The history of the Jewish community in St. Catharines has been impacted by the evolution of the Welland Ship Canal and its various iterations beginning with the completion of the Third Canal in 1887. Businesses boomed along the banks of the canal and because it was shorter in distance and enabled much larger ships to navigate it, the City of St. Catharines grew rapidly. There were shipbuilding and milling and tanning and brick building along the canal and St. Paul Street became the main thoroughfare of the city pretty much following the path of that canal.
In the years after 1910, the Government of Canada realized the potential of shipping inland from the Atlantic Ocean using the Welland Ship Canal to take boats right through the entire distance spanned by the Great Lakes of Ontario, Erie, Michigan, Huron, and Superior. It new it needed a more direct route around Niagara Falls and the Niagara Escarpment so it began construction of the canal in 1913. Obviously, news of the impending construction enticed more families to move here in order to take advantage of the business that was going to develop. Tailors, shoemakers, haberdashers, dressmakers, skilled tradesmen and merchants of all kinds took up residence and this is when the congregation first came into existence with minyanim held in the various homes of the new residents. Unfortunately, the First World War intervened and so newcomers were scarce for those years. Immediately after the end of the war, by 1919 construction continued, was interrupted again because of the depression and the scale of the task, and was not completed until 1932.
Throughout this whole time, the old THIRD channel continued to be used until 1935. Having construction of the scale that was involved on one channel and lots of traffic going through the older canal meant that St. Catharines was booming in so many different ways and so too was the Jewish community. Without this double whammy of the old and the new, it is doubtful the synagogue could have ever been built.
Once the canal ceased to be used for boat traffic, it became possible to build a new, permanent bridge over the Third Canal to take vehicular traffic from downtown St. Catharines to what became known as the South End. The bridge depicted in the picture above was replaced in the ’60s by what became known as THE FILL It’s construction was part of the construction of a new highway running along part of the old canal’s channel which is still used today and was called the 406.