The College of Optometry of Ontario was founded in 1925. Not part of any university, although it was located on Toronto’s College Street on the fringe of the University of Toronto, it was in effect a trade school for members of a new and not well understood profession: “eye doctors” who would be not physicians but scientists, experts in how the human eye actually works and how its optics might be improved with lenses.
In 1967, the College of Optometry became a part of the University of Waterloo, its faculty and apparatus moving from Toronto to Waterloo, where it was established as the “School of Optometry” within the Faculty of Science. (A change of name to “School of Optometry and Vision Science” was in process in 2011-2012.) The books in the college’s library were integrated into Waterloo’s engineering, math and science library, and some can still be found in the Davis Centre library. Alumni of the College of Optometry — dating back to 1927, with a particularly large graduating class in 1950 — were added retroactively to the roster of Waterloo alumni.
Optometry set up at Conestoga, President of Conestoga and Waterloo, 1971. University of Waterloo Library Special Collections & Archives.
Until an Optometry building could be designed and built, the new optometry school was mostly housed off campus, in the former post office building at 35 King Street North, Waterloo. This brick and stone structure, sometimes known as “Westminster Towers”, had been built in 1909, and became surplus when the federal government built a new post office complex at the corner of King Street and Bridgeport Road in 1967, Canada’s centennial year. The University established the optometry clinic there; other optometry facilities were squeezed in here and there, including an optics laboratory in the just completed Biology 2 building.
Early on a Sunday morning in February 1969, passers-by on King Street smelled smoke from the old post office. Within half an hour the firefighters were joined at the scene by students, faculty, staff, and others, many of whom made their way into the building and emerged, coughing, with armloads of salvaged books and equipment. Al Adlington, the University's vice-president (operations), showed up on the heels of the central stores and security crew who were doing what they could to protect University property. He took one look around (so it was said afterwards), spotted an empty building across the street, and got on the phone to the president of Waterloo Mutual Insurance, the company that owned it. By mid-morning, the clinic apparatus was being reassembled there. On the Monday, optometry students and faculty were doing eye examinations according to their appointment schedule, almost as if nothing had happened.
Optometry building from the South in May, 1974. University of Waterloo Library Special Collections & Archives.
Westminster Towers has subsequently housed a software company (Mortice-Kern Systems, which won an architectural award for remodeling the building), a restaurant, and offices for the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. The present Optometry building north of Columbia Street was opened in 1973 and has been expanded several times as the optometry school has grown, both in enrolment and in its research scope.