When I was six years old back in 1960, we lived on the corner of Elm and Ethelbert streets in the city's West End, in a basement apartment that surprisingly is still there and basically has not changed.
Even through its more than 60 years ago, I still remember that neighbourhood like it was yesterday.
I remember the old Belton Hotel on Spruce Street with the White Rose gas station next to it and the long gone West End playground where I first skated up.
It's all gone now, however one icon of my youth remains.
Elm Street was and still is the main street of Sudbury and as a kid I remember it as a bustling, active and busy street filled with people, stores, apartments, hotels and government offices.
As I would make my way downtown heading east on Elm, either walking or in the car with my parents, I always seemed to make mental notes of what I saw along the way.
In our part of town, Elm was lined on both sides with homes, and in one of those homes just a few up from Ethelbert lived a sergeant with the OPP.
His name was Sergeant Pepper (no fooling) and years later when the Beatles came out with an album of that same name (Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the group’s eighth studio album), everyone assumed it was our own as Sgt. Pepper supposedly had worked security when the Beatles came to Toronto in 1966.
The story got even more widespread when an image on the inside cover shows Paul McCartney wearing an OPP badge. Whether true or not, it was a great story and a terrific bit of Beatles trivia.
As you made your way up Elm you arrive at Maclachlan Street, where at one time you could toboggan all the way down to Pine Street before the homes on the north side of Elm were built.
On the other side was the Presbyterian church where I made my stage debut so to speak in the annual Christmas pageant as one of the wise men, and even got my picture in the newspaper in 1960.
I also remember the church had raised funds for a steeple, and when it arrived, it sat for years (maybe decades) on the rocks beside the church and was never installed. I believe it was finally sold for scrap.
Further down Elm past Whittaker and Eyre Streets and continuing to Regent Street still stands Gus's Restaurant, the first restaurant I was ever in.
The famed restaurant was founded in 1952 by Kostantinos (Gus) Lagges, a Greek immigrant and his nephews, George and Peter Moutsatsos, and Nick Lagges.
Gus's is still owned and operated by a fourth generation of Greek owners, Spyros and Fania Koutroumanos.
It's an amazing feat to still have this astonishing connection to our past (along with Gloria's in the South End, also founded in 1952), a rarity in any town or city in Canada.
To this day when I smell french fries, I am transported back in time to Gus's.
Next to Gus's was the Minit Car Wash and I remember when they expanded in the late 1960s they carved themselves into the rock underneath Pine Street, quite the undertaking, even for a mining town.
Across from the carwash on the northeast corner once stood the Elm Street Public School, where I attended kindergarten in 1960. How many of us of a certain age had Miss Rundle as our kindergarten teacher?
I remember even then the school being old, and not like the spanking new school my cousin attended, Princess Anne Public School.
Elm Street Public was built in 1913 just before the outbreak of First World War and would close in 1965, torn down to make room for a brand new Dominion Grocery Store.
Across from the school was Ho-Wah Gardens Chinese restaurant.
Sudbury seemed to have an abundance of Chinese restaurants and there was a reason for this.
Sudbury's early Chinese community was mostly men who were brought over from China in the 1860s to build the railway across Canada and were by law only allowed to operate restaurants and laundries. In Sudbury, this was in the Borgia Street area and Chinese business owners were forbidden from hiring white European women.
Between 1923 and 1949 when the law was repealed, if a Chinese man wanted to stay in Canada and later send for his family, he had to pay the infamous $500 head tax.
It was after 1949 that Chinese-run restaurants started to spring up in other parts of Sudbury, including the celebrated Radio Lunch on Cedar Street, and the racist hiring practices were finally abandoned.
On the southwest side of Regent and Elm stood the high-end furniture store Paramount Furniture and as a kid I always enjoyed looking at their impressive window displays with their over-sized sofas and chairs.
In 1956, the Four Corners of Regent and Elm became the site of a near riot of the good kind for one of the most famous men of his time showed up to speak at the Mine Mill Hall just south on Regent.
Paul Robeson born in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 9, 1898, the son of slaves. He would go on to be a great athlete, singer, actor and one of the first leaders of the American Civil Rights movement following the Second World War.
With his booming voice, he could bring people to tears and then to their feet with his rendition of Ol’ Man River from the musical “Showboat” in the 1936 movie version.
Paul Robeson wasn’t just a civil rights leader for people of colour, but also a fighter for workers’ rights around the world, so much so that eventually he was blacklisted and branded a communist for his ideals.
The U.S. revoked Robeson's passport, but when his ban was lifted in 1956, Robeson came to Sudbury in February to perform at the Mine Mill Hall.
Longtime Sudbury resident, the late great architect Oryst Sawchuk who was at that concert, recalled the concert for me a few years back.
“I recall his powerful presence on the stage cupping his ear so that he could hear himself as he sang. There were hulking miners posted around the hall in case goons were there to disrupt the concert, but he was warmly greeted. He sang Ol’ Man River with its powerful call for resistance against oppression, then he spoke describing his art as a weapon in the fight for freedom of all people and thanked the Mine Mill people for supporting him through his struggles.”
I grew up in a union family and my late father, Tom Bell, a nickel miner, belonged to Mill Mine (now Mine Mill 598/CAW).
My dad would often speak of how Robeson’s celebrated presence in Sudbury came at a time of sweeping social change.
Robeson believed in defying long held racial stereotypes and Sudbury — with its newly minted multi-cultural population following the Second World War and with its strong union ties — was leading the way in civil rights for the rest of the province.
Here concludes Part One of Bruce Bell’s recollections of Elm Street. Next time, Elm Street sees the construction of the first new downtown hotel in decades and the demolition of Sudbury's first hospital.
Since 2020, former Sudbury resident Bruce Bell has written a series of columns for Sudbury.com, sharing his memories of downtown Sudbury in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Back in February, he shared his memories of Sudbury’s most lavish movie palace, the Capitol Theatre. You can read that here. For more of his tales, type “Bruce Bell” into the search bar at Sudbury.com.
