“The Disappearing City” refers to types of buildings that I like to photograph that are rapidly disappearing from the centres of our major cities: factories, store fronts, commercial and institutional buildings built in the late 19th or early to mid-20 century, indicative of the mixture and concentration of functions that gave cities their distinctive feel in the mid-twentieth century. The disappearance of these industrial sites from our inner cities, the predominance of shopping centres and strip malls, and the stricter segregation of residential and commercial districts, have made our cities feel more and more like intensely concentrated suburbs.

Thirteen of the buildings photographed for this show have literally disappeared. They include in Toronto the old McMurtry Furniture factory on Dupont, Arc Industries on Eastern Avenue, an attractive barbershop on College Street that’s now a Starbucks. All of them were beautiful in their own way and some deserved to be preserved. Some buildings photographed, like the striking Symes Avenue generating station, are falling down from neglect; others, like the RC Harris filtration plant, are now off-limits to the public.

In Toronto, some attempts are being made to preserve industrial heritage sites, such as the Gooderham-Worts distillery and now the former brick works on the Bayview extension. But the real character of these buildings is being destroyed in order to make them commercially viable again. At least some sections of these buildings should be preserved in something close to their original state, as museums, so that city dwellers can remember when urban centres were not just aggregates of white-collar and commercial enterprises and comfortable residential neighbourhoods, but also places where the majority of people worked in difficult and often dangerous circumstances in order to achieve the middle-class comfort and prosperity most of us take for granted today.