Anaconda Brass

Anaconda Brass started as J.F. Brown’s Copper & Brass Rolling Mills, in 1919, located on Birmingham Street near the corner of Eighth Street, picture below:

Anaconda acquired the mills soon after in 1922. A documentary film, entitled “Copper Goes to War” describes the Anaconda American Brass Company’s contribution to the war effort during the Second World War. It is available at the Toronto Public Library: Search Results - Copper Goes to War. The company was known to have great business ethics, contributing much to the community such as assisting in paving streets, helping to provide new fire trucks and sewers, building a public ice arena and swimming pool, among others. By 1967, the company had 1400 employees and occupied 32 acres of land. In its last few years of operations, it was Arrowhead Metals. The plant closed its doors for good in 1989, and is today a controversial “brownfield” site: http://www.aboutremediation.com/article.asp?id=1688

I am told that the brass doors inside the LAMP Building on Fifth Street were manufactured by Anaconda Brass.

There is a very interesting painting by Wyndham Lewis in 1942 that is currently part of the collection of the Tate Gallery in London, England. Please visit their website at http://www.tate.org.uk/ to view the painting. As noted in the Guardian Book website, it took fours years for the “War Artists' Advisory Committee to extract from Lewis the picture it had commissioned, on 10 June 1942, of the Anaconda American Brass Foundry near Toronto. No sooner had the Committee's long-suffering representative at last got the damn thing out of Lewis's Notting Hill studio and into a taxi than he asked for it back”.

The following postal cancel was sent to me by an interested philatelist.