a hardware store to better serve the needs of the rapidly growing community. It was a prescient move. The store would remain a successful hardware store for the next 101 years. In 1899, Mary Jane Shepard, daughter of Joseph Shepard II, acquired the property for “$1.00 and natural love and affection,” according to the deed, clearly a close family. In 1904, Benjamin Brown bought the property from Mary Jane and enlarged the former van Nostrand facilities to the north where a 1914 Model T Ford would soon be parked alongside the buggies, cutters, and wagons. In 1923, Benjamin sold the property to George and William Dempsey, whose family name would become as familiar to several generations of North Yorkers as the name Shepard.
By now the building had been modernized with the addition of indoor plumbing, central heating, and electricity. The Dempsey brothers, plumbers by trade, renamed the store the Dempsey Brothers’ Hardware Store. In the 1930s, the second floor was extensively renovated to create two separate apartments for George and William’s families. Dormer windows were added to the attic around the same time and the attic converted to a communal rec room that could be accessed from either of the apartments below.
The Shepard/Dempsey store as it looked in 1955. The car in front of the store is a 1939 Ford. The car to the right appears to be a 1953 Oldsmobile.
Photo by Ted Chirnside, Toronto Public Library, TC 24.
In the 1960s, the store was taken over by George’s sons, Bob and Jim. By the time they took over, the store had some local competition from such upstarts as the Kitchen family’s Lansing Building Supply at Willowdale and Sheppard Avenues, and York Mills Hardware, operated by Msrs. Bannister and Jenkins at the corner of Bayview and York Mills. Nonetheless, Dempseys’ remained the place to go for your hardware needs. Likely everyone living in North York back then has a Dempsey Brothers story or two.
In the 1950s and 1960s, a Saturday morning trip to Dempseys’ was like a ritual. Many of the Second World War vets who now populated the area were pretty handy with a hammer and saw and much of the interior finishing work on the post-war houses that were covering the farms of North York was done by the owners. If the job was too complex for one person, neighbours could always be counted on to lend a hand, much like the barn-raisings of a not-too-distant past. Whether the job called for ten thousand nails or just one, Dempseys’ could help, and the staff all knew just what kind of nail would do the job. The floors sagged and creaked underfoot. The bins behind the counter groaned under the weight of a seemingly endless array of screws, nails, nuts, bolts, and washers. Anything that might fall under the heading of “hardware” was in there somewhere. Maybe it was hanging from the ceiling or in a little drawer behind the counter or out back with the bags of fertilizer and cement or stashed upstairs or hidden in the basement, but if anyone in the whole city had it, it was probably the Dempsey brothers. Bob Dempsey liked to joke that he could fill a customer’s order before the customer could get his wallet onto the counter.
By the end of the 1980s, the next mutation of North York was well underway. Mayor Mel Lastman’s dream of a new downtown took root, as the high-rise wind tunnel endured today blew down precious history and replaced it with what many perceive to be an ill-conceived attempt to be something North York never was. In 1989, the Dempsey Brothers’ Hardware Store was sold to the Canderel Development Corporation and the Prudential Assurance Company Limited. The new owners thought so much of their new acquisition that they turned it into a dollar store. A visit to the new store only emphasized the soullessness of the place. In place of the complex inventory of sturdy, essential items was a haphazard array of flimsy imported trinkets. In place of a caring, knowledgeable staff were bored, dismissive, and detached clock-watchers. The indignity continued for several years until the developers, finally devoid of ideas, gave the place to North York to avoid the cost of tearing it down.
North York wasted little time in devising a rescue strategy and soon a plan was in place that would see the old store moved out of harm’s way. Building-moving specialists Charles Matthews Limited stabilized the structure and prepared for the half-mile move to the store’s new home in a little park at the north end of Beecroft Road. On February 18, 1996, hundreds of people gathered in bone-chilling weather to witness a 463-ton building lifted off its foundations and driven down Beecroft Road. Supported by 128 wheels on nineteen dollies, the store began its laborious journey, taking nearly twelve hours to travel the half-mile distance. Once at the new location, the building was carefully placed on its new foundation.
The building was then restored under the supervision of the architectural firm Philip Goldsmith and Company Limited. The exterior of the building was restored to appear as it was in the Shepards’ time. This meant the removal of the third-floor dormer windows and the re-creation of the original porch. The interior was completely re-imagined to serve an altogether new purpose as the new home of the North York Archives. Students, researchers, and members of the general public all looked forward to utilizing this precious resource. The architects were particularly proud of their accomplishment. A special publication called “The Dempsey Archivist” was published by the North York Mirror on Saturday, September 13, 1997, to mark the opening of the new archives. In it, architect Philip Goldsmith said:
Archives and archive storage facilities generally are the toughest uses to put into a historic building. Archives, by their very nature, are for the long term storage of fragile material. We needed to create the maximum storage capacity in our work. We created a separate zone in the basement that was column free and high enough to maximize storage. In essence, we created a small building in a building. Also, we designed and incorporated our own vapour-barrier system to contain and control the humidity factor primarily in this space.
All in all, it was an expensive and time-consuming task that was extremely well done. Then something went terribly wrong.
In 1998, the provincial government, under then-premier Mike Harris, shocked the citizens of North York, East York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, York, and the City of Toronto by forcibly amalgamating these six separate entities into one unmanageable blob under the banner of “Toronto,” despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of residents had voted against the amalgamation. The subsequent years have proven the residents right and the premier wrong as infrastructure and services have deteriorated to the point where few citizens ever expect to see a return to the modest efficiencies of pre-amalgamation. The casualties could fill a separate book, but the one that concerns us here is the fate of the North York Archives. On January 1, 1998, North York ceased to exist. It was now just a corner of Toronto. Shortly after, the archives that had been so proudly installed in the newly-renovated Shepard store were