It all started with an old garage in a laneway in Schumacher in the summer of 2015.
There was something beautiful that Timmins photographer Carlo De Lorenzi saw in the garage built by Edwin Lucyk in 1938 that had clearly seen better days.
The house on Croatia Street and the garage in the laneway is now owned by Carter Lucyk, Edwin’s son.
“That garage was more than a structure,” De Lorenzi told a gathering in the Timmins Museum Black Room which contained an exhibit of his photographs combined with material, some would say junk, others antiques, that had been salvaged from some of those garages.
“It’s a story about his father storing his vehicle there and the tools to keep his vehicle running,” De Lorenzi said. “Every time Carter walks by the garage it reminds him of his father.”
Over the next few months De Lorenzi found six other garages that also had stories attached to them.
Part of what drove De Lorenzi to complete his photo essay was his desire to capture this part of Timmins that will over time eventually be lost.
“The garages are all old and will be torn down,” he explained. “I hope my photo essay will be the story of these structures for days to come.”
“Without fanfare, in the largely forgotten backdrops of our city, these garages have unpretentiously survived for over 75 years,” De Lorenzi wrote on his web site posting accompanying his photo essay.
For De Lorenzi, his great reward was discovering the stories of the men who built the garages as told by their children.
“Isaac Mieto was a mechanic at the Paymaster Mine who built a house for his family on Crawford Street in South Porcupine in 1931,” De Lorenzi told the audience.
“During the depression owning a home was a fantasy only few would realize. While other parts of Canada were suffering in the depression, Isaac was riding the wave of Timmins second gold rush.”
But owning a home for Isaac was only half of the dream. The other half was to build his own garage.
“Isaac was a mechanic who liked fixing things - he like fixing cars, big motors, small motors,” recounted De Lorenzi. “He liked fixing anything with moving parts that didn’t have a heartbeat.”
Mieto needed space to store his tools and to fix his cars and motors.
Within a year of building his house he ordered a pile of Douglas fir lumber from BC and built himself a sanctuary at the back of his house
De Lorenzi next told the story Stanley Fermanick’s garage on Montgomery Avenue off of Mount Joy Street South. His son Walter still lives in the house.
“In the 1940s Fermanick, who was a miner at the McIntyre, decided to build a second home along the back alley for his family which now had six children,” explained De Lorenzi
Fermanick went to Feldman Lumber and ordered enough wood to build his second home.
Bylaw officers stopped Fermanick from completing the house because it violated a zoning by-law restricting each lot to one house. From that point on Fermanick was no longer building a second home, but a garage.
Fermanick didn’t have a car and he used the garage for storage of firewood and at times horse manure that he collected off the city streets for use on his garden.
The garage that Edwin Lucyk build in Schumacher was the first garage that inspired De Lorenzi to pursue his garage photo essay.
De Lorenzi said Lucyk was a self made entrepreneur, a mechanic who lived on what today is Croatia Avenue. It was the first double door garage in Timmins.
“He owned a service station on Algonquin Avenue, he also owned the first snowmobile and motorcycle dealership in Timmins,” De Lorenzi said.
The garage still stands today with the same wooden floor that Edwin put in.
While De Lorenzi was preparing for his exhibit he came across a garage on Drury Lane that was going to be demolished. He didn’t photograph the garage but he was able to save the two doors from the garage and they were included in the exhibit along with material that had be salvaged from other area garages.
The exhibit Garage Barrage by Carlo De Lorenzi runs at the Timmins Museum until April 3.
You can see more of Carlo De Lorenzi’s photo essay here.
