History in flames, as former Hotpoint clubhouse burns in Ontario

Aug. 22--I stood surveying the wreckage of a forgotten building. A fire last week in an obscure corner of downtown Ontario claimed the Hotpoint clubhouse.

In one sense it was simply a fire to a long-abandoned structure, with no loss of life. The 1:30 a.m. blaze took place Aug. 14. The cause is under investigation.

But the demise of the clubhouse, which had stood more than a century, was a sad bookend to an important chapter of city history. It needed to be marked.

So on Wednesday I drove past the Museum of History and Art to the dead-end of Lemon Avenue, parked and walked a few paces to the Amtrak platform.

What's left of the clubhouse is visible across the railroad tracks.

The roof has collapsed into the interior. Rafters can be seen against open sky. Exterior walls are charred. Empty window frames increase the desolation.

"They've declared it a total loss," Debra Dorst-Porada, a councilwoman with a keen interest in city history, told me later.

You can be forgiven for never having taken notice of the Hotpoint clubhouse. You can't see it from Euclid Avenue, and even if you did see the boarded-up building from the city's museum complexes, you wouldn't know what it was or why it was ever important.

Built in 1917, the Clubhouse was a social hall for the Hotpoint Co., whose factory stood to the south.

Wisconsin transplant Earl H. Richardson had invented the Hotpoint electric iron, innovative because it heated all the way to the tip, in 1903 in Ontario.

By 1914, the factory employed 500, or one in every four working Ontario residents. I don't know if that made Ontario a company town, but close. General Electric bought out Hotpoint in 1918.

The bungalow-style clubhouse had been built in 1917. The clubhouse had a company store -- was there Hotpoint scrip? -- as well as club rooms for men and women and a cafeteria. Classes were taught in the kitchen to promote Hotpoint appliances and better get them into every home.

With hardwood floors, a cobblestone fireplace, a long porch and a kitchen, the clubhouse was in part a social hall.

"It's where the General Electric employees had their weddings, their baby and bridal showers, their dinners," Dorst-Porada said. "It's where the employees had their family events and their fun times."

Said Petrina Delman, president of Ontario Heritage: "It was used for all kinds of social activities. They probably had Halloween parties, Christmas parties, different events throughout the year."

The factory pumped out 1 million irons in 1949, or more than 2,700 per day. That figure rose to 5 million in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan, a GE spokesman, visited in 1956 to receive its 50 millionth iron.

At its peak, the factory employed 1,500. Its whistle, heard far and near, helped set the schedule for merchants and housewives alike.

General Electric pulled the plant's plug in 1982, throwing a thousand people out of work. Over its three-quarters of a century, the factory had churned out 150 million irons.

The clubhouse was next used as a job placement center and later as a Moose Lodge. But it's been empty for at least a couple of decades. The Hotpoint factory building has multiple tenants, with nothing even close to the magnitude of the old days. I guess they don't need a social hall.

The entire property is hard to get to since Euclid was sunken under the railroad tracks, cutting off access from the west.

I first learned of the clubhouse on a tour in the mid-'00s by Ontario Heritage of endangered buildings downtown. We saw only the outside, and from the same place where I was standing Wednesday, the Amtrak platform.

I didn't see much hope for the clubhouse, or much point to its continued semi-existence, given its all but inaccessible location.

Various ideas for the clubhouse were floated. A preservationist considered buying it. A former councilman suggested moving it across the tracks. Costs to rehabilitate the decaying structure, though, were deemed too high.

The property owner, who also owns the old factory, "barely kept (the clubhouse) boarded up to keep transients out," Dorst-Porada said.

"It's been vacant for years. There's been a lot of code violations," Delman said. "They had problems with break-ins. Syringes were found. Small fires were started by homeless to warm themselves."

A history of the clubhouse in a 2016 Ontario Heritage newsletter ends: "The building has now deteriorated to the point where demolition is the only option unless private investment restores it."

At the Chaffey Community Museum of Art, also in view of the clubhouse, president Nancy DeDiemar told me: "It's really a shame. There was hope for a while the building could be rehabilitated and there could be adaptive reuse. But that's gone now."

Plywood had been used to patch the roof after a previous fire, museum coordinator Jenelle Lowry said. I remember the effect resembling a patchwork quilt.

A fence was put up around the property in April. That foiled my history columnist colleague Joe Blackstock, who'd been hoping to take his metal detector around the grounds to hunt for the reputed burial of one of the last Hotpoint irons by disgruntled ex-employees.

After leaving the museum, I drove east to Plum Avenue, took a right over the tracks and then an immediate right on a narrow industrial strip, the comically named Main Street.

The former Hotpoint plant was to my left. To my right was the clubhouse, fenced off but just feet away.

The poor condition of the grounds was evident. Thistle was chest-high both west and east of the clubhouse on the long piece of property, some of it with cracked pavement, some of it dirt, all of it overrun.

That this unloved building would be surrounded by tumbleweeds in the making seemed all too appropriate.

The clubhouse itself didn't look any better from this angle, obviously. Its empty eye-socket windows gave a view of the mess inside. The exterior was charred all all the way around.

Like a Hotpoint iron, the clubhouse had gotten hot all the way to the end.

David Allen writes Friday, Sunday and Wednesday, which isn't so hot. Email [email protected], phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.

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