More Then and Nows from Fort William and Port Arthur, Ontario(Thunder Bay)....

Long overdue on this blog page are a few of my favourite "Then and Nows" .....with help from the Brill Bus era in Fort William and Port Arthur, Ontario!

This intersection at Fort William Road and 11th ave shows an incredible amount of changes and differences between the 1968 and 2010 photos. The big item here is of course the CNR ore trestle shown in the background of the first photo which has long been scrapped. The next item is the fact that two sets of tracks were once there. The next item is the lack of sidewalks on Fort William Road in the first one and also that the road was only two lanes of traffic compared to four lanes now. An outstanding difference is the incredible amount of overhead wires and telephone poles in the first photo, as compared to the lack of same in the colour photo. Finally, the wooden fence for Lakehead Scrap Metal is long gone as shown in the first photo.

Thanks again to the Scalzo Collection for a picture of the Brill bus just west of the Red River Road and Hodge Street corner taken in about 1969. The bus photo clearly shows a little corner store which is so rare to see on any street corner today. In the 2010 photo the house on the right is still there with a few minor changes and the corner store is now just a residential home. I sure miss those great little corner stores with racks of penny candy to spend our copper coins on.

This one may be a little difficult to figure out....the 1969 Brill Bus photo shows the bus just crossing Junot Street and heading east down Red River Road. It also shows a Texaco Station on the North/West corner which is now a Shell Station. The Shell Station sign on the north/east corner of the new photo is a current design which replaced the old style sign in the bus photo. Both these photos were taken at the same angle at the exact same location.

No one really knew what "The Arcade" meant on the facade of the building in the very early Brill bus photo(maybe it really was an arcade at some time or another). This building still exists today with the same facade "The Arcade". If you can't remember where this is......it's directly across from the old day and current day CPR station on South Syndicate Ave.........my how things change!!! ....but not totally.

Here is the old Bank of Montreal Building as shown in about 1948 in the Brill Bus photo. The rubber tired Brill Trollys were just starting up in the Lakehead cities then. The building with the shoe store is now long gone, but the unique corner BMO building still stands today as solid as the structure was back in the late 1940's.

Click on photos to enlarge(sorry but most of these are in fairly small format)!