When I began sifting through my photo archive for images related to this month’s theme (what was but is no more), I was astonished at the number of buildings I have photographed that have later met with accelerant and a lit match. See my previous post on Notre Dame de Paris. I swear I had nothing to do with it. Today’s featured photo is a night shot of a building on Algoma Street South in Thunder Bay, ON. I shot this in May, 2016 and a few months later it was gone.
There have been a rash of fires in the vicinity. Two years ago, a building on Bay Street went up in flames. Before that, it was the Hells Angels clubhouse. And in December, the town lost the historic Finnish Labour Temple and, with it, the Hoito restaurant, located just around the corner from my lonely building featured here. There isn’t any evidence to suggest that these fires are connected. But when there are so many fires in close proximity, one does wonder.
As far as I’m aware, none of these fires resulted in injury or loss of life. Even so, each of them has been an occasion for grief, especially in the case of the Finnish Labour Temple, which had been a community hub for more than a century. There is something shocking about fire, something irrevocable. We do our best to clean up the site, but traces remain for years. We smell it in the soot. We see it in charred bits of wood.
Whenever I drive up to Thunder Bay, I see evidence of fire all along my route. In the town of Heyden, just north of the Sault, there’s Pruce’s Motor Inn lying in ruins, ironic given that the local fire station is just next door. And 20 km west of Nipigon was a gas station, abandoned for years, then torched to the ground. Further along, in Dorian, another motel was abandoned then torched, or torched then abandoned. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which came first.
For a lot of sites in Northern Ontario, it’s typical simply to walk way. Let nature deal with the charred remnants. Snow melt and rain turn it into a black slurry. Seedlings hatch there. Moss and lichen creep over the exposed surfaces. In time—natural time, not human time—the burnt out buildings vanish beneath a layer of living matter, joining a larger cycle of decay and rebirth.
