About that tea party ...

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Posted 2 months ago

Re: Dan Christie's Nov. 12 column, "All the running we can do."

I also know something about architecture and old buildings.

I know all about the Wychwood car barns located off St. Claire Ave. West, which housed the wooden Bathurst streetcars, and the semi-streamlined PCC (Presidents' Conference Committee) streetcars which first appeared in Toronto in 1938.

I know all about the big steel Peter Witt streetcars which hauled coal-stove-heated trailers, in service on the Yonge St. line until the 1954 opening of the Toronto subway.

I also know something about the timber reinforced, fortress-like limestone Gooderham & Worts distillery buildings by Toronto's Don River.

I can well visualize the long-ago Crane Foundry engineers with their hand-held slide rules and poetic sounding formulas -- "section modulus", "moment of inertia", "radius of gyration", etc. -- defining the size and placement of structural steel I-beams, channels and columns with as much integrity as produced by the latest computer technology, as evidenced by the still-standing centre pier buildings.

I have witnessed first hand the romance and drama of tons of white-hot molten iron cascading out of the coke-fired cupola to be streamed into precisely formed sand molds, from which emerged red-hot bathtubs, ultimately to be adorned with a gleaming coat of white porcelain.

I know something of other places where old decaying abandoned industrial sites have been turned into thriving tourist and commercial attractions. However, none of them was developed on land with a 75-year legacy of low-level radioactive waste, in the shadow of the uranium refinery that produced it.

I would suggest the participants at the Alice In Wonderland Mad Hatter's party would be those who promote the centre pier development rather than those who oppose it.

Roy Cowan Port Hope