In 1986, thirteen hundred workers punched out of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company of Canada for the last time — and never went back.
Built in 1921 on reclaimed harbour land in Hamilton, Ontario, the Firestone plant was once the crown jewel of Canadian tire manufacturing: eight hundred thousand square feet of Albert Kahn architecture, a workforce that helped win the Second World War, and a community that had organized its entire identity around the promise of the factory floor.
What destroyed it was not simply the market. It was a corporate cover-up that stretched from Akron to Ottawa — a defective tire that Firestone knew was killing people, a government rescue package that the company accepted and then systematically defrauded, and a multinational acquisition that left Hamilton with nothing but a flooded basement and an empty lot. This is the story of Firestone Hamilton. A factory built to last a century. A betrayal that took decades to fully understand. And a city still living with the consequences.
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