Happy Friday everyone! Here’s an old shot looking south along Ouellette from near the present day intersection with University. The building in the foreground to the left is the old Palace Theatre building, demolished in the mid 1980’s. Next to that is the building that’s home to Ray & Kim’s today, still standing, as is the Canada Building to the south. Next to the Canada Building is the long gone Prince Edward Hotel.
Have a great weekend everyone, see you back here Monday.
What is Ray & Kim’s? And what was their in the forties?
Ray and Kim’s is a convenience store and I see Trott’s Shoes’ sign on the building.
Trott’s Shoes. Remember it well from the sixties. My mother liked that place.
The building to the left is the almost-block-long Palace Theatre Building. It included the original Palace Theatre itself (off the left of the photo), a real gem of a theatre where I saw many movies over the years from Fantasia and Song of the South to The Godfather. I also remember, not in any particular order, the United Cigar Store (see sign in photo) where Dad used to buy his Wakefield pipe tobacco, the Columbia Fruit Market, a meat market, Trott’s Shoes, and the Honey Dew Restaurant, where they specialized in the refreshing “honey dew” orange drink (great on a hot, humid summer day in a time when air conditioning was rare) and food was served from a cafeteria at the back. Upstairs in the building were various offices of doctors, lawyers, etc. On the ground floor of the tall magnificent Canada Building (tallest building in southwestern Ontario back then) was the telegraph and ticket offices of Canadian National Railways. This was where you bought your train tickets and sent telegrams to your distant relatives. The tall building nextdoor was the Sheraton Prince Edward Hotel, which, along with the nearby Norton-Palmer Hotel, was the largest and most opulent hotel in Windsor with 250 rooms, eleven floors, and its amenities which included the Towne Room dining room, the Fisherman’s Cove bar-lounge, a fancy ballroom, and the downstairs Piccadilly watering hole for thirsty downtown workers and shoppers who wanted something a little stronger than “honey dew.” Beyond that, across Park Street, was a parking lot with a fence along Ouellette Ave. on which grew an immense display of roses. It was on this site where the original St. Mary’s Academy was situated before it moved to its magnificent (now-destroyed) building in South Windsor.