The Seagram Museum was a museum in Waterloo,

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, preserving the heritage of the once venerable Canadian distillery

Seagram The Seagram Company Ltd. (which traded as Seagram's) was a Canadian multinational conglomerate formerly headquartered in Montreal, Quebec. Originally a distiller of Canadian whisky based in Waterloo, Ontario, it was once (in the 1990s) the lar ...

. Located at 57 Erb Street West, the museum operated from May 1984 to March 1997. Designed by architect

Barton Myers Barton Myers (born November 6, 1934) is an American architect and president of Barton Myers Associates Inc. in Santa Barbara, California. With a career spanning more than 40 years, Myers is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and w ...

, it was built at a cost of $4.75 million and its entrance was a renovated late-19th century rack warehouse from the Seagram plant. It had a variety of exhibits illustrating everyday life in the liquor distillery in the late 19th and early 20th century. The company closed its Waterloo plant in 1992, and the museum continued to operate for another five years. It narrowly escaped a fire in 1993 that destroyed the building next to it. The City of Waterloo purchased the Seagram property for $4 million in the fall of 1997. The museum donated its archives to the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality ...

. Two former barrelhouses on the site were converted into condominia while the museum became an office building, leased to software company

Waterloo Maple Waterloo Maple Inc. is a Canadian software company, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario. It operates under the trade name Maplesoft. It is best known as the manufacturer of the Maple computer algebra system, and MapleSim physical modeling and ...

. The company moved into the renovated building in June 1998. In July 2002, the city sold the building to the

Centre for International Governance Innovation The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI, pronounced "see-jee") is an independent, non-partisan think tank on global governance. CIGI supports research, forms networks, advances policy debate and generates ideas for multilateral ...

(CIGI) for $2.5 million. In September 2003, Waterloo Maple left the building and CIGI moved in. In 2010 it also housed

Project Ploughshares Project Ploughshares is a Canadian non-government organization which works to advance policies and actions to prevent war and armed violence and build peace located in the Centre for Peace Advancement at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterlo ...

. E-commerce company

Shopify Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. The Shopify platform offers online ret ...

moved into the building in 2016. Some of the museum's collection was transferred to the City of Waterloo and is on display at the City of Waterloo Museum, which opened in 2009.

Affiliations

The Museum was affiliated with: CMA,

CHIN The chin is the forward pointed part of the anterior mandible (List_of_human_anatomical_regions#Regions, mental region) below the lower lip. A fully developed human skull has a chin of between 0.7 cm and 1.1 cm. Evolution The presence of a we ...

, and

Virtual Museum of Canada The Digital Museums Canada (DMC; , ''MNC'') is a funding program in Canada "dedicated to online projects by the museum and heritage community," helping organizations to build digital capacity. Administered by the Canadian Museum of History (CMH) ...

References

External links

Centre for International Governance Innovation

Canada's Technology Triangle

Project Ploughshares

Seagram Museum collection
at

Hagley Museum and Library The Hagley Museum and Library is a nonprofit educational institution in unincorporated New Castle County, Delaware, near Wilmington. Covering more than along the banks of the Brandywine Creek, the museum and grounds include the first du Pont ...

Seagram Museum Archives collection (R8574)
at

Library and Archives Canada Library and Archives Canada (LAC; french: Bibliothèque et Archives Canada) is the federal institution, tasked with acquiring, preserving, and providing accessibility to the documentary heritage of Canada. The national archive and library is th ...

. The collection consists of films originally held by the Segram Museum Archives. {{Waterloo, Ontario Museums established in 1984 Organizations disestablished in 1997 Postmodern architecture in Canada Museums in Waterloo, Ontario Defunct museums in Canada Industry museums in Canada Barton Myers buildings 1984 establishments in Ontario 1997 disestablishments in Ontario Seagram