From the Windsor Star – July 31, 1936:
Windsor police today were searching for the driver of a car, which shortly before noon crashed into the guard rail of the C.P.R. Bridge on London Street West.
Police hurried to the scene, found the car, registered in the name of Alice O’Gorman of La Salle, but there was no sign of its occupants. Witnesses told police that the driver had been taken away in a car, apparently injured.
The car jumped the curb, demolished an iron railing around the front lawn of the Canada Packers office and ended up against the bridge guard, as shown above.
An empty liquor bottle, baskets of tomatoes and other produce were found in the car.
I love the description, produce and liquor… 🙂
Canada Packers was located on the south east corner of University Avenue (then known as London Street) and Salter. As seen in this fire insurance map from 1937.
The building still stands, and the scene of the mystery is marked by the yellow arrow.
The photo above is from 1949, and it looks like the bridge has either been replaced or widened as it looks much wider today. The fire insurance map above greatly exaggerates the narrowing of the bridge, although as you can see in the photo from 1949 it was a bit narrower than the road.
Maybe some of the rail fans out there will know if and when the CPR bridge at University was widened or replaced?
I wonder if this Alice O’Gorman is a distant relative of mine. My grandmother was related to O’Gorman’s in the Lasalle area. Maybe it’s time to climb my family tree and have a look around.
cool!!! anyways did you ever hear about what happened on that same side of the bridge bacl in the early 80’s?
I black man hung himself along there and was just hanging until police came…..the man was unknown,, he was a black male mid 50’s…
Yes, it was widened, but you are testing my memory cells. I worked on it. I know the tracks where still in use underneath. I am going to say early 80’s. If more comes back to me I will add. The general contracter was a company called McKay Cocker
I remember the work on London Street but not the date though it might have mnore or less coincided with the renaming of the street to commemorate Assumption College receiving its university charter in the fifties.
I find the name “O’Gorman” of interest. In the eighties, working at the Downtown Mission, I knew a then elderly (now deceased) man, Carl O’Gorman, infamous in the downtown area as an alcoholic who could tend toward violence though I never had a problem with him and got to know him perhaps as well as anyone did. He was an artist of some talent. I wonder if he could have been the driver in the incident you report? Could have been driving his mother’s car. Just a speculation.
Clare, I too remember Carl. I used to work at the Zehr’s on Dougall, and he used to come in and attempt to shoplift either mouthwash or Aqua Velva on a regular basis… I never found him to be violent, but maybe I was just lucky…
He was killed on the bar strip maybe a decade or so ago? He got in an altercation with a drunk kid and the kid punched him. When he fell to the sidewalk he banged his head, and never recovered. If my memory serves, no charges were laid, or if they were, the kid ended up being acquitted…
However, long story short, I think that in 1936, Carl would have still been too young for this to have been him….
The O’Gorman family in LaSalle is well known. They used to have a large farm in the area. The family is quite large with one of the brothers now a police officer another a teacher. The father (who would be approx. 70 today) used to be a principle at Shawnee HS. Very nice people.
Died: O’Gorman Carl J., Sep 17, 1996 from the online Obituary database from Windsor Public Library.
Does anybody know what used to be directly south of canada packers? If you go south on Salter St., it comes to a dead end and there’s a path you can take that comes out at the field at the northeast corner of Wyandotte and Crawford. The path goes through an abandoned field/forest that has old concrete foundations of some sort. I don’t know what could have been there before because there’s railroad tracks to the east and an alley to the west.
The stories about Carl O’Gorman remind me of the stories about a guy called Yorkie my grandfather would tell me. Back in the mid fifties when my grandfather was just beginning his police career, he would routinely have to take Yorkie in to jail for disorderly conduct/public drunkeness.
Yorkie once climbed half way up the radio tower at CKLW, until the cops got him down.
The thing about Yorkie was that he was a really nice, generous guy, he was just a legendary alcoholic who was homeless with a record a mile long – so long, he allegedly was in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most arrests due to public drunkeness. He was the kind of guy who would try to get arrested just so he could have a place to stay that night.
Maybe some of our seasoned veterans could help me on this…
Urbanrat – Thanks. 1996, time sure flies!
SBW – The fire map shows it as “vacant”:
The 1923-24 City Directory list a Lumber Yard there…
@Brendan – I remember Yorkie very well. He was a fixture downtown when I worked there during the 70’s and 80’s and was a well liked character. It was a testament to his popularity that when he died many local dignitaries attended his funeral including at least one judge. The story was told that one year when summer was over and the days were growing colder, Yorkie, looking to be jailed for the winter, tossed a brick thru the window of an Ouellette Ave business and waited to be arrested. When he went before the judge he was released rather than jailed and so Yorkie went back to the scene of the crime, waited until the glaziers had finished replacing the window he had smashed, and tossed another brick thru it. This time he got his wish and was “put up” for the winter.
All of this was reported in The Windsor Star at the time.
Cool, thanks Andrew I always wondered what was there before. Judging by the age of the trees back in there, it must have been gone for a few dacades now.
Yorkie, Norman Hayworth, had served in the Navy during WW2. His drunk charges were often heard before Magistrate Gordon R. Stewart who, in a way, kept a an eye out for the veteran. There was no detox centre so Stewart would let Yorkie run up several days of convictions before sending him to jail for the always unpaid fines and to dry up. Yorkie was in court almost every session and whether he walked out that day with a fine or was sent to jail depended on whether he looked like whether he had been eating properly or not. In December Stewart would look at the calendar and give Yorkie a longer sentence than the usual three days to be sure he was in long enough so he could have the jail’s Christmas dinner. He was originally a Brit and his nickname was based on birthplace in the UK.