St. Catharines unveils new patchwork logo ahead of 150th anniversary

The City of St. Catharines is turning 150 this year and the city is kicking off a year of celebrations with a flag raising on Monday.

Mayor Mat Siscoe and city officials are inviting residents to a small, informal event to launch the milestone.

Mayor Siscoe announced the theme for the anniversary: common ground. He says the logo was designed to resemble the quilt-like origins of the community.

“It demonstrates the quilt aspect to building any sort of community. The way St. Catharines was built with all the different groups. We have a large Italian diaspora, a large Polish diaspora, the indigenous people who formed the way St. Paul Street looks today through original trail systems, the freedom seekers and underground railroad and Black community that is here because of the emancipation work done in the mid- 1800s. All of those pieces or patches fit together into a quilt that created this community,” says Mayor Siscoe.

On Monday, City Hall held a flag-raising ceremony at 11 a.m. where the city’s 150th anniversary logo was be unveiled.

The flag is being raised to commence a year of community events honouring the incorporation of St. Catharines in May 1876.

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Mayor Siscoe says the city will be holding a birthday party celebration on May 2 with birthday cake. May 1 is the city’s official birthday.

“The 150-years-ago-city was a small part of the city. Basically the downtown core. So, Merritton, Port Dalhousie, parts of Grantham Township, were not part of St. Catharines when it first became a city. That didn’t happen until amalgamation in the 1960s. I think people would be amazed at how much we’ve grown in just 150 years,” says Kathleen Powell, Supervisor of Historical Services. 

Powell was also at the flag raising to share some history of the city.

She says we can thank early surveyors for the parallelogram shaped street-blocks in St. Catharines.

“I think a lot of people driving around our city think ‘what the heck, what happened here, why do our streets meet at weird angles?’ and it’s because when they did the very first survey of this part of the Niagara Region, they surveyed based on the first section of the edge of the shoreline of Lake Ontario, which doesn’t run square.”

For more information about upcoming celebrations visit the city’s website. 

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