Charlie Ingwer the Flophouse King

This week I am looking into Toronto's inner east end, and its history as an area of low-income housing.  I plan to look at the unfolding of renovation gentrification.  This seems to start in the mid 1960s.  Gentrification (if that is the right word) through new-build apartments seems to start in the 1950s.  There is a roughly 10-year gap between the two.

The inner east end is a part of town where I suspect air pollution inhibited gentrification.  Smoke remained severe into the mid-1950s.  This is the real objective of the research at the moment. To connect smoke to gentrification.

I will need to research the development of poor housing conditions in the inner east end.  I have uncovered an interesting series of stories about the slums and flophouses of this part of town.  New-build developers played quite a role in degrading the housing in the district from the 1950s onwards, as they built their land assemblies.  Low-income residents were squeezed out of many of the properties acquired, and prices rose in the remaining ones.  Various operators moved in to operate bottom-of-the-market rooming houses as tenants of the high-rise developers.  Many of these places were firetraps, and there were numerous fatal fires.  Developers were accused of blockbusting, and certainly had cosy relationships with key rooming-house operators.  It may not have been actual blockbusting.

There were also other operators building strings of rooming houses and flop houses.  One such was Charlie Ingwer, who started to build his flophouse empire in the 1940s.  By the early 1950s he had more than 80 properties under his control.  The money to fund the empire came from his contacts in South America.  He was a reclusive man, never married.  Speed typist, gold miner.  Born in 1909 in Vienna.  Seems to have been a Jewish man, from a family with ancestral connections to Spain [Shephardic?].  Lived in the Alexandra Hotel, Niagara Falls ON in 1935.  Worked for an oil company in Ecuador in 1940-41.  Started buying properties in Toronto in 1943.  Took on Steve Feron as a manager in 1949-50.  Feron a former debt-collector, difficult to trace in City Directories.  Holdings were restructured, with Inglewood Construction Co Ltd [never built anything] becoming the holding company for the flophouses.  Feron an employee.  Directors Julius Einbinder of Ecuador, Thelma Lind of Mexico, Linus Coghlan of Toronto, and Charles Ingwer.  In 1953, or so, it was restructured again with ownership of flophouses being transferred to Johanna Nemath, a practical nurse who lived and worked in New York City.  Ingwer's cousin, supposedly.  Nemath then gave power of attorney to Manchester Realty Co, operated by Feron.  Under Feron the flophouses began to shift emphasis towards prostitution, with the complex ownership screening the system from civic and police investigation.  Feron and Ingwer moved into a 3-storey Rosedale home, which had hardly any furniture, except a grand piano, which Ingwer played.  Both men had expensive cars.  Ingwer also acquired a 250-acre dairy farm near Port Perry.

In October 1955 Charlie Ingwer and his brother William, Steve Feron and Linus Coghlan were arrested by police in a series of dawn raids.  Charlie and Steve were tried before Magistrate Elmore in the longest-running magistrate's court trial in Toronto's history.  Feron and Ingwer were convicted for operating bawdy houses.  The city's print media treated the flophouse empire as somehow connected with international organized crime.

Subsequent years showed that Charlie Ingwer was probably just a strange character.  Reclusive, and somehow trying to make his living out of running flophouses.  He remained in the business until the early 1980s.  He found himself dragged into court several times over the condition of his flophouses, but was never again accused of harbouring prostitution.  I suspect that it was Steve Feron who had the crime connections.  Ingwer was simply a flophouse operator.

Charlie Ingwer is a little obscure and difficult to trace.  He continued to operate the farm in Port Perry.  He was still listing it as his residence in 1963.  In 1960 there was a fatal accident on the farm when a tractor rolled over during haymaking and a 23-year-old farm worker was killed.  Ingwer continued to operate his diminishing flophouse empire which, by the later 1970s was making an important contribution to housing otherwise homeless men in the city's east end.  Redevelopment and gentrification was squeezing them out of the housing market, and Charlie was managing to make some money by giving them some place to stay.  In 1979 there was serious consideration of asking Charlie Ingwer to operate a city-owned flophouse.  This was the facility later known as Seaton House.  Aldermen Dan Heap, John Sewell and Anne Johnstone all supported the scheme, but Alderman Allan Sparrow opposed.  Charlie was in his 70s by then, and his complex reputation made it awkward.  The job went to someone else.