At the corner of Clarence and Mill Streets you can see the possibilities of heritage restoration and the raw material. Two buildings that once were Parmenter & Bulloch.
Before being repurposed as office space, the wire shed as it was called clearly deserved the shed appellation. It was a wobbly looking two story building made of wood framing barely able to hold up the metal siding and roof. Its main feature was loading doors in the end wall that faces Mill Street. They would have been conveniently close to the railway line that ran down Mill Street to the waterfront station.
Across the street is the actual factory builiding of Parmenter & Bulloch that produced rivets and wire nails. In March of 1937 first two industrial deaths involving the handling of cadmium annealing happened at Parmenter & Bulloch. The industry was just realizing the risks of both the plating process and the cutting of cadmium plated steel. In 1947 the employees purchased plant and owned it for 5 years. It was then bought by American Townsend and then Textron.
The building that housed production part Parmenter and Bulloch is a good example of early poured concrete Modernist industrial architecture. are for Eastern Ontario, , that’s a mouthful, don’t want to say it twice. As it is in better shape than it looks, there are plans to repurpose this building to residential. Factories are surprisingly well suited to being done over for residential use.
Most recently the building was used for storage by 1000 Island Playhouse and a warehouse for a local metal recycling fundraising operation.
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