The small building nestled on 60 Ontario St. was recently transformed into a cafe, a gallery and a soon-to-be bar. But one of its past faces holds a special place in the heart of a former Guelph local.
Bob Borghese spent much of his young life there, where his dad Bruno operated a gas and service station known as Bruno’s Shell from the early 1940s until 1964.
“It was one of the best places in town. It was always busy," Borghese said.
When you pulled up to the station, they would come out to serve gas, clean the windshields and check the tires – and all the mechanics were done by hand.
“We didn’t have the tools they have now," he said. "Changing tires, you didn't have a tire machine, you did that with a sledgehammer and a couple of bars.”
But that's not all that's changed since Bruno's was there.
In what is now the parking lot sat two gas pumps; cars were serviced in the space the Double Rainbow Cafe is occupying, and his father’s office was where the bar, Standing Room Only, will be.
“That's all that's all we worked with. There wasn't a lot of room,” he said. “We put a lot of vehicles through here. We fixed a whole lot of cars, knew a lot of people, made a lot of friends. You cannot believe the stuff we did in that little spot.”
Between the giant Coke machine and his desk, there wasn’t much room in the office, either. In between the office and service station were two washrooms, and in the middle of the now-cafe was a giant pit where they would crawl under cars to work on them.
“You had to almost get on your belly and crawl underneath the car, because there just wasn't enough room,” he said.
The addition on the back, which currently houses Lalani Jennings Contemporary Art gallery, wasn’t there when Bruno owned it. In its place was a house.
“The oil company bought the property, and my dad bought the house,” he said. “And he had the house moved halfway up Oliver Street, where there was an empty lot. He put a foundation in, and that's where I grew up," along with his four siblings.
The house was just half a block away from Bruno’s, so Borghese was there constantly.
“I’m 12, I'm into cars, I’m building soapboxes. Anything mechanical,” he said.
Borghese worked at the shop through the 1950s as a teenager, though he was changing tires and sweeping the floor as early as 12.
“Anything to be here. I wanted to be here with my dad and my uncles,” who worked there too, he said. “Then after high school, I got right into it full-time, because that's what I knew I wanted to do.”
And that’s exactly what he did. Inspired by his father and uncles, he and his brothers moved to Kitchener to open their own shop in 1962.
As the years went by, one brother opened his own place in Elmira, while the other opened one in Cambridge. Borghese himself still has a shop in Kitchener called Busy Corner Garage, which his son now runs.
“We just can’t get away from the cars,” he laughed. “We’re all mechanics. It’s in the blood.”
To come back and see the building all these years later, the memories came flooding back.
Borghese remembers one man in his 40s coming in with a wheelbarrow full of engine parts.
“He was going to change his own engine, and he got it all apart, but he didn’t know what to do. So he put everything in a wheelbarrow and he brought the engine down to my dad.”
His dad then looked at him and went, “there you go, put it together.”
“So I got the books out, and if I got stuck, I’d ask him. But I put that engine back together for the guy. I was about 15 or 16.”
That’s how they learned back then, he said, by diving right in. But if he ever needed help, his dad and uncles were always there.
“I did a lot of body work in my day, just from watching my one uncle. He did quite a bit of it. So I'd watch what he'd do, then I’d do it.”
That was also how he scored his first car, a ‘47 Oldsmobile he fixed up himself at 16.
“It was in a big crash up at the Breslau bridge. It was accordion, which means it got squashed from front and back. But I had a brand new engine and my dad knew the car. I think he bought it for $20,” he said. “And he towed it back here and said ‘there you go. Straighten it out, it's yours.”
They also did a lot of work on fleet vehicles, like Bell telephone line trucks and the trucks for Victoria Dairy, which was down the street – they even worked on transport trucks in that small space.
“I mean, you couldn’t get them inside,” he said. “We just put them across the front. January, February, we’d be rolling around out there working. You did what you had to do.”
Two years after he and his brothers opened their own shop, his dad followed them to Kitchener, closing up shop in Guelph after business started to slow down.
“It was dying. Ontario Street was Highway 7 at one time, so there was a lot of traffic. But they changed the roads; the traffic kind of died.”
To see the place where he spent much of his life transformed into what it is now made him smile – and would have made his dad smile, too.
“A lot of these places, they’re gone. I’ve had three different service stations in Kitchener and two of them are levelled – there’s nothing there, they’re parking lots,” he said. “It's just nice to see that the building is being used.”