Infamous Thunder Bay, land of
hockey players,
persians and
racism.
I've spend much of the past 12 years photographing this city. In this thread I'll share with you just some of the many photos I've taken over the past 18 months. Captions for photos will be located
below the photo in this thread.
All the photos posted here are hosted on their website, and you can view them here.
The Queen stayed in that hotel once. I know someone who has the silverware she used while she stayed there. Today it's low income apartments, the elevator doesn't work and the hallways are stained with urine. The mountain in the background was called Anemki Wachieu until a white guy walked to the top of it in the 1800s and they named it after him instead.
Mount McKay is a 1,000 foot high diabase sill, and one of the tallest "mountains" in Ontario.
Drew Street School. It's located on Syndicate Avenue. Syndicate Avenue was called Drew Street until two years before the school was built. Why they named the school after the old name of the street when it wasn't built until after the street was renamed is a decision that has been lost to history.
McVicar Creek in Downtown Port Arthur. A little piece of nature downtown!
Our oldest apartment building.
On the right is the former courthouse. It's going to be turned into a hotel later this year, which is actually pretty exciting.
The city ordered him to remove this a few days after he put it up.
Last spring I got an 80-200mm telephoto lens. Nothing fancy (which will be made obvious by the photos you're about to see) but it gave me an opportunity to try some compositions I've always wanted to take but didn't have the ability to until recently.
Thunder Bay's tallest building, a 16 storey condominimum located on a hill above downtown. The roof is over 100m above the lake.
Downtown Port Arthur. In the background is the Resolute Forest Products paper mill, the city's largest single employer. Industrial facilities dominate our skyline and waterfront, and you're about to see most of them.
The large Canada flag in the middle is, of course, a Husky Truck Stop.
The two large buildings in this photo are part of a 600+ bed seniors living facility.
The grain elevator in the middle still operates. The Thunder Bay Community Auditorium is in the foreground.
Downtown Fort William's skyline, hiding behind the "Sports Dome". The "Sports Dome" collapsed last November (the same day that I was supposed to leave to go to Toronto, see
this thread). For months now, it's been a pile of torn vinyl and debris. The operators have abandoned it and the landlord claims to not have enough money to clean it up.
An abandoned grain elevator and an abandoned iron ore trestle. The trestle is actually made of concrete, and the orange colour is the result of iron ore dust being sprinkled on it by trains over the 40 years it was in use. This whole area used to be a sawmill, and will eventually be (if things work out for the developer) a mixed use business, residential and parkland area.
Bay Street. The centre of culture in Thunder Bay.
Wholesale Club is the closest thing we have to Costco.
Downtown has strict height limits to ensure that little lighthouse can be seen from the park in which I took this photo. They work!!!!!!
That little green and red building burned down a couple weeks after I took this photo. The Italian Flag is flying above the Italian Cultural Centre. Thunder Bay is about 17% Italian, and the language is spoken more widely here than French.
While we don't have many tall buildings here, the large buildings we do have are arranged in a fairly aesthetically pleasing way.
They rebuilt the McDonald's last fall, but the sign is still large and obnoxious. We're probably the only city in Canada where a McDonald's sign figures prominently in the downtown skyline.
Thunder Bay's East End is replete with history and industry. It's the original site of Fort William, a trading post set up by the North-west Company in 1803.
Our fancy new court house.
Every year, we had a ten mile road race on Victoria Day which results in the closure of one of the main north-south corridors in the city. This street is the begining and end of the race. I love how the telephoto lens pulls the mountains so close.
That's all for now. Next time: Bay and Algoma; *inside* a 105 year old grain elevator, and some pretty awesome street art.
Here's a song from my youth to finish us off:
• Video Link
