Massey Harris Lofts

History of Massey Harris Lofts

The Massey business began in the late 1840s, when Daniel Massey started making ploughs and other simple implements near Newcastle, east of Toronto; his son Hart took over the foundry in 1851. Incorporated as the Massey Manufacturing Company in 1870, it moved to a six-acre site on King Street West in 1879, where hundreds of workers built farm machinery shipped around the world. In 1891 it merged with its main rival, A. Harris, Son and Company of Brantford, to form Massey-Harris, the largest maker and exporter of its kind in the British Empire. It became Massey-Ferguson in 1958.

This was the company's office. The two-storey north part, with its bay windows and the sculpted pediment, was finished in 1885 to designs by E.J. Lennox, then just starting out; Lennox also designed a house for Hart Massey's son Charles and went on to design Old City Hall. George M. Miller, who consulted on Massey Hall, added the third floor and the three-storey south wing in two stages before the First World War.

When Varity, the company's last incarnation, left in 1986, the rest of the factories were torn down, and the office is all that is left of the Massey-Harris works on both sides of King. The City listed it on its first heritage inventory in 1973 and designated it in 2008. It was converted in 2003 into 46 lofts with exposed brick, fieldstone in the lower walls and ceilings up to 17½ feet; some bathrooms were built inside the old payroll vaults, and eight two-level glass penthouses sit on the roof.