Decades-old safe opened during renovations on former Goudies store

A locksmith works to open a safe in the Queen Street building that once house the Goudies department store on Friday, Aug. 7, 2015.

What do a fax machine, a can of Coca-Cola and a fishing magazine from 1990 have in common?

They’re just three of the things discovered Friday in a safe that had sat undisturbed for more than two decades.

The safe belonged to Arthur Goudie, the owner of Goudies department store in downtown Kitchener.

Goudies first set up shop in 1925, and remained in business until the late 1980s.

Its Queen Street storefront has gone through a number of tenants since then – including, according to new owner Frank Voisin, a manufacturer of robes for the Roman Catholic Church.

Voisin and his brother purchased the building in June.

“We fell in love with the high ceilings (and) the brick-and-beam style,” he said.

Since the deal closed, plans have been drawn up and put into motion to renovate the building.

Vidyard, the Kitchener-based video marketing firm, plans to move a few blocks from its current home to take over the bulk of the space next January.

“Everything just keeps moving further and further into downtown Kitchener. It’s really great to be a part of that,” Vidyard CEO Michael Litt said in an interview.

The company currently employs about 85 people, and hopes to expand its workforce to 115 in the next few months.

By moving to the former department store, Litt said, they’ll have enough room to accommodate as many as 350 employees in the future.

Voisin is in negotiations with a brewpub restaurant to occupy the rest of the building.

The renovations plotted out for the building included a new entrance off of Goudies Lane.

There was only one small hiccup: Where Voisin wanted the door to go stands a walk-in safe.

The safe belonged to Goudie, but its code was never passed along after the department store moved out.

Friday, a locksmith was called in to open it up.

While there weren’t any gold bars or massive stashes of cash inside, there were a number of items suggesting the safe was used fairly regularly until the early 1990s, including a fax machine and pager, newspaper clippings and a local real estate directory dated 1992.