For a city that prides itself on its waterfront, there are surprisingly few picture postcards of what is now some of the most prized real estate in Kingston.

The author of a new book on vintage postcards says there’s a historically obvious reason why that is: For most of the city’s history, what is today the city’s centrepiece was a filthy, industrial mess that was better off ignored.

“The harbour itself was not a picturesque place,” said Lorenzo Marcolin, a retired surgeon who grew up in Port McNicoll.

Dundurn Press has just published a selection of Canadian harbour views in a book,A Great Lakes Treasury of Old Postcards.

Nearly all of the waterfronts in the 306 postcard views in the book have been reclaimed and gentrified and people today are not only unaware of their working past, but could find that past unimaginable given how they look today.

Marcolin now lives in Baltimore, but has been collecting postcards for nearly 40 years. All postcard collectors specialize and his niche is the Great Lakes, which he can honestly say is pretty much his alone.

“I have never met anyone else who specializes in the Great Lakes,” he said.

“I go to a lot of postcard shows and everyone has their speciality, whether it is Santa Claus or ladies in flowered dresses or the French erotics, which are always very popular, but I was pretty much the only one looking specifically for Great Lakes postcards.’

Postcards are known as “ephemera” in the collecting trade as they are cheap and disposable in their time and often vanish forever. Libraries did not stock them for later examination by scholars and their runs were never microfilmed as were newspapers. Most were lost to history unless preserved by happy accident.

They do present an unvarnished picture of what cities used to be like, however, and Marcolin chose to focus on the years between 1894 and 1960 — roughly the age when ships were the main methods of transportation around the Great Lakes.

He says it is difficult to reconcile the images of the historic harbours with those of today. Kingston was just one of many cities that was built looking away from the water because the docks were rough, industrial areas serviced by smoking trains and rusty merchant ships.

The historic views from Fort Henry Hill towards Royal Military College or Wolfe Island towards the mainland shown in the book were preferred as they were bucolic vistas as opposed to the waterfront of the city proper, which was a mess of skiffs, trains, cargo carriers and coal piles to feed both the steamers and the locomotives.

It was the same in nearly every industrial port along the Great Lakes, from Thunder Bay to Cornwall. In many cases, just as today’s suburban sprawl is geographically indistinguishable, if it had not been for a label saying where the photo had been taken or some waterfront landmark that still stands, the photo could literally have been taken anywhere.

“A lot of these places look like one another,” acknowledged Marcolin, saying they all did the same job, which was to unload and offload raw materials for industry rather than serve as locations for prized housing or waterfront recreation.

Areas that are playgrounds today were playgrounds 100 years ago, such as the Thousand Islands, where day liners and small sailboats travelled the same routes as they do today.

“The Thousand Islands has always been where people went to vacation and there are always more postcards of places like that,” said Marcolin, noting few travellers would look for views of the smoking slag heaps near the locomotive works on Block D to send to folks back home.

While the book itself is of postcards, postcard collectors will be among the least interested in it because of the incredible specialization of the hobby.

“I advertised it in one postcard collector publication and didn’t get one response,” he said with a laugh.

“Everyone has got their own speciality and I’m hoping this book will be more of interest to people with an interest in the history of the Great Lakes than the people who collect postcards.”