MADE IN HAMILTON
19TH CENTURY
INDUSTRIAL TRAIL

SITE 7
HAMILTON SPECTATOR, 1846

This building was constructed in 1926 to house the expanding Hamilton Spectator newspaper. The modern printing plant was attached to the rear of the building. It still stands at the south-west corner of Catharine and King William Streets (see sign). The newspaper operated out of a number of downtown locations before this. Presses rolled at this plant until 1976, when operations were moved to the company's present Frid Street location.

The Spectator was founded in 1846, when local Conservatives recruited Robert Smiley to head up a new publication. Its aim was to combat the rhetoric of the local Reform newspaper, The Journal & Express. Newspaperman William Southam bought the paper in 1877. Southam used the Spectator as a base from which to grow a national publishing empire. He eventually acquired the Ottawa Citizen, the Calgary Herald, the Vancouver Province, the Edmonton Journal and the Winnipeg Tribune, among others. The newspaper is now owned by the Torstar Corporation and boasts an average daily circulation of just over 110,000 copies.

While the Hamilton Spectator is now the city's only daily newspaper, for much of its history, the Spectator competed with a number of local newspapers with names like the Herald, Times, Standard, and Gazette, among others.

Some of the Spectator’s current staff of over 500 workers are organized as a Local of the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild, now part of the Communication, Energy and Paperworkers Union as a Local of the Graphic Communication International Union.

For close to a century, type-setters at the Spectator were members of one of the city's first craft unions, the International typographical Union No. 129, organized in 1846.