May 2026
Like many provincial highways across Ontario, Highway 11 was once dotted with roadside motels that catered to weary travellers. The highway originally stretched from Lake Ontario in Toronto to the Minnesota-Ontario border at Rainy River in northern Ontario, but the section south of Barrie has been downgraded to a municipal highway.
The Comfort Motel sits along a section now known as York Regional Road 1/Yonge Street in Bradford. The motel had long-since become a long-term rental accommodation, like many former motels, catering to the economically-challenged. Many of the residents had mental health and addiction problems but even more unfortunate, other rooms were rented to parents living with their children.
The motel had largely gained a negative reputation, with dirty, smelly, bed bugs, rude owner and even a scary place being some of the comments mentioned by road-trippers unfortunate enough to not already know its reputation.
All that came to an end when a fire destroyed the west end of the building on 23 March 2025, causing an estimated $450,000 in damages. Fortunately, the building was largely vacant and under renovation at the time, but some the rooms were illegally occupied by squatters.
A year later, the Comfort Motel sits abandoned, with no signs that it will be repaired and re-opened. The Bradford Inn next door has similarly been under renovations for a possible re-opening, but there doesn’t appear to be much work being completed presently.
Sources: The Comfort Motel left with roughly $450K in damages after fire, ‘Use a proper ashtray’: Smoking may have led to Bradford-area motel fire, official says – Bradford News.
