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Visit to CCM (Lozier) Factory
I live in Toronto and so I'm familiar with the Toronto Junction neighbourhood. I believed I had a general idea of where the CCM former Lozier factory (pre 1918) was probably located. After posting a picture of the factory I decided I would try to find its exact location. This proved to be a challenge. None of the factory illustrations showed the street address, just Toronto Junction. I started with searching for historic maps of Toronto Junction, with no luck. I found a reference to the factory being at the north end, at St. Clair and Weston Rd. A search of this area dug up many images of the famous stockyards and abattoir at that location which gave "Hogtown" its name, but nothing showing the roof outline of the CCM factory. Then I took a different approach, and looked for who occupied the buildings after CCM. After searching for images of Willys-Overland Toronto, and Canadian Acme Screw and gear, I finally figured out why the search had been so difficult. The factory was actually located a half a kilometre north of St. Clair. And...! it seems part of the old factory is still standing! So today I drove there to check it out.
The row of buildings in the foreground were built by CCM as an expansion of the original Lozier bicycle factory (see John McKenty's book pg. 115). CCM needed the extra space for their Russel automobile venture. The following pictures show the building in the lower right corner of this image and the larger buildings behind.
And here is that building from the lower right of that first image above! The address is 201 Weston Rd.
The larger building just to the north of 201, is 207 Weston Rd. Here is a photo of the building in the 1960's when it was occupied by Canadian Acme Screw and Gear, owned by the same company that owned CCM at the time. I will also upload an arial photo when it was used by Willys-Overland in the 1930s.
201 Weston Rd. is now a trendy vintage loft building with 20 units. A young dude walking his dog let me in. There were some historic Weston news clippings in the lobby but clearly and sadly they have no idea their building was part of a CCM factory.
After that I thought I'd drive north and grab a coffee at the Tim Horton's now on the site of the 1918-1983 CCM factory. It was 4km north along the same railway line. Besides the Tims there is a Wendy's, a fire station, and many single story commercial units. I drove around to the back and along the tracks where the bikes used to be loaded onto rail cars I found a line of ice cream trucks. To the North and East were little houses built for factory employees. When you get to Gibson Ave. you know this must be the heart of CCM country!
Nice work, Bike looks right at home back close to where it was made.
Looks like you had a fun day out with the bike. Neet to see the photos of the buildings past and present, and the changes over the years.
Erik
Brian, nice detective work. A few years ago, I went through the excersie of trying to identify all the Toronto based companies in the bicycle industry at the turn of the 20th century. As you've already noted, there was no numbered address given for the Lozier factory, though some placed it on Keele Street North. My assumption was that the Grand Trunk railway separated the north and south sections of Keele St. and that the factory was actually on the opposite side of the tracks. However, I was able to find a 1913 map, identifying and showing the layout of the Russell Motor Car Co. Ltd. It was right where you found it and the layout of the old Lozier factory buildings compares reasonably well to the catalogue illustrations.