Brock Lofts

History of Brock Lofts

Wilbert Hooey, born on a farm near Blackstock, Ontario, in 1858, arrived in the village of Parkdale, not yet part of Toronto, with about $300. In 1886 he patented a refrigerator, really an icebox, insulated with air so the ice stayed dry and food kept longer, and set up the Eureka Refrigerator Company in a small building on Noble Street, behind 15 Brock Avenue.

By the late 1890s Eureka was said to be the second-largest refrigerator maker in Canada, shipping to England and Australia and supplying butchers, grocers, hotels including the Gladstone, and wealthy Toronto families. Hooey built a two-storey brick factory on the next lot in 1905, now the back of the lofts, and the front addition in 1913. A few years later he sold to the Keenan Company, which moved Eureka to Owen Sound in 1917.

The Canadian Symphonola Company, which advertised “Canada's premier phonograph,” moved in next, followed in the 1920s by the National Fruit and Wine Company. From the 1940s until about 1980 the building belonged to S. Gumpert Co., the baking-supply company, which then moved to Mississauga. Through the 1980s and 1990s it was rented as studios and rental lofts.

M&M Developments and Core Architects converted it in 2003 into 24 lofts from about 360 to 1,400 square feet, with 12- to 18-foot ceilings, big wood beams, exposed brick and ducts, skylights in the upper units and a shared roof deck. Live/work units with their own entrances line the lane, and you can still see at least four phases of construction from it.

Stories you'll hear

Nobody knows where Hooey's starting money came from. One story says he found a bag of money; another says he struck gold in the Yukon.