The Brick Works, Then and Now

Amanda Castleman's short article, quoting me, has been published (See April 13). For now, it's the first article of five at this MSN site. Fortunately, there's an option to turn off the chatter that introduces the site.

Someday soon, Toronto's former Don Valley Brick Works, which includes 15 husks of old factory buildings on about 250,000 square feet of land, will be a redevelopment site sporting various cultural uses, with an emphasis on environmental activities and education. But for now it's a collection of spooky derelict structures, though I was told they've been stabilized. Presumably that meant things wouldn't fall on us as we toured the structures last week, and nothing did. But the floors were dusty and punctuated with irregular holes and outcroppings of former rail lines, and there was always the risk of tripping over pieces of bricks, bits of metal, trash or unrecognizable industrial debris.

Step inside and it's like one of the places where Alex and his droogs took unfortunates for a little ultraviolence, or maybe where Clarence and Robocop had it out in the first movie of that series. According to our guide, however, the former brick works has mostly been overlooked as a movie set, even as Toronto became a location of choice for directors looking to dodge high costs in California.

Musty and dark, even in the middle of the day, the largest of the buildings is very large indeed, and includes a several enormous kilns. I expected the kilns to be big and squat, but they were as long as a football field and only a few feet wide. In its heyday in the early 20th century, the Don Valley Brick Works made 100,000 bricks a day or so, most passing through one of the long kilns. I couldn't do any of these kilns justice with photography, but I did get a few shots of the graffiti that was most everywhere. Some of them were more artful than others, if you can use that term.

According to our guide, the old factory is sometimes still used to hold raves. None of us were really young enough to fully appreciate that -- I know I don't really know what one involves -- but the old brick factory does look like a place, there only about 10 minutes' drive from the Apollonian downtown Toronto, to get your Dionysus on.