Custom Cardboard Boxes Company Thrives in Bad Part of Toronto

Picked up my client's custom printed suit boxes yesterday
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These custom cardboard boxes made at Colt Paper 151 Sterling St in Toronto. These nifty boxes are two and a half feet wide, and three feet tall with a remarkably sturdy galvanized stainless steel bar folded together across the top of the box. They're like wardrobe boxes, but shorter and custom printed with my client's business details. His specially designed mini 'wardrobe rack' box is custom printed with his business logo on it and each box contains a special gift which has to be held in place at the top - so this was tricky order and Colt Paper did a beautiful job getting all the details right. Client is happy, and yesterday we got a huge order, and other packing supplies including custom printed tapes and about a hundred regular stock boxes too.
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While they were doing paperwork, i took the time to explore the building ..
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In the shadow of the derelict Nestle chocolate factory on the west side of Sterling St, which is still listed among the tallest industrial buildings in Canada, there are several odd duck businesses including a model car maker *The Fulstrom car company or whatever they're called makes kit cars, and there's an associated kit car auto parts supply store, and they're a supplier of electrical generators and batteries for kit cars etc . Thats going to be a huge business soon - electrical cars, custom made 'kit cars' that have zero emissions and can only be driven inside the city limits. But I'M digressing and I didn't even get a picture so..

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The area is slowly becoming gentrified ,as always happens when artists move in.. But of course their most beautiful works of art are sure to be bulldozed when the place goes condo.
While I was poking about, around getting shots, the worker in the back opened a loading bay door and I glimpsed this beautiful graffiti on the cinder black wall outside...

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There's a 2011 story in the Toronto Star about the origins of the Tomorrow Gallery at 163 Sterling Rd. The article reports that in Oct 2010, Scott-Douglas the proprietor of Tomorrow Gallery rented his unit from the property owner for approx $900 a month (the gallery is almost 2,000 square feet)! That was four years ago though...

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I looked for another way out or up or across to other more interesting parts of the bldg. The east end of the structure is maze-like and I don't have a lot of pictures because there wasn't much to see there truthfully except bags of foam packing stuff, rolls of tissue paper, rolls of vinyl , rolls of cellophane pallet wrap etc stacks of plywood in several different sizes and thicknesses for making custom crates...
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There were cardboard flats everywhere - there must have been six thousand boxes back there . even the interiors of parked tractor trailers were filled with boxes (and Styrofoam peanuts) the wrecks of trailers have been permanently parking in an unused loading bay area and filled with stock..
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Here are stacks of wooden pallets and sheets of Masonite and giant bags filled with Syrofoam particles for packing, or what Colt Paper calls Pelspan Peanuts and sells for about $60 that whole huge bag - 20 cubic feet of foam peanuts in a bag.

Then I found a door and went looking around the hallways. I wanted to see if I could glimpse some of the more artistic tenants at work making sculptures or paintings or shooting pictures or videos, but had no luck.
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I really am a nosy Nellie...

The original worker guy who let me in told me that Colt paper has been here for almost sixty years. They own the bldg which will likely be converted to condos in a few years because the bad parts of town today are the best parts of town tomorrow.