Kodak Building 9
Mount Denis
TORONTO, April 21, 2013. My dad lived in Weston in the late 20s and early 30s when he first married my mom. He and his older brother ran an auto wreckers/garage there at the time. A few years later dad moved north to join two other brothers in the same business in Allandale, where I grew up.
I was born in Long Branch on 40th street and all my baby photographs were taken with a Kodak Six-20 folder made in Kodak Heights. Dad used to talk about driving by Kodak and taking various roads like Scarlett Road. He often mentioned both Mount Denis and Weston in his stories to me. My wife’s cousin Don Peneycad, was the personnel manager at Kodak Heights, and one of my neighbours was the resident electrician.
This all came back when George Dunbar sent me a message about the sad demise of Kodak Heights. Like the much larger Kodak facilities in Rochester, the buildings have been destroyed as film and Kodak’s ubiquitous cameras lost out to electronic companies and digital cameras built into cheap cell phones. Back in 2009, when Kodak announced it would soon stop making Kodachrome colour slide film, that staple of professionals since the late 1930s, Rick McGinnis wrote and illustrated the story of the death of Kodak Heights on the blogTO.com site. His article can be see by clicking here.
The Kodak Canada records were donated to Ryerson University. Bob Burley of that institution has produced the book “Disappearance of Darkness: Photography at the End of the Analog Era” which quickly sold out its 25,000 strong first printing and recently went into a second printing. The book includes images of the Kodak Heights campus.
