Ouellette Looking North – 1930’s

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• I have photos that were developed at that very Pond's store by my mother. I believe it was in operation until the 1960s at least. And across the street was Tamblyn's Drug Store, if I'm not mistaken. The site of Pond's, later the old CIBC building and now the vacant new CIBC building, has not been an enduring one, as noted.

  Do you, and does anyone else, remember Bondy's Shoe Store, which closed circa 1980s, and is now the site of a restaurant/bar (whose name escapes me.)? My father was a salesman there from the late 1930s. The current bank building, on Ouellette, is the site of the old Bartlett's Department Store, dating from about 1873, which was formed in an L shape and wrapped around the block. It closed and was demolished in the 1970s. As I recall, as the bank was scoping out its land needs, Bondy's refused to sell, and the building was simply built around it, so it goes. The old shoe store has had many incarnations since. Does this ring a bell?

• Pond's Drug Stores went on to be the founder of the co-operative which became the Big V Drug Stores chain (purely for trivia's sake, the co-founding partner was Parke+Parke Drugs in Hamilton, Ontario). In recent years "Pond's Big V" was on Ouelette in the Metropolitan Building--that location since has moved to the ex-Canada Trust location at the intersection with Wyandotte St.

• Tamblyn had a fairly big footprint across Ontario. They disappeared when U.K. chain Boots entered the market--when was that the 70s? Like M&S, Boots disappeared from Canada, selling to Oshawa which rebranded the stores as PharmaPlus, a chain that has since passed to Rexall.