History

Toronto’s Flatiron building was constructed in the late 1800s (10 years before the more publicized NYC Flatiron) for the Gooderham and Worts distillery company. The building, located at the intersections of Front St, Wellington St, and Church St., was built for $18,000 by family architect David Roberts and makes use of both gothic and romanesque architectural features. The building is 5 stories tall with 12-foot ceilings and makes use of red brick with a copper cone roof as one of its signatures.

The wikipedia states" The Gooderham Building, also known as the Flatiron Building, is an historic office building at 49 Wellington Street East in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is located on the eastern edge of the city's Financial District (east of Yonge Street) in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, wedged between Front Street and Wellington Street in Downtown Toronto, where they join up to form a triangular intersection. Completed in 1892, the red-brick edifice was an early example of a prominent flatiron building." We already have two dates of the construction of this building.

Flatiron Building is a name applied to a number of buildings shaped like a flatiron.

Flatiron comes from flat iron or smoothing iron. The general name for a hand-held iron consisting simply of a handle and a solid, flat, metal base, and named for the flat ironing face used to smooth clothes.

The build included a walk-in vault for the family riches and a tunnel that led to the bank across the street which the Gooderhams also owned. This made it easy for them to transfer money safely from the building to the bank. The Gooderham family owned the building until 1957 when it was sold for the first time. In 1975 the building became a National Historic site and was sold for its last time less than a year ago for 15.2 million bucks, an increase from the 2005 sale for 10 million.

Today the site is used for offices and is considered one of the most expensive office spaces in the city. The building is also home to the Firkin chain of pubs The Flatiron & Firkin who has a contract in place until the year 2015.
The back of the building has this mural on it done by Canadian artist Derek Besant. The image is of the Perkins building across the street and is done in the style of Trompe L’Oeil (trick the eye) or an optical illusion. The illusion makes it seem like their are more windows than there actually are, as well as making it look layered as opposed to flat.

The Gooderham Building is associated with the Gooderham family, particularly George Gooderham, the eldest son of William, who founded Toronto's Gooderham and Worts Distillery in 1837. In the 1880s, after taking over his father's continuously expanding distillery, George commissioned architect David Roberts Jr. to construct a building slightly west of the industrial complex to house the offices for the business. At a cost of $18,000, the resulting building, known as the Gooderham Building, was the most expensive office building to be erected within all of Toronto at that time. As the president of the distillery, the Bank of Toronto and the Manufacturer's Life Insurance Company, Gooderham possessed the finances to decorate the building with the most lavish of details. At the time of his death in 1905, Gooderham was listed as the wealthiest man in Ontario.

Location of Supporting Documentation

Conservation Easement Files Ontario Heritage Trust 10 Adelaide Street East Toronto, Ontario

Cross-Reference to Collection

Fed/Prov/Terr Identifier

HPON05-0563

Wireless electricity?
This building has the features of old wireless electricity collection and usage. On the top of the building we see some spherical metallic devices that were incorporated in the architecture that some alternative researchers find on different old buildings and state that they were used as wireless electricity collectors that transmit to interior devices used for heating and lighting the building. The present educational system created a wrong paradigm erasing the information from the public consciousness.