General
Info:
The Great Lakes' port of
THUNDER BAY
is much closer to Winnipeg than to any other city in Ontario, and its population of 117,000 is prone to see themselves as Westerners. Economics as well as geography define this self-image, for this was until recently a booming grain-handling port, and the grain, of course, is harvested in the Prairies. The grain still arrives here by rail to be stored in gigantic grain elevators and then shipped down the St Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic, but not in the same quantities as before. In the 1990s, the economics of the grain trade changed in favour of Canada's Pacific ports and Thunder Bay suffered accordingly. Consequently, many of the grain elevators that dominate the harbourfront are literally rotting away, while others are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. This unwarranted reversal of fortunes has encouraged Thunder Bay to reinvent itself by encouraging manufacturing and tourism. To boost the latter, the city council has created a cheerful marina and built a spanking new
casino
, though this proved very controversial. Such was the opposition that the casino was, in a rather bizarre compromise, called the "Charity Casino" to remind the citizenry that the profits be spent on good works.
Thunder Bay was created in 1970 when the two existing towns of Fort William and Port Arthur were brought together under one municipal roof.
Fort William
was the older of the two, established in 1789 as a fur-trading post and subsequently becoming the upcountry headquarters of the North West Company. It lost its pre-eminent position when the North West and Hudson's Bay companies merged, but it remained a fur-trading post until the end of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, in the middle of the nineteenth century, rumours of a huge silver lode brought prospectors to the Lake Superior shoreline just north of Fort William and here they established
Port Arthur
. But the silver didn't last and the Port Arthur, Duluth and Western railway (PD&W), which had laid the lines to the mines, was soon nicknamed "the Poverty, Distress and Welfare". The Canadian Northern Railway, which took over the abandoned PD&W lines, did much to rescue the local economy, but did not bring Fort William and Port Arthur closer together. Rudyard Kipling noted that "The twin cities hate each other with the pure, passionate, poisonous hatred that makes cities grow. If Providence wiped out one of them, the other would pine away and die." Fortunately, the 1970 amalgamation bypassed Kipling's prediction and nowadays these parochial rivalries have all but vanished.
Scarred by industrial complexes and crisscrossed by rail lines, Thunder Bay is not immediately enticing, but it does have enough of interest to make a pleasant stopover on the long journey to or from Winnipeg. The most agreeable part of town is the few blocks stretching inland from behind the marina in
Thunder Bay North
- north of Central Avenue - and here you'll also find several good cafes and restaurants.
Thunder Bay South
is much grittier, but on its outskirts is the city's star turn, the replica fur-trading post of
Old Fort William
.
More Thunder Bay travel guides (each guide contains specific sub-sections):
Thunder Bay
Listings
Eating and drinking
Arrival and information
