by Craig Colby
The Fire
“The Hoito is on fire”.
My friend Relita Hagberg said this as I dropped off Christmas presents at her house in Thunder Bay. It’s a shocking statement. The Hoito, a restaurant on Bay Street in city’s north side, is an institution. My wife and I both grew up in Thunder Bay. We have Hoito t-shirts and a water colour print of the building hanging in our Toronto home. I decided to drive by to see how bad it was.
The situation wasn’t bad. It was tragic. Flames leapt through the collapsed roof of the large brick building as I pulled into the Italian Hall parking lot next door. I got out of the car and walked surprisingly close, within 100 yards. Water streamed onto the fire from a hose attached to a long ladder. Plumes of smoke and steam ascended high into the pitch-black sky. What I could see was bad, but the worst was still obscured. More flames peeked through the thick black and grey billows. There was no way this beloved landmark could survive the damage from fire and water. Several hundred people watched on a night that would live forever in Thunder Bay history. We were witnessing the end of an era.
Saying “the Hoito is burning’ was only partly accurate. The building itself was the Finnish Labour Temple, which opened in 1910 as a place to better the lives of the large Finnish community who had been settling on the north shore of Lake Superior since the 1870’s. The large structure with a three-story tower in the front was named a National Historic Site in 2015. It housed a Local, a Temperance Society, library and a newspaper. As important as those services were, it was the basement restaurant that opened in 1918, the Hoito, that resonated with the wider community. It was established so that Finnish workers coming in from jobs in the forest would have a place to get a good meal at a good price. The menu was varied, but the star was Finnish pancakes, thinner and chewier than their buttermilk counterpart, but no less delicious. The décor was straight-down-the-middle diner, with a coffee bar and standard tables, an understated setting for a comforting meal. The Hoito was a place to relax and be yourself.
I moved permanently from Thunder Bay after I graduated from university in 1988. Working at Canada Malting, a malthouse and grain elevator on the harbour, paid me enough to put me through school. As every former resident will tell you though, you may leave Thunder Bay, but it never really leaves you. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Hoito to people who haven’t lived here, but I’m going to try. You have to understand the make-up of the city before you can appreciate the Hoito’s place in it.
The Reputation
Right now, Thunder Bay has a bad reputation across the country. Recent headlines have given Thunder Bay a national identity as the murder capital of Canada. It’s also known as a racist city because of some horrifying headlines - the deaths of seven First Nations youths and of a woman who died after being hit by a trailer hitch thrown at her by a man in a passing car. My friends who have remained at the Lakehead bristle at these labels, but I’ve seen the racism here first-hand. In the last year, three people I’ve met, two Indigenous and one black, have immediately responded to the mention of Thunder Bay with “that city is so racist” then recounted personal experiences to bear that out. So yeah, it’s a problem here. But it’s not a problem exclusive to here. It’s also an incomplete picture of my hometown.
The Treasures
If you ask the people of Thunder Bay to list the things that identify the city, I’d wager the following would be the top three. The first is the Sleeping Giant. Technically, it’s a peninsula on the traditional territory of the Fort William First Nations. Visually, it’s a man lying on his back, always present across the harbour. Culturally, he is Nanabijou, the Spirit of the Deep Sea Water, who, in one version of the legend, turned to stone to protect the Ojibway’s silver mine from exploitation by the white man. The legend speaks to the complicated history of relationships here, but it is embraced by all of Thunder Bay’s residents.
The second would be the persian, a cinnamon bun with pink icing only found here. It was created by Art Bennet of Bennet’s Bakery in the 1940s and named after General John “Black Jack” Pershing, a World War I general who happened to visit Art while he was making the dough. So beloved is this mouth-watering treasure, that Nucci’s, the successor to Bennet’s Bakery, sells buns by the dozen separately from the frosting to Thunder Bay expats taking them home on airplanes, along with the advice that you have to pack the frosting in your checked bag to avoid it being confiscated as a liquid. At the airport, in the shop past the security gate, tubs of the frosting are sold to passengers who did not heed this advice.
The third, of course, is the Hoito. More than just a restaurant, this cultural institution speaks to the best of this hardy community, lodged on the rocky shores of unforgiving Lake Superior. It was created to help people, to provide a good meal at a reasonable price. Its menu embraces the restaurants Finnish roots. Cultural diversity is a common theme in Thunder Bay, where people gather for drinks at the Italian Hall, line up for perogies and cabbage rolls at the Polish legion, and regale visitors with the legend of Nanabijou. Every background contributes to the whole. You didn’t have to be Finnish to belong at the basement restaurant in the Finnish Labour Temple Building. Everyone, from every background, would come to the Hoito, our complicated history crowding at simple tables, together. There was always a long line to get in.
That’s why the pictures and videos of the fire on social media have been met with comments like “heartbreaking” and “it’s a tragedy,” My media friends, who either featured the Hoito in television programs (I’ve sent two productions there myself) or just stopped for a meal, reacted with shock. In their brief visits they felt the power of the Hoito. For my Thunder Bay expat friends, who regularly posted pictures of persians or Nanabijou or the Hoito on social media as a sign that they had come home, the fiery images were a stab in the heart. “This is devastating” was the common theme.
The Resolve
But this story is not over. The Hoito is about to show another aspect of Thunder Bay, perhaps unfamiliar nationally but well know locally. This town is tough. People here don’t endure the frigid winters. They turn them into playgrounds filled with outdoor hockey rinks, ski hills, snowmobiles and ice fishing huts. This city does what it takes to solve a problem. Thunder Bay survived downturns in the main industries of forestry and the grain elevators by embracing biotechnology and life sciences. The city is tackling the racism problems too. The local public library board established an Indigenous advisory council, opened facilities to smudging ceremonies, and shares space with the Anishinabek Employment and Training Services. Thunder Bay has also produced the most NHL players per capita. That level of toughness speaks for itself. The Hoito is about to become another example of Thunder Bay’s fortitude.
After being shut down because of a financial crisis caused by the pandemic in 2020, a former resident, Brad McKinnon, bought the place and was renovating the building, preparing to reopen. The fire has altered the plan, but not changed the goal. McKinnon says they’ll tear down the charred remains and rebuild.
No, the Hoito won’t be the same, but neither is Thunder Bay. It’s emerged from its own fires, working through the pain, building towards something better. While they wait, Thunder Bay residents will have to find comfort with a delicious persian, the reassuring presence of Nanabijou, and the knowledge that the Hotio’s simple pleasures will return to this complicated, but resilient, town.
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Craig Colby is a television executive producer, producer, director, writer and story editor. He runs a storytelling consulting and production service for businesses.