SAM BERGER & PAT GILLIN PLAYING WITH BLOCKS

October 21, 2017, 7:57 am

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This post focuses on two downtown blocks that demonstrate the vagaries and vicissitudes of commercial development and redevelopment. Each block was dominated a hard-charging individual who wanted to stamp his properties with both a personal statement on style and his own name. Their buildings prove that within the limitations of office space real estate some quality design could be achieved. But since first being built those designs have certainly suffered some indignities. It's also an opportunity to look at the work of Peter Douglass and Alistair Ross, a firm that wanted to give their office buildings a little bit extra.

You could say that it all started with the Juliana Apartments (1961-63), a prestige project devised by the colourful Samuel Berger, Q.C. Sam was a trial lawyer, city politician, real estate mogul and president of the Ottawa Rough Riders Football Club. It is said that Berger wanted to build the most desirable apartment building in Ottawa, and for this he turned to the local office of Peter Dickinson Associates which was staffed by Peter Douglass and Alistair Ross. Dickinson died shortly after the commission was granted and it was left to Douglass and Ross to complete the project. They are largely responsible for the design.

The two formed a new partnership, Douglass and Ross Architects. Apparently satisfied with The Juliana, Berger's Ottawa Commercial Realty Company hired the firm to design a Y-shaped hotel on the north side Laurier Avenue West between Metcalfe and O'Connor Streets. In the time honoured tradition of a developer's overconfidence Berger said that he anticipated an early start in the summer of 1963.  As the caption said 'work on the footings is expected to get underway within the next few weeks.'(Ottawa Journal, May 30, 1963)

Meanwhile it was claimed that a new apartment hotel at the Driveway and MacLaren Street had been begun by developer Jarvis Freedman, and another new hotel at Rochester and the Queensway was also being built. None of the three materialized, or even started. (Ottawa Journal, June 8, 1963)

By 1964 Berger had revised the project and transformed the hotel into an office tower. Building the hotel, which was 20 bays wide, must have been dependent on acquiring the property next door. The office is much narrower, at 12. Douglass and Ross's Canadian Building has lost much of its original impact by having the variety of materials, finishes and colours totally spay-painted with a monochromatic beige coating. Of note were the vividly textured precast panels, embedded with slate grey stone chunks. The spandrels were sage green and the floors separated with pale banding.

They had attached similarly bold-faced panels at The Juliana. It's a wild texture that must have taken a lot of nerve to use.

The full depth of the Canadian Building was briefly exposed during the construction of the EDC Building at O'Connor and later. The brick building at the left behind the Canadian is its younger more sombre sister. (Photo: Images of Centretown)

An aerial view of the Canadian Building (No. 1) taken in 1965. The Ottawa Public Library is at the right. The Rideau Winter Club at the left. At the rear is a surface parking lot, site of Ottawa Commercial Realty's next project in this block.

This 13-storey office building, to be known as the National Building, was also designed by Douglass and Ross. Note the construction dates. They built them quickly in those days, often in less than a year from start to finish. But negative-4 months is record breaking.

The T-shaped tower is a solid building of warm masonry and rippled surfaces. The deeply recessed covered plaza elevated on top of the podium, which lent a certain drama to the entrance, has been filled in with commercial space. The top of the building was given a Gothicized crown.

There is a mixture of effects: the orangey brown brick which is supposed to have an antiqued look, contrasted with bush hammered and shutter marked exposed concrete. Doubled projecting piers with knuckle joints at floor level animate the building's planes. Love those skinny strip windows in the link between the top and the tail of the 'T'.

Douglass and Ross strayed into eccentricity with these ridiculously deep coffered windows in the podium. In its current grimy state the National is underappreciated and I expect that its days are numbered.

Berger served two terms on the Board of Control - a powerful executive body elected at large that ran the city government. A constant critic of Charlotte Whitton, his time in office co-incided with her four year absence from the Mayor's chair. He opposed her when she decided to re-enter municipal politics in 1960, running losing campaigns in that year (by a small margin) and again in 1962 when he was defeated more decisively. In referenda held during those elections the voters of Ottawa opposed the fluoridation of water and split on Sunday openings - yes for movie theatres and no for sporting events. (Ottawa Journal, December 1, 1956)

Sam Berger probably set down roots in this block by opening the committee room for his successful 1956 bid to become a City of Ottawa Controller in an old building at 227 Laurier Avenue West, site of the future Canadian Building. It was a stretch of Laurier Avenue in transition from older apartment houses to newer office buildings, demonstrated in the drawings for the 1952 Underwood and IBM buildings above (Wallace C. Sproule Architect). (Drawing: Ottawa Journal, May 13, 1952; Photo: CA-AN-048620)

Although Sproule doesn't really fit into this story since it's in the same square block this is his Savoy Apartments, a vaguely Moderne building with furnished housekeeping units. Conrad Black lived here while attending Carleton University. (Ottawa Journal, May 16, 1957)

With some minimal exterior alterations it is now the ARC Hotel. The outside is still dowdy, on the inside all is drop dread.

This fuzzy aerial shows the Berger and Gillin blocks side by side. It's from a much wider panoramic view trumpeting the late '60s growth in downtown Ottawa. No. 15 is the Canadian Building, No. 12 the Berger Building (1968-69) his last. The tail of the National Building snuggles between them. Pat Gillin built Nos. 13 and 14 between 1964 and 1966. (Ottawa Journal, September 16, 1969)

Gillin made a major incursion into Sam's block when he built the new Ottawa Public Library under a complicated turn-key, lease-back, rent-to-own scheme. Before the addition of the office tower you could see all three of Berger's buildings in their original garb, especially the Canadian's dark and light colouration and the Berger Building's tight transparent skin.

After purchasing the former headquarters of the Conservative Party of Canada in December 1963 Gillin revealed his plans for the Gillin Building on Laurier Avenue West. Picking up the adjacent property (an old apartment house) he was then able to double the building's size. The dark curtain wall has since been reclad in an egregious Post-Modern treatment. (Drawings: Ottawa Journal, December 10, 1963 and March 21, 1964)

The renovation stopped just short of the side walls, and thankfully saved these cool signs.

Bill Ketchum's Faces of Ottawa profile describes Pat Gillin as one the the city 'most energetic and enterprising developers'. Like so many of them he got an early start as a home builder. Ottawa Journal, March 27, 1965)

His conquest of this block of Laurier Avenue West was cemented by the much more massive Sir Guy Carleton Building. The thrust of the overhanging podium is somewhat overemphasized by this rendering but it did give the square tower above a little breathing room. (Ottawa Journal, August 5, 1965)

It turned out to be another exercise in pure back and white and briefly served as the headquarters of the National Capital Commission (left). The office to hotel conversion that turned Sir Guy into the Marriott Residences Inn carved out the central sections of the podium to create an entrance court for the hotel.

This time only the back end of the podium survived. It demonstrated a crisp, masterful use of precast. And doesn't this look exactly like the base of Sam Berger's unrealized hotel a block to the west? In fact, Sir Guy Carleton's tower seems to be the angled wings of Douglass and Ross's 1963 project straightened out. Go back to the top of this post and check it out. Gillin used this firm for some of his later buildings, which suggests that their association may have begun with this building.

Buying the old YMCA (left) completed Pat Gillin's lock on this block. All three buildings are linked by two-storey passerelles.

Speaking of conversions, the former YMCA has had a checkered history. After the Y left it was turned into Rupert McCelland's Bytown Inn, a crazy dump for hippies and hoboes, then the Roxborough Hotel (still downmarket but trading on a fabled name), and then the ultra hip Hotel Indigo.

The Y's internal light well was transformed into a blue atrium. Indigo was part of a chain of individually designed boutique hotels. It has disappeared from this location, along with its trademark nautilus shell logo, and is now called The Metcalfe.

In marking its 20th anniversary Gillin Engineering and Construction could also point to the 20-storey Congill Building at Slater and Kent (top), and the El Mirador Hotel on Isabella Street. (Ottawa Journal, December 16, 1969)

Douglass and Ross are credited with designing the two-storey penthouses on top of Gillin's Rio Vista Apartments at 400 Stewart Street (1969-70), apparently a late stage alteration to the original plan. - so I'm inclined to attribute the rest of the building to them. Peter Douglass also gets the design credit for Gillin's shiny steel shaft for the EDC at 151 O'Connor Street

The Rio Vista's sculptural precast panels were fabricated in one of Pat Gillin's spinoff businesses - the Modulcon cement casting works at 2715 Sheffield Avenue. You can see some of their handiwork in the building. It was a system imported from Europe that used high-speed vibration of the aggregate mix in Fiberglas molds to produce strength in a dense bubble free finish. From the look of the window panels at the right it's likely that Gillin's  Moduloc factory also made the precast panels for the Congill Building.

To get back to the beginning... just before Sam Berger's aborted hotel on Laurier Avenue West was announced Douglass and Ross Architects were involved in another abandoned hotel project in the city's east end. The Bruce MacDonald Motor Inn beside the St. Laurent Blvd. and Queensway interchange was an ambitious mixed use project. One of its features was an indoor/outdoor swimming pool that could be partitioned by a glass wall in the winter. The pentagonal outdoor portion is poking out into the landscaped courtyard. The caption here says that 'construction will begin in a few weeks' but it didn't, although today there is a Comfort Inn nearby. (Ottawa Journal, May 10, 1963)

The Motor Inn is not to be confused with the earlier Bruce MacDonald Motor Hotel in the West End. It was re-named the Embassy West and is now a seniors' residence.

However Douglass and Ross did end up designing another hotel known as 'The Embassy' (1965-66) at 25 Cartier Street. It looks very much like a regular longterm rental apartment building that was converted into an apartment hotel at a later date (as so many Centretown apartment buildings were) but it actually opened as one. This may have been a decision made mid-construction when a glut of apartment buildings in Ottawa was poisoning the rental market. (Ottawa Journal, October 21, 1966)

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LORD ELGIN'S GRAVEYARD FOR DEAD PLANS

October 30, 2017, 7:28 am

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When discussing Ottawa's pre-1950 planning and design it's tempting to pin everything on Mackenzie King or Jacques Gréber. The Lord Elgin Hotel (1941) is a hybrid, more King than Gréber. The Prime Minister believed that by personally intervening in the building's appearance he was chanelling the wishes of his owlish adviser. When the Lord Elgin was designed and built, during the darkening days of WWII, Gréber was out of reach behind enemy lines. That story is for Part 2.

This post will be a little convoluted because it attempts to condense a complex story into a few snappy paragraphs. It surveys the pre-conditions that determined the hotel's design - the 1927 scheme to develop 'Confederation Park' a sprawling open space in the centre of Ottawa that sprang from the feverish mind of Mackenzie King, and Jacques Gréber's subsequent 1937-39 planning studies for re-making Elgin Street in his own Beaux-Arts control freak style. While the resulting mash-up at Elgin and Laurier satisfied neither master plan, it leaned more heavily on King's conception. Although he may have been coaxed into authorizing its construction through an elaborate plot engineered by crafty local pols. For this story you should read Randy Boswell'sThe Lord Elgin Hotel - Mackenzie King's Capital Vision and the Birth of a Landmark, published in 2016 to mark the hotel's 75th anniversary. Of course King didn't need much encouragement. He had been thinking about it for a long time.

Here is the hotel that was meant to take advantage of Confederation Park in 1930, although building the park had barely begun. The backers of the unbuilt Ambassador Hotel (Marani, Lawson and Morris Architects) on the Lord Elgin's future site were caught up in a political maelstrom that followed the change to a Conservative Government as a result of the July 1930 elections. When submitted in the fall of that year it was soundly rejected by the FDC, still stacked with Liberal appointees, which had gained approval over the design of all new buildings on the west side of Elgin. An outcry from local city politicians (mostly Tory) managed to overturn that, but by then it was too late. The Depression was taking hold and no one was building 300 room hotels.

The notion for a large hotel at the northwest corner of Elgin and Laurier certainly predates Gréber's involvement in planning the capital by several years. It was the outcome of a monumental scheme announced by the King Government when it created of the Federal District Commission in 1927. Confederation Park was the centrepiece of an ambitious plan to reshape the national capital region, using vastly expanded federal powers, to coincide with the Diamond Jubilee anniversary of Canada's confederation. (Ottawa Journal, October 8, 1930)

Today we think of Confederation Park as one pleasant block where they stage the International Jazz Festival, but that is a fragment of its former self. King presented the full scope of the original plans to municipal officials on Monday, October 24, 1927. As he wrote in his diary: 'Today I completed the first stage of the transaction which will have an important bearing on the future of Ottawa and will leave its mark on the Capital for all time. I met with Mr. Ahearn, Presdt. Fed'l District Comm'n at 11 and went over with him what I was supposed to say to the members of the Commission and the Mayor and Board of Control. At 11:30, I had the others come into my office and I went over all phases of past negotiations and present position. I told the gathering that the Gov't had decided to allow the expropriation of the Russell House block properties on condition that all of the area from Sparks St. to Lisgar, and Elgin to Nicholas were to become one central park in the heart of the City to be known as Confederation park. There was genuine satisfaction expressed by the members of the Board of Control and the Commission. They left delighted at 12:30.'

The Ottawa Journal, generally no fan of Mackenzie King, said that the plan was 'easily one of the most momentous announcements ever made affecting the Capital.' - 'meaning briefly the creation of a huge public park in the heart of the Capital, to be known as Confederation Park, in commemoration of this being Canada's Diamond Jubilee.' King's long term vision for an Elgin-to-Nicholas and Sparks-to-Lisgar park which had been disclosed to the Mayor and Board of Control wasn't mentioned. (Ottawa Journal, October 26, 1927)

They included a front page a sketch by William Chalmers illustrating the initial phases of the scheme. (Ottawa Journal, October 26, 1927)

Ninety years later one can argue whether ripping out the heart of the city (the City Hall, the Central Post Office, the largest hotel, the most important theatre, a honking big church, and several of Ottawa's most commodious apartment buildings) was worth the effort. (Photo: NAPL-1926)

The empty light-coloured areas were the first to go. The Sparks-to-Wellington block in the lower right of this 1928 aerial was wiped clean, and the Rideau Canal's turning basin at the middle left was filled in. Take note of the small patch of grass with the curved paths running through it that's across the canal from Union Station. You could say that this was an early start on Confederation Park. In the early 1900s the Ottawa Improvement Commission negotiated the purchase of the Bate and Co. warehouse, demolished it and created a small park.

Demolition of the cluster of old buildings in the Sparks-Elgin-Wellington block had actually begun a year before the Confederation Park plan were fully hatched. (Photo: LAC)

The most controversial and protracted expropriation and demolition process was surely at the Russell Hotel, a monumental brick pile that had once been the city's finest. When it finally closed in 1925 its new owners, the Blackburn brothers,  promised that they would be building a new hotel on the site. This was probably a negotiating tactic to up the value, because by then it was clear that the government would want this property some day. Except for its ground level stores, the building sat empty for another three years as the government dithered over the expropriation. While this was going on the Blackburns took the decision to demolish the Russell Theatre which adjoined the hotel. The before and after pictures are the middle photos in the lefthand and righthand columns above. (Photo: LAC)

While the details of the expropriation were finally being thrashed out the Russell caught fire, which was a good deal for the Blackburns. They were able to collect insurance on the loss of the building, and then sell it to the government. However the need for another large hotel would figure in the Lord Elgin's story. The city's business leaders went in search of a major hotel operator willing to build on another site. (LAC a025086 and a025084, Ottawa Journal, April 16, 1928)

This was the result, a new hotel to be built by an American syndicate on the west side of Metcalfe Street, between Albert and Slater. As their agent stated 'Options for this property were signed yesterday by E.E. Hampton... According to Mr. Hampton the project is to be pushed this summer and all major financing has been arranged.'(Ottawa Journal, May 25, 1928)

The Metcalfe Street hotel proposal was thrown into doubt by this revelation. King had entertained other possibilities for city improvements - 'a scheme for the widening of that street [Metcalfe], which at least has been considered by the Prime Minister and the Federal District Commission. The possibility of making a 100-foot boulevard from Parliament Hill to the Victoria Museum was in the mind of the Prime Minister some time ago, and to ascertain the feasibility of the scheme a valuation of all property on the east side of the Street was made.' The idea was too expensive and never saw the light of day until Jean Chretien's much loathed Grand Boulevard Metcalfe Street widening 70 years later. (Ottawa Journal, May 25, 1928)

Meanwhile at Sparks and Elgin the remains of the Russell Hotel and Theatre had been carted away, and the block was being levelled in preparation for the first instalment on Confederation Park. (Photo: LAC)

The next obstacle needed to complete the Confederation Park puzzle was Ottawa City Hall. It conveniently caught fire on March 31, 1931. The fire's origins have always been unclear. Some say that it was to erase the evidence of corrupt practices of prior civic administrations. What is clear from this photo published the next day is how undamaged the building appears to be. Repair was briefly discussed, but the municipal government was eventually relocated to several floors in the Transportation Building in space that had already been leased by the federal government. It would remain there until its move to Green Island in 1958. After the fire the City of Ottawa entered into a murky agreement that would transfer the property to the Crown in exchange for a new site. Out of office, King had nothing to do with this but years later when receiving a special commendation from the RAIC for his work on the General Plan for the National Capital he joked that fire had played a helpful role on furthering his plans for the city. (Ottawa Journal, April 1, 1931)

Always suspicious of the Dominion Government before the fire the City of Ottawa's Town Planning Commission had launched a plan of its own for an Elgin Street boulevard in 1928. To accommodate a report requested by the Board of Control Nolan Cauchon, its technical adviser recommended to Council his proposal for Confederation Place. It included a new City Hall and Post Office and the removal of Knox Church.

Ten years later Knox Presbyterian Church on Albert Street at City Hall Square (Henry Langley Architect, 1874) was the last to go. It was expropriated by the City of Ottawa for Elgin Street widening in 1929. After vociferous protests from the congregation the Board of Control considered moving the whole church eastward onto an empty lot to allow for the widening. This idea was discarded. They then asked the Government of Canada to buy properties on the west side of Elgin, so that the street could loop around the building and the church stay in place. After a two year battle Knox took the money and the congregation built itself a new church at Elgin and Lisgar (safely outside the boundaries of Confederation Park) in 1932. But with the onset of the Depression the old building was soon pressed into service as an emergency relief centre and it wasn't demolished until 1938. (Photos: LAC a046855 and a046854)

By April 1928 the Confederation Park plans prepared by the Federal District Commission were ready to be presented to Parliament. (Ottawa Journal, April 25, 1928)

It turned out pretty much as planned, a northern extension of the FDC Driveway alongside the Rideau Canal from Laurier Avenue up to Sparks and Wellington. One of Confederation Park's major objectives had been achieved - sweeping unobstructed oblique vistas up to Parliament Hill. It was a stirring view that would be later blocked by the MackenzieKing Bridge (1949-50) and the National Arts Centre  (geoOttawa, 1931)

Before discussing it with the Federal District Commission and the City of Ottawa King had already revealed the total vision to his diary (May 30, 1927). 'My idea is to take over the whole space between Elgin St and the Canal. Later the space between the Canal and Nicholas St. on the other side of the railways should also be taken over. It will make a fine city. The improvement with Dey's rink down is already remarkable. It will open up the whole centre of the city to beautiful vistas from many directions.' Was King's vision totally original? Had he seen Chicago-based Edward Bennett's 1915 plan for the centre of the city? A few years earlier Mackenzie had daydreamed about turning Elgin Street into a kind of 'Michigan Avenue' fronting onto Grant Park .(Photo: NAPL -1926)

With Dey's Rink gone, the FDC was able to fill in the old turning basin. (Photo: LAC)

The reclaimed land was graded and sodded, in preparation for the FDC's curving scenic driveway and pathways. (Photo: LAC)

Further west on Laurier Avenue, when the Confederation Park plan was first broached the Mayor of Ottawa was hoping to get the northwest corner at Elgin for a new City Hall site. A location for a new City Hall consumed most of the discussions regarding Elgin Street's frontage. It would come up again during Gréber's deliberations in the 1930s and 1940s. (Ottawa Journal, November 12, 1927)

Although most of the government's efforts had been expended on the Rideau Canal frontage, work had begun on the south west corner of Confederation Park. By 1931 the FDC had expropriated and cleared the east side of Elgin Street between Laurier and Slater, and it was being used for a temporary parking lot. Across the street the Ottawa Amateur Athletic Club's large buildings were still in place, but their days were numbered. There was also a mini-putt golf course tucked into the middle of this block.

As of 1933 the FDC's block opposite the hotel's future site was sodded, ready for the anticipated widening of Elgin Street. The OAAC buildings had been demolished for a gas station and used car lot. No more work on Elgin would occur until King was returned to power, ready to pick up the plans where he had left them.

It would take a few years, and Jacques Gréber acting as a tour guide when the Prime Minister was inspecting the Canadian pavilion at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris, where Gréber was the Master Architect. To make a long story short he exercised his considerable charm and English-speaking skills on King, and within two months he was in Ottawa looking things over. It's interesting to note that while in Berlin earlier that year Mackenzie King found himself seated beside Albert Speer in the Fuhrer's box taking in military games at the Olympic Stadium. From the photographs of the event they were engaged in lively conversation. (Photo: LAC)

Gréber returned to Ottawa in 1938, developed a detailed plan that was primarily focused on the area between Bronson and King Edward Avenues, and produced a set of drawings. In this he mostly concentrated on the design of major institutions, grand tree-lined allées and formal plazas. He was also insistent on establishing an architectural vocabulary (though not entirely in the Chateau-style) that would be mandatory for all pubic buildings. Some nodes would be Moderne monumental, others in the Flemish Revival mode. He returned again the following year to consult on the design of the decorations for the Royal Tour and refine his Ottawa plans, sending a plaster model on ahead. (Ottawa Journal, January 20, 1939)

A new Union Station on the east bank of the Rideau Canal, moved two blocks south from its existing location, was one of the major elements in the Gréber plan. It would be built atop a huge elevated semi-circular plaza reaching across to Elgin Street. To achieve this the canal would need to be decked over. The tower to the left of the rail terminus would be a new hotel. (Photo: LAC)

Union Station's western pendant was to be a new National Art Gallery which filled most of the block bounded by Elgin, Slater, Albert and Metcalfe Streets. The other buildings fronting Elgin Street would have been relegated to uniform relatively featureless buildings to serve as backdrops to the gallery. (Photo: LAC)

The buildings continue south along Elgin to Lisgar Street enclosing the western edge of Cartier Square, which had always been considered to be a ready-made part of King's Confederation Park. The model included tiny soldiers on parade. Flemish gables on the Elgin Street buildings suggest that they were to be minimally Chateau-style, if at all. (Photo: LAC)

So in summary, as Gréber left it the Lord Elgin Hotel location was intended to be just part of a frame for his radiating plaza. The particulars of King's 1927 plan, gently curving parkways and paths, had been largely overthrown, or amped up beyond recognition. (Photo: LAC)

It's difficult to reconcile Gréber's grandiosity with this dismal downpayment. Widening Elgin Street turned out to be a headache. Knox Presbyterian Church, the last building standing in the way had to be relocated from Albert to Lisgar Street. The City had to install a major new sewer line and demanded that the FDC share the costs. The Ottawa Electric Railway had to abandon its streetcar line and convert the Elgin Street streetcar to diesel buses. When it was finished it was s-o-o wide, but the profile was only 40% roadway and 60% grassy boulevards. Within a decade of this picture being taken (August 1939) the trees had started to grow. In time, with the Lord Elgin Hotel,  the National Gallery of Canada, and the British  High Commission buildings completed the original Confederation Park's desired effect had been realized. (Photo: LAC)

The vehicular road widening began in 1965. With turning lanes, widened lanes, added traffic lanes, and minimal vegetation it has been turned into an arid arterial.

It took over ten years and Jacques Gréber for the government to gain ultimate control of future development and 'to provide for architectural improvement of the western boundary of Confederation Park' by expropriating all of the properties on the west side of Elgin between Queen and Laurier. Until then they had been coasting along under an agreement with Ottawa's Board of Control transferring development approval of new buildings to the FDC in exchange for future inducements to the City of Ottawa. (Ottawa Journal, August 17, 1939)

The buildings to be taken were surveyed and photographed in sequence during the last days of August 1939. The is Laurier Avenue at Elgin, on the future hotel side. (Photo: LAC)

Rounding the corner to take in a British American gas station and a car lot. Within a few days of this photograph being taken the Confederation Park project would have to go on hold. (Photo: LAC)

The Elgin Street frontage - a three-door brick rowhouse, another gas station and car lot, and an old frame house containing a store. Canada was about to plunge into the greatest international crisis of the twentieth century, World War II. This would produce a very changed country, a very different plan for Ottawa, and incidentally along the way the Lord Elgin Hotel. (Photo: LAC)

'A SCENE OF FEVERISH ACTIVITY. ANOTHER MILESTONE IN THE PROGRESS OF CANADA'S CAPITAL.'

November 5, 2017, 7:34 am

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Building the Lord Elgin Hotel was a remarkable story in many ways. Today's just-in-time project managers and highly paid development consultants would be amazed. After years of start-and-stop planning, federal-municipal wrangling, and wild fluctuation in the 1927 to 1939 business cycles, it all came together rather quickly. From a gleam in the eyes of local boosters to the signed agreement, the complicated government approvals were navigated in under six months. Construction work began on September 13, 1940 and the hotel was ready for opening on July 19, 1941, despite strict wartime controls on labour and materials. It's been described as 'grand' and the Lord Elgin is sort of grand on the outside but the inside was a different story - basic accommodation, meeting the minimal requirements for the maximum number of filled beds.

Throughout the design process the Lord Elgin's architecture was unaccountably described as being in the 'Norman Style', which it certainly was not. Today one might call it Chateau-Light filtered through the Moderne. As to the hotel's appearance it is intriguing to recall the similarity in massing between Marani, Lawson and Morris Architects' Ambassador Hotel 1930 project (top) and the Lord Elgin Hotel of ten years later, both intended for the same site. A coincidence?

Probably not. Just an interesting footnote*. Each of the Ottawa examples (built and unbuilt) used a standard type of plan - the 'H' shaped building with a peaked central core, viz. the Royal York Hotel by Ross and Macdonald Architects, 1929 and the Hotel Vancouver by Archibald and Schofield Architects, 1929-1939.
*To add a footnote to the footnote, when the Lord Elgin's future owner came to the capital to develop the hotel in 1940 he offhandedly remarked that he had been wanting to build a hotel in Ottawa since 1930 - the year that the Ambassador Hotel previously rejected for the Laurier and Elgin site was rejected.

Regarding the pre-War plans for Confederation Park, upon his return to Ottawa shortly after the end of WWII (Mackenzie King had to petition Gen. Charles de Gaulle to get him out of France) Jacques Gréber found the Lord Elgin in place and plugged it into a whole new vision for Elgin Street and the Park. Large parts of the 1937-39 scheme were discarded or substantially re-worked. (Photo: 1950 General Plan for the National Capital, Gréber, Fiset, Kitchen et. al.)

Progress in fulfilling the plan would take some time. In 1954 the hotel still towered over the western blocks of Elgin Street.

This post is a year late for the Lord Elgin's 75th Anniversary and several commemorative histories have already been published. They recount the political machinations that brought together the Civic Industrial and Publicity Committee headed by Chester E. Pickering, John C. Udd the Ford Hotel Company president, and the Dominion Government to hatch the hotel. My thanks to the creator of OttawaHH for his Lord Elgin picture gallery, the source of many of these images.

The Lord Elgin's developer, who built plain hotels for the budget-minded traveller, favoured the 'E' shaped plan in their  nearly identical Ford Hotels in Toronto and Montreal (1929, architects unknown).

The Ford Hotel in Buffalo,  NY (1922) was demolished by implosion in 2000. They also operated hotels in Rochester, their corporate headquarters, and Erie, PA.

I will attempt a forensic investigation of the Lord Elgin's architectural development through a sequence of clippings and not rely on my usual recourse to Mackenzie King's private diary unburdenings, which tend to be self-satisfied and a little less objective. It appears that Ford Hotels had wanted to crank out a brick-clad  'U' shaped version of their previous hotels (left). The ultimate design (right) was hammered out through a series of negotiations with the Dominion Government. The Prime Minister took a keen interest in the project.

One of the controversies surrounding the hotel was its request to the City of Ottawa for a property tax holiday based upon a reduced assessment, but Ford Hotels had missed the deadline imposed by the Board of Control because of 'conditions over which neither the hotel company nor the city had any control' this being the hotel's design and location. Their lawyer stated 'Jacques Greber, noted town planner of Paris, was to have visited Ottawa to approve of the plans. It was not known now if he would be able to come.' That probably had something to do with the Nazis. As to the location 'Plans had been drawn up for one site, but since the proposed site had changed again they have to be revised. They should be ready in another week's time. While he did not mention where the new site was, it was understood to be on the west side of the widened Elgin street, between Slater and Laurier. It had been intended to erect the hotel on the corner of Elgin and Slater.' Despite the uncertainties over the design and location the Board of Control granted the fixed assessment.   (Ottawa Journal, July 3, 1940)

On the invitation of a committee of local politicians and businessmen the Ford company arrived in Ottawa in early 1940 scouting sites suitable for its third Canadian hotel. Both the location and the design would prove to be tricky. In choosing the west side of Elgin between Slater and Laurier they would need to engage with the Government of Canada and its amateur town-planner-in-chief, Prime Minister Mackenzie King.'It was stated that Prime Minister King was much interested in the plan, that being because of his desire for the proper beautification work on the centre of the Capital. He saw the plans and subsequently they were studied in the Department of Public Works. One of the main questions is as to the exterior finish of the building. That has been settled but there has been a re-drawing of the plans by the firm of Ross and Macdonald, Montreal architects who designed the Royal York Hotel, Toronto.'(Ottawa Journal, July 19, 1940)

The matter was taken up by Cabinet on July 23, 1940 after Ford Hotels 'brought revised plans for the building which they hope will meet the objections raised to the original plans. The changes provide for a very attractive exterior to conform with the architecture of other buildings in the area contemplated under the Greber plan.'Apparently the revised plans did not fully satisfy the Government's objections because six days later 'a further change in the design of the proposed $1,00,000 hotel has been suggested and a new sketch is being submitted to the Government with a re-arrangement of the roof line.'(Ottawa Journal, July 23 and 29, 1940)


The lease between the Government of Canada and the Ford Hotel Company was signed on September 5, 1940, in advance of the hotel's final design being available, but the directions were clear. 'Architects are now finishing up their plans of the alteration to the front elevation and roof as suggested by Dominion Government authorities. These alterations consist of re-designing the roof of the building so that it will harmonize with elevations of the new Post Office and the Chateau Laurier. ...The new hotel will have accommodations for about 700 persons and will have 350 guest rooms, each one of which will have its private bath. The tower section of the building will be 11 storeys in height and the other parts nine storeys.'(Ottawa Journal, September 5, 1940)

A week after the signing the local backers, and Ford Hotel's president Jack Udd (in shirt sleeves on the left) and Mayor Stanley Lewis (in shirt sleeves on the right) turned the sod for the Lord Elgin Hotel. Digging started the next day.

The Government of Canada retained ownership of the land they had expropriated in 1939. Their 99-year lease with Ford Hotels stipulated a rent of $5,000 per annum. However the Crown wasn't able to settle all of the property expropriations in time for the start of work, including the building at the Slater Street corner, seen right up against the foundations. In front of it is the viewing platform constructed for sidewalk superintendents who wanted to watch the hotel's progress.

The building at Slater and Elgin would remain in place for some time. (Photo: LAC)

The cornerstone was laid by Mackenzie King and Mayor Stanley Lewis on February 27, 1941. To  signify its importance to the Federal Government Public Works Minister Cardin, DPW Deputy Minister J.B. Hunter, and Chief Dominion Architect Charles Sutherland were in attendance. The hotel's backers, Chester Pickering and Jack Udd, were also in the official party. And the old building next door was still there, screened by a tarpaulin. Behind this was a plywood structure set up to display a model set-up of a typical hotel room. King was impressed and said it was very modern.                                       
The stone contains an inscribed parchment prepared by Pickering that reads 'We who are living to-day have faith there'll always be an England. Democracy will always prevail.'

In a bitterly cold February 1941 while the Queenston limestone was rising to cover the steel frame the hotel's construction site was hemmed by another unsettled expropriation on the Laurier Avenue side. I don't know how they managed to build it under these conditions - and it was completed in just ten months.

Just before the Lord Elgin's steel frame was about to be erected a rumour that structural steel would not be available until the War's end was circulated around Ottawa. The Ford Hotel Co.  president was forced to place ads squelching this, reminding citizens that the hotel was being built under the Government of Canada's supervision which would ensure the delivery of steel. (Ottawa Journal, December 2, 1940)

I really like the chubby columns that used to cary the porte-cochere. Six months after the Lord Elgin's opening Winston Churchill stopped in Ottawa to confer with Mackenzie King, on his way to spending Christmas of 1941 with FDR in Washington. During the Ottawa visit Churchill made his famous 'Some chicken... Some neck' speech to Parliament and had the scowling lion portrait taken by Yousuf Karsh. He didn't stay at the Lord Elgin.

The stone columns were replaced with more slender metal posts, probably to allow for additional space for cars to pass under the canopy or open their doors when they were under it.

Lord Elgin's porte-cochere columns were replaced with squared-off versions in its last renovation. Although not entirely. When the old one was deconstructed the hotel's 1941 steelwork was briefly revealed and left in place to receive the new stone cladding.

On Saturday, July 19, 1941 the Ottawa dailies published 15-page supplements to advertise 'A New Hotel in the Heart of Canada's Capital' to explain the history of its development, the perspicacity of its backers, its salient features, and the many fine building materials that went into its construction.

During its development the Lord Elgin's capacity had grown from 350 to 400 rooms by shrinking their size and squeezing them into every possible corner. The nightly rates, subject to the Wartime Prices Control Board, had been established in consultation with the Dominion Government.

The Lord Elgin Hotel was featured in the December 1941 edition of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal. It was newsworthy because the hotel was an anomaly in the Government's strict regulations on constructing civilian projects during WWII, an indication that building was deemed to be of strategic important to the war effort. The photos were taken by the Photographic Stores of Ottawa.

The Lord Elgin's 1941 lobby was spare and streamlined, continuing the round columns inside. The front doors are at the left. With no vestibule to check Ottawa's wintry blasts they eventually had to add another set of interior glass doors.

At some point the round columns were boxed in and fitted with display cases. The lobby was also partitioned.

The evolution of lobby furnishings through the 1950s and 1960s.

When it first opened there was a lounge in one corner and a concession stand in the other. A series of lobby bars and shops gradually encroached on the lobby area.

A typical floor plan. Each room was approximately 10 feet wide. There were living quarters for the hotel manager on the top floor under the copper roof. The elevator bank was located on an outside wall to allow for its connection to a future wing.

Squeezing an extra 50 rooms into the hotel made them extremely compact. This is a twin-double. As for the decor this was the palette - the 'general colour scheme on the first three guest room floors is blue grey and dusty rose. The next four floors are in mauve and dusty rose, and the upper floors are in sun tan buff and ivory. Carpet covering all floors is of a unique pattern and construction. The background color is cedar rose with a leaf figure in three frame appearance in mauve.' The dressers, desks, and table were maple with tops covered in a 'stainless material', probably an early form of Formica. And, 'all beds are two inches longer than standard and are of the modern footless design. The legs are recessed for convenience and are entirely out of view, it being impossible for one to stub his toes.'

The rooms were modernized in the 1960s, with what passed for a portable TV in those days. The door to the right was a closet, and the one at the left for the bathroom.

The Lord Elgin's original bathrooms were closet-sized, not as depicted here. Most of them just had one small shower stall and no tub. For economy and speed of construction tile-setting wasn't required. The walls and ceilings described in the promotional material as 'solid baked enamel surfaces' were actually 'the modern plastic-type wallboard' - ivory coloured to match fixtures in a colour called sun-tan. They even made a virtue out of the inexpensive floors. 'In further consideration of the guest's comfort a rubber floor was installed in each bathroom to provide warmth underfoot.'

When it opened the Lord Elgin's basement level contained two taverns dictated by the liquor licencing requirements of the day. One for mixed sexes (the more refined 'ladies and escorts' type of licence) and a separate men's-only beverage room. I have been told that it was the hotel's proximity to so many military personnel, working in the Department of National Defense temporary buildings across the street on Cartier Square, that launched this room's role as social space for gay men. It blossomed during the 1950s and 1960s when the RCMP was hunting down gay civil servants there by hiding behind newspapers with cameras. When I went there ca. 1970 it was a raucous place with a great juke box. This sketch was drawn by the poet Charles Fisher as part of a gay history project.

The mores of the 1970s pushed the Lord Elgin's tacit tolerance and they took steps to stamp out public displays of affection. To protest members of the gay community staged a kiss-in in front of the hotel, but the bar's days were numbered and it was eventually closed.

After building the Lord Elgin Hotel, in 1948 the Ford Hotel's President John C. Udd achieved his greatest triumph by opening the $8 million, 23 storey, 1,100-room Laurentien Hotel in Montreal - the largest hotel built in Canada in 20 years and the biggest one built in North America since the end of WWII.  Designed by architect Charles Davis Goodman the Laurentien was a behemoth partially clad in glittering aluminum sheathing. The following year Udd sold his Ford Hotel chain to Sheraton Hotels of Boston and became head of its Canadian operations including the Lord Elgin. Shortly after the sale Udd resisted an offer from Ottawa businessmen to buy it, but soon sold it. On January 20, 1950 the Lord Elgin's ownership was transferred to a group of six men headed by Controller C.E. Pickering.

On July 25, 1949, while the Lord Elgin was still a Ford Hotel and Ottawa had lost a number of conventions due to a lack of hotel rooms, John C. Udd announced 'that construction of a $1.25 million addition to the Lord Elgin Hotel will begin early this Fall. The addition to the west will contain twin bedrooms or double rooms, thus providing accommodation for an additional 400 persons.' (Ottawa Journal). The Lord Elgin's new owners took up the cause and promised that they would be starting a 200-room addition in the fall of 1953. They made the same promise again in May 1957, noting that when the Lord Elgin had been built in 1941 'heating and elevator services were anticipated for the addition which will be a factor in the cost.' On May 12, 1958 Pickering and his associates sold the Lord Elgin, and the plans for an addition were abandoned. (Ottawa Journal, June 13, 1953, May 22 and June 26, 1957)

'Sold' was a relative term because Pickering continued to have a business association with the Lord Elgin until the early 1970s. When they announced the 1957 decision to proceed with an addition designed by the Montreal architect Henry Langston, the Lord Elgin had come under the control of the National Management Company. They were the owners of the Lord Simcoe Hotel in Toronto, also designed by Langston. One wonders how he would have treated the Lord Elgin addition. The Elgin and the Simcoe were sister hotels for several years.

They took another run at expansion in 1969. The Lord Elgin Plaza was to be a separate hotel tower attached at the base to the old building. It was a contentious project and the architect, George Bemi, had to appear before the Ottawa Planning Area Board several times to defend it. By the time that the City of Ottawa dropped its opposition (too tall) the plans were revised and the proposed hotel was changed into an office building. Bemi argued that the new tower was compatible with the Lord Elgin because its precast panels were beige.

A small extension was made in 1977-79 when Murray's Restaurant wanted to build a 1,000 square foot greenhouse type cafe in the landscaped area north of the Lord Elgin. Because it was on federally owned property this brought the full force of the National Capital Commission's Design Committee into play. It delayed the project for months as the committee argued about the amount of glazing and the types of plants they'd be using inside (this was the era of the fern bar). The architect, Edward Cuhaci was required to come back to the NCC with revisions. This photo was taken before the Murray's addition. It shows the Slater Street 'plaza' of the Lord Elgin Plaza and Bemi's alignment of the office building's lower two floors (a commercial arcade) matched to horizontal banding established by the Lord Elgin Hotel.

When new north and south wings finally got added the original Queenston limestone (no longer available because the quarries were closed) was carefully salvaged from the 1941 section's end walls and reinstalled in selective features like the five-storey oriel window in the centre of this picture.

I won't comment on the design of the new wings (David McRobie Architect, 2001) except to say that's it's earnest. Would something of its 21st century time have been preferable? The debate rages as the Chateau Laurier contemplates its own addition.

THE TIFFANY APARTMENTS - 'DISTINCTLY NEW YORK'S PARK AVENUE'

November 12, 2017, 2:41 pm

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Design-wise The Tiffany Apartments (J. Morris Woolfson Architect, 1952-1954) was kind of clunky, although its builders wanted to evoke an association with something more more chic when they claimed that this building and its surroundings were 'distinctly "New York's Park Avenue" in character',  choosing a name that hinted at the ne plus ultra in luxury living.

In its time it was Ottawa's largest and most technologically advanced apartment building, the first to be built in a park setting, and cater to modern needs such as television and the car.

The Tiffany Apartments is one of many buildings highlighted in the Post-War section of Heritage Ottawa's forthcoming publication on Ottawa's historic apartment houses. For the feature buildings we were limited to a page per entry. Here's a much expanded version of The Tiffany's story. But you'll want to get the book to learn more about dozens of other interesting buildings.

The Tiffany's pyramid-shaped site has a layered urban history that starts with a railway, street diversions to route road traffic around and under it, the Ottawa Improvement Commission's beautification of the lands along the Rideau Canal, an interesting episode dictated by the necessities of World War II, the post-War housing crisis, the Federal District Commission authority over development here in the early 1950s, the growth of apartment building in Ottawa, new construction technologies, and aspirational lifestyles. 

In the 1880s the Canada Atlantic Railway, whose tracks traced a line approximating the route of the present day Queensway, built their 200-foot long car shed and an engine shop east of Elgin Street when Arygle Avenue was called Archibald Street and Park Avenue was an extension of Flora Street. Each was destroyed by fire in 1899 and 1902 and not rebuilt. (Photo: LAC, Drawing: Ottawa Fire Insurance Map, 1888)

It formed just a part of the CAR's extensive property which included a passenger station on the south side of Catherine Street and the rail yards where traffic on Elgin Street had to negotiate a dangerous level crossing.

The problem was solved with the Elgin Street subway, when the yards were blocked off and the road was doglegged towards the Rideau Canal and travelled under a new railway bridge. (Photo: LAC)

At the same time the Federal Government was landscaping the western bank of the Rideau Canal for the OIC scenic driveway. This is the view of the completed work looking south towards the Glebe with the former CAR now GTR) grounds, on a knoll at the right. (Ottawa Improvement Commission Annual Report)

The Driveway was linked to Elgin Street as it passed under the subway, creating a triangular plot that would ultimately shape The Tiffany's footprint. (Ottawa Fire Insurance Map, 1912)

Just for interest, this is the southern side of the subway looking towards Centretown. (Ottawa Improvement Commission Annual Report)

While it landscaped the edge, the Ottawa Improvement Commission did not take ownership of the land. In the late 1920s the Supertest Petroleum Company bought the property and built a service station at the Argyle and Elgin tip of the triangle. The rest was left as a vacant field, although you can evidence of a baseball diamond here.

It was occasionally put to other uses such as the Mayno Davis Lumber Co. Ltd.'s Log Siding Camp where they displayed their new expandable  'Guest Cabin'. (Ottawa Journal, May 22, 1935)

At the outset of World War II the Government of Canada resisted the enlistment of women in the armed services. However by 1941 the supply of male recruits was dwindling, and the Canadian Women's Army Corps (CWAC) was created for women wanted to serve. The future Tiffany site played its part in this effort, and its aftermath

To accommodate their swelling ranks the 'Argyle Barracks' was hastily built on this site in 1943. The 500 servicewomen slept four to a cubicle in asbestos clad timber framed buildings. A similar facility went up for the RCAF Women's Division further west on Argyle - the Princess Alice Barracks, which became known as the Beaver Barracks. (Ottawa Fire Insurance Map, 1948 - Plate 137)

After the War's end the Argyle Barracks were evacuated, but not for long. To meet Ottawa's critical housing shortage they were converted into emergency housing for the families of returning service personnel who grew increasingly militant as new housing was not being built to meet the demand. In 1950 the families were forcibly evicted and the barracks were demolished and sold for scrap. The land was needed for another purpose.

The plans for The Tiffany had to wait until Jacque Gréber's 1952 visit to Ottawa when he reviewed the design and pronounced it in accordance with his plan. The building's design was announced in 1953 with this crude but anatomically correct sketch. 'OTTAWA's Largest Apartment BUILDING - From the architect's plan will come this 129 suite project of the Tiffany Realty Company launched today when a $1,000,000 building permit was taken out at City Hall. The apartment, to be completed in September 1954, will be located at the Driveway and Argyle corner. The eight-storey building will have suites ranging from two bedroom deluxe to the single bachelor type.'(Ottawa Journal, June 19, 1953)

'WORK IN PROGRESS on $1,000,000 OTTAWA APARTMENT... will be completed by October 1, 1954. ' Seen from across the Rideau Canal, four months after construction commenced the Tiffany was three storeys out of the ground. Progress was hastened because only a very shallow excavation was required. (Ottawa Journal, October 23, 1953)

In the background of this shot of Elgin Motors' 1954 model Studebaker presentation ceremony taken in the southeast corner of the National Museum grounds, the rear corner of The Tiffany's growing frame rises above Argyle Avenue. (Photo: CA)

The Tiffany's backside is strictly utilitarian. At the tip of the triangle there's an access point that used to be labelled 'Trade Entrance'.

The real structural challenge in building The Tiffany was the site's subsoil conditions. It was underlain by a deep seam of sensitive marine ('Leda') clay that couldn't bear the weight of that heavy frame using normal footings. The solution was the floating slab, a raft of reinforced concrete. This 27 inch thick foundation mat, sunk 10 feet below grade, extended about 4 feet out from the perimeter of the building's superstructure. That distributed the point loading of the columns over the whole area of the floating slab. When measured a few years later years it was determined that the foundation had settled by less than an inch. (Drawing from Three Buildings on 'Floating Foundations' in Ottawa, Canada. NRC Division of Building Research, R.F. Leggett, 1961)

Morris Woolfson had used the floating slab system twice before - for the Russell Beach Apartments at 255 Metcalfe Street (1948-49), and the James Warren Beach Apartments at 196 Metcalfe (1950-51).

Representatives of the plumbing contractors Erskine-Smith Company visit The Tiffany's construction site as the apartment nears completion. The porte-cochere has yet to be added, and the openings for its large Thermo-Pane insulated picture windows were still covered with tarps. (Photo: CA3617)

The aluminum framed window system has lasted over sixty years.

Their were no residential penthouses on top of the building's distinctive shae, but there was a generous common space. The ads said 'Finally there is the roof. Perched atop it is a solarium-type recreation lounge, luxuriously furnished, and complete with TV, for the use of tenants - especially those with young children. In warmer weather tenants may also sit out on a beautiful roof-garden with a view unequalled only by that from the Peace Tower.'

Four full pages of publicity accompanied the opening. It had been completed on time at a total cost of $10,000 per unit. 'The beautification of the Nation's capital has taken rapid strides with the erection of the distinguished apartment building, the Tiffany. ...Situated on the Driveway, the Tiffany Apartments face the Federal District Commission Parkway. It is landscaped in keeping with the FDC plans. ...The building is solid underfoot and thick between the walls. It contains enough concrete alone to lay inch-thick pavement over a 30-acre area and there are 500 tons of structural steel to reinforce it.' (Ottawa Journal, October 15, 1954)

The Andrews-Newton glamour shot of The Tiffany taken on September 8, 1954. (Photo: CA005395)

Apart from some fiddling with the porte-cochere it hasn't changed much. Banded buff brick dominates, with a variegated sandstone base.

'A lobby of black marble and pastel walls leads the way to two automatic elevators and halls decorated with handsome murals and wall-to-wall carpeting. The spacious foyer is decorated with a natural garden sunk into the terrazzo floor.' The brushed aluminum doors are the only surviving features.

For security there was a three-way entry system, front, back, and individual unit doors interconnected with two-way telephones. The owners described the interior security in exhaustive detail.  'On each floor is a safeguard for the tenant being introduced for the first time in this Ottawa apartment building. Immediately over the door knocker is a small square of what appears to the visitor as a mirror. Actually, it is a piece of so-called two-way glass which enables those inside to see out into the corridor, although the person outside sees nothing but his own image. This phenomenon is made possible by there being a greater amount of light on the outer face of the glass than on the inner. This in turn is accomplished by a small hood over the inner side of the little window with a slit-like aperture operated by the tenant. Thus the tenant, in addition to the protection of the automatic locks on the main door, is able to see whether his caller is known to him before he opens the door to his apartment.' A rather elaborate description of a peep-hole. (Ottawa Journal, October 15, 1954)

The initial tenants could avail themselves of a free design advisory service provided by Randall's Paints Limited and chose their own colour schemes. 'A typical apartment in The Tiffany might have bone white ceilings throughout with the living and dining rooms and hall in parchment, the kitchen in lime yellow with bone white cupboards, the bedroom rose and the bathroom in lime yellow with matching tiles. Here are some of the most frequently occurring colors: Kent (yellow), shell tint, topaz, Burgundy, raspberry, sand, charcoal, parchment, blossom pink, flamingo, cobbler brown, Windsor blue, Puritan grey, rose, Wedgwood blue, lime yellow, fawn grey, Delft blue, blue spruce, Regency blue, platinum, Indian turquoise, lime green, cocoa brown, dusty green, and Sudan ivory.' (I recognize some of those colours from my time in the 1950s.)

The interior angles of The Tiffany's wings created some interesting room shapes, and generous closet space. The walk-in in the upper plan is almost room-sized. The kitchens look small, New York-sized, but planned out on 'the step-and-space-saving principles of the most modern designs'. In the lower plan the kitchen was screened from the living and dining area by sliding plastic doors.

Some of the apartments were huge in comparison with today's shoe-box sized condo units. The two-bedroom two-bathroom 'deluxe-type' (top) was especially generous, although relatively light on closet space. This was compensated for by individual storage lockers being located on each floor.

In 1954 Supertest opened a new service station at the western end of the block, which the promoters of The Tiffany advertised as a convenient advantage for the apartment building's car owners, 46 of whom could park in the heated underground garage with an automatic door opener and an additional 60 using the surface lot next to the gas station. Each outdoor parking space came equipped with its own electric outlet for a block heater. As they boasted 'In Ottawa's crowded area of non-parking facilities, The Tiffany is a motorist's paradise.' At 106 spaces for 129 units the parking provisions were well above average, heralding the age when the car was king.

The Tiffany's penthouse lounge peaks over the top of the new Supertest station (Photo: CA035548)

The old Elgin Street dogleg detour under the railway overpass disappeared with the construction of the Queensway. You can see its alignment picked up by the row of parked cars in front of the Supertest station.

The Tiffany's site (the treed triangle in the centre of this photo) as depicted by the 1950 model in the Plan for the National Capital General Report. Described as an 'Interurban Arterial' the future Queensway was conceived as more graceful boulevard with a landscaped median in a park-like setting and a large traffic circle at the foot of Elgin Street. 

It would have given this winged brick wedge a much grander setting. The exigencies of Post War freeway engineering produced a slightly different result. Despite that noisy intrusion, as The Tiffany enters senior citizenship it still holds a high place in the story of Ottawa's historic apartment buildings.

SOME MODERN BITS FROM HERITAGE OTTAWA'S NEW APARTMENT BUILDING HISTORY BOOK

December 2, 2017, 7:34 am

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This month Heritage Ottawa launches its newest book. From Walk-Up to High-Rise: Ottawa's Historic Apartment Buildings is the story of how apartment houses emerged as an unwelcome intrusion in the early 1900s, and then flourished, leaving a legacy of beloved landmark buildings. HO's book launch event includes a presentation by two of its contributors, Shannon Ricketts and Susan Ross, focusing on the years 1900 to 1939 when local apartment buildings were influenced by the Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Moderne styles. This post will look at something unexpected in this book - the architecture of social housing. The publication will be available for sale at the event, the lecture is free and there is no need to pre-register. To celebrate the launch and the 2017 holiday season after the lecture you can join HO and its friends for refreshments. Dominion-Chalmers United Church is located at 355 Cooper Street.

The final section of the book samples some of Ottawa's Post-War apartment buildings - their types, innovative financing arrangements, and public versus private sector development.  And not all of them became beloved landmarks. Three are the fruits of the Lowertown East urban renewal project, one of the biggest undertaken in Canada. Once commonly called public housing or low-rent housing, without much regard to the sensitivities of those living within, these buildings are more significant for their approaches to social engineering through built-form, than for the quality of their architecture. (Photo: CHMC)

Perhaps the chief virtue of the mixed building type project built for the Ontario Housing Corporation that filled the four blocks between Nelson, Chapel, Murray and York Street (1969-1970, Miska and Gale Architects) is that it was the first evidence of progress after a six-year period of controversies, studies, and false starts. (Photo: CMHC)

After a building-by-building inventory of housing conditions had determined that a sufficient percentage of the existing dwellings was blighted and beyond repair, most of Lowertown East was designated as an urban renewal district. This qualified it for the massive federal funding needed to expropriate the land, demolish 1500 houses, and pay for the planning studies. By 1966 the City of Ottawa had completed its own in-house concept plan for redevelopment, which was distributed to all residents with the accompanying statement: 'Your house will be demolished. You will have to move.'

Planning studies of the era relied on provocative photographs like these to demonstrate 'typical living conditions' and 'everyday scenes' of life in Lowertown East.

Not satisfied with the caliber of the city's design, the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (the project's chief funder) required the City of Ottawa to engage the services of Murray and Murray, Architects and Town Planners to embellish the plans, a further delay of two more years. Their master plan envisioned lively public open spaces punctuated by local commercial areas and community uses. The townhouses were oriented to sheltered amenity and play areas, obviously expected to be heavily socialized.

New mixed use hubs with small shops would be interspersed throughout Lowertown to meet the residents' daily news.

The combined built forms of highrise and lowrise was the model for redevelopment. Unfortunately Murray and Murray's optimistic vision was never met.

Despite a tight budget (there were actually public qualms over making the new housing 'too nice') there was room for modest experimentation. Clarence Street symbolically runs through the incredible length of the apartment tower's floor plate in a covered pedestrian passageway. Parking was segregated and out of sight, and there were common courtyard areas behind the townhouse clusters.

Many of the blocks in the old street grid (left) were combined into super-blocks. The chaotic grain of multiple buildings was re-ordered into neat patterns. Lowertown East's unpardonable flaw was that after a ten-year wait the thousands of forcibly ejected families, who had lived in this neighbourhood for generations and been promised new housing in their old community, were permanently dislocated and most never moved back in.

Despite its good intentions, safe and sanitary property standards, less crowding, lower population densities, and rigorously clean spatial organization, urban renewal's model for social housing has been deemed to be a failure.

Friel Towers (Craig and Kohler, 1971) is the most experimental of Lowertown East's high-rise apartment buildings. It had the unique challenge of trying to put larger households in tall buildings, which was accomplished by two-storey maisonette units. The 'skip-level' plan, with the elevators stopping at every second floor, was a first for Ottawa.

The towers are part of the tall building edge condition that walls Lowertown East's redevelopment from Rideau Street

Murray and Murray's urban renewal model on display in the City of Ottawa's field office. (Photo: CMHC)

Friel Towers was Brutalism on a budget - push-pull volumes faced in split block. The offset stair and elevator towers punctuate the whole seething concrete mass like an exclamation mark.

Some of Brutalism's best monuments were in the service of public housing, and Erno Goldfinger's Balfron Tower (1965-66, left) and Trellick Tower (1966-72, right) were hugely influential.

Pestalozzi College at Rideau and Chapel Streets (Elmar Tampold and John Wells Architects, 1969) is significant not so much for its architectural aesthetics as for its bold social experimentation in living arrangements. Pestalozzi was built by the Co-operative College Residences Inc., a radical Toronto-based organization taking advantage of the federal government's new approaches to housing. (Photo: CMHC)

Tampold and Wells' previous co-operative apartment buildings - the notorious Rochdale College, 1967-68 (left) and Tartu College 1968-69 (right) - both on Bloor Street in Toronto, had a certain sameness design-wise.

When it was first announced CCRI simply intended to recycle one of Tampold and Wells' prior designs, with horizontal bands of concrete and glass. (Photos: Original Pestalozzi College scheme at left, Ottawa Journal, January 17, 1969 and Google Streetview)

Pestalozzi had two distinct parts, a wing for the 'ashram' clusters of multiple bedrooms sharing a common kitchen and lounge space (based on the Rochdale model), and a more conventional wing of one-bedroom apartments. There was to be an educational component as well - dance and yoga classes, a pottery studio, film society, and a hippie-food cafe.

Within a year of opening Pestalozzi College had defaulted on its mortgage payments and was in receivership. The experiment had been snuffed out by drug-dealings, knifings and out-of-control behaviour. Its future would be debated for several more years while the City of Ottawa considered purchasing it for social housing, various relaunches were attempted, and it was eventually sold as a private sector rental building. The communal-style units in the Rideau Street wing were converted into generated apartment lay-outs, and the pointy projecting windows doubled up into one bay. Today it operates a regular apartment building - its lofty goals just a ghost of 1970s idealism.

From Walk-Up to High-Rise: Ottawa's Historic Apartment Buildings. Heritage Ottawa, 2017. 80pp. $20.00 +HST

SEEKING TRUTH AND JUSTICE

December 14, 2017, 8:24 am

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King Edward VII's Monument was supposed to be erected in Ottawa just prior to WWI. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances it was left unexecuted save for a pair of heavily draped 10-foot bronze figures. There's a blurry photo of this plaster maquette in one of Construction Magazine's 1913 issues, but this crisper version (newly discovered, to me at least) has inspired a retelling of how Edward's attendants came to be at the Supreme Court of Canada almost 60 years after they were made. If world events had not conspired against those noble ideals the two figures on the left (Truth and Justice) would have been Bertie's permanent companions in an ensemble standing about 800 metres east of the pair's present position. 

As a matter of fact, right about here.

The selection of a site for the memorial explains its composition. On January 29, 1913 it was noted with some qualification that the monument's location 'has practically been definitely decided upon'. It would have been placed 'on the heights between Wellington Street and the East Block, overlooking Confederation Square and the Rideau Canal'. (Ottawa Journal, January 29, 1913)

Fast forward to 1969-70 when these two elements of the King Edward VII Memorial ended up here, on giant granite plinths in front of the Supreme Court of Canada. It's an oft told tale, but here are some more details. (Photos: SCC)

There's an urban legend that Truth and Justice were found buried under a parking lot. This article on their reappearance reported that they were 'dug out of storage after more than 50 years in a government warehouse'.  The parking lot entombment made for a good tale but the resurrection might not have involved any actual digging, and perhaps their half-century interment wasn't quite so ignominious. And when did they really go under wraps? The date of the story (1969) minus 50 years equals 1919, or so. The reasons and whereabouts before going into storage are unknown. To make this more confusing the article also says that Truth and Justice were cast 25 years before the Supreme Court of Canada building was opened - which was January 1946. Unless they meant 25 years prior to 1939, when the SCC's cornerstone was laid. So that could make it either 1921 or 1914 when the gals disappeared. You do the math. (Ottawa Journal, October 4, 1969)

After nine years as King and Emperor Edward VII died on the evening of Friday, May 6, 1910. By all accounts he had turned out to be less feckless than most people expected, earning the sobriquet 'Edward the Peacemaker' for establishing cordial relations with England's old enemy, France. As for Germany, Turkey and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not so much. (Ottawa Journal, May 6, 1910)

On April 13, 1912 the Government of Canada announced that it would establish a competition to create a monument to the late King not to cost in excess of $35,000, and open to all artists residing in the British Empire. The design for Canada's official memorial to Edward VII was revealed to the public on May 10, 1913, almost three years to the day after his death. Forty-two designs were submitted, only five of which from Canada. The Journal concluded that 'Under the circumstances it is all the more gratifying that the award should have gone to a Canadian, Mr. Walter Allward, of Toronto'. The vote of the jury in charge of the competition was unanimous. Its total length was 55 feet perched under the edge of Parliament Hill with a flat retaining wall set into its slope. The trio on the stepped approach would be nine to ten feet tall, and the 'reeling' form on top of the wall 15 feet long. (Ottawa Journal, May 10, 1913)

There were to be four figures in all, three in bronze and one stone. From left to right they are allegorical representations of Truth, Justice and Peace, and the dead monarch himself. The full inscription on the monument's wall reads 'EDWARDVS - REX - IMPERATOR - THROVGH TRVTH AND JVSTICE HE STROVE THAT WAR MIGHT CEASE AND PEACE DESCEND OVER ALL THE EARTH'. After the unspeakable carnage of WWI, which was not the cessation of all wars and did not produce an everlasting peace the world over, it was painfully clear that his strivings proved to be futile. (Photo: Toronto Star Photo Archive)

Allward's plaster maquette for the Edward VII Memorial now resides in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, although it is a relatively recent deposit. The model was a gift from his daughter-in-law (widow of the architect Hugh Allward)  that was donated in 1981. It measures approximately 20 1/4 inches wide by 8 3/4 inches tall, about 30 times smaller than its finished size would have been. (National Gallery of Canada Online Catalogue, Category: Later Canadian Art)

A detail of Truth and Justice. I have never come across a discussion of sexual identity in Walter Allward's work. So many of his female figures have androgynous qualities. They look like they might have been modelled by men. From this photo you can see that in order to make it stand out when the picture ran in the newspapers the Star's photo editor has retouched the hefty blade on Justice's sword. In the actual bronze statue it's more swathed by her drapery. The hilt was damaged during her fifty years in a crate, and it was repaired by Eleanor Milne, the Dominion Sculptor of Canada, before Justice was set up in front of the Supreme Court.

I think that the mystery of their disappearance has never been fully explained. This version says that they were created by Allward for the Edward VII memorial 'but went by the wayside during the First World War'. How did this happen? In slight contrast to the 1969 article they appear to have been in storage for 'almost 50 years of gathering dust in government storage yards in Ottawa'. Either way this suggests that they would have been put away around 1919, and leaves a gap of in their chain of custody from the time that they were cast (date unknown, but likely to be closer to 1914 if they had been fabricated at what was undoubtably an offshore foundry and returned to Canada prior to the outbreak of WWI). (Ottawa Journal, August 15, 1970)

It was a logical place to put them and one hopes that the Court's deliberations will be guided by the word carved into Truth's base. She was often depicted in the nude to represent the 'naked truth'. Almost all of Allward's allegorical figures are naked, or nearly so, but their attendance to the King must have required more decorum. That heavy book (inscribed with the letters VE...) that she is pointing to may be a symbol of humanity's belief in the knowledge of truth. In explaining Western art history some hold that Truth is most frequently depicted as a woman because the nouns associated with this virtue are commonly feminine - Truth = la Vérité.

Justice, also almost always female, is usually illustrated with a sword in one hand and scales in the other. Here she is sword-only which rests sheathed on the ground, ready to be drawn to deliver justice. Sometimes she's blindfolded to demonstrate impartiality. In this instance Justice's head is cowled under a heavy cape that flows over the edge the base, a feature which replicates the intended positioning on Edward VII monument's flight of stairs. Truth only curls a large right toe over the her base.

The installation was a bit of a cock-up. The truck delivering the heavy granite plinths broke down on the way to Ottawa and arrived 12 hours late. After the stones were wrestled into place a tempered steel pin on the hoist used for lifting the statutes bent 'like a piece of black licorice' and the whole operation had to take a rest until things got fixed. The caption relates the fact that the Edward VII memorial was 'cancelled after the First World War'. This must be true, although whether it was a deliberate decision or simply by default is unclear. (Ottawa Journal, August 14, 1970)

Justice was used on this eight cent stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Supreme Court of Canada (1875-1975).

Allward experimented with another Truth and Justice in one of his schemes for the Citizens' War Memorial in Peterborough, ON but eventually converted them into the Angels of Death and Mercy. (Drawing: National Gallery of Canada)

In his official portraiture Edward was normally shown wearing the enormous Imperial crown or a cockaded hat. Here he wears a simple coronet, which is more than compensated for by the lavish proportions of this flowing cape. The downcast gaze and outstretched arms are also atypical.

Ottawa wasn't the only Canadian city to miss out on an Edward VII monument. While Montreal got a big one in Phillips Square (off rue Ste-Catherine between Birks and La Baie) Toronto's never materialized. This gap was filled in 1969 when business tycoon Hal Jackman paid for a mounted Edward now in Queen's Park, but originally from Delhi, India and taken down after independence.

The carved figure of Peace emerges from the stone wall half-covered in a diaphanous garment. It's a common device in classic statuary.

Here is one on Allward's earlier Baldwin-Lafontaine Monument on Parliament Hill, representing Vpper Canada.

And another recumbent among the Vimy Memorial's multitudinous figures. 

In photographs Walter Seymour Allward (1876-1955) liked to present himself as signifying the inner turmoil of artistic struggle, a melodramatic pose that found its way into his forms in stone and bronze. He began fashioning terra cotta ornaments at the Don Valley brickworks, where he gained considerable skill in modelling clay. This is essentially what a sculptor did. The rest was up to anonymous and uncredited casters and carvers.

His first important commission was for the South African War Memorial (1910) which stands in the middle of University Avenue, Toronto. Compared to his later more fully developed work it is stiff and conventional.

BLADWIN? The discussion regarding a monument to commemorate the roles of Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine in uniting Upper and Lower Canada into the United Provinces of Ontario and Quebec (a precursor to Canadian Confederation) had been ongoing since 1899. But the sculpture, by Allward,  was not executed until 1912. Apart from a small memorial in Beechwood Cemetery this is Walter Allward's only other major piece on Ottawa, which The Journal claimed was 'almost similar to a famous St. Gaudeus design'. The article also refers to the impending erection of D'Arcy McGee and George Brown memorials, statues whose fates may have been relevant to Truth and Justice. (Ottawa Journal, May 6, 1912)

They are almost certainly referring to Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Admiral David Farragut monument in Union Square, New York. Here the subject stands atop an exedra, a bench or seated gathering place favoured by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Baldwin and Lafontaine's sweeping exedra holds a secret. It's a whispering wall that amplifies the voices of people who are seated at either end. This no doubt symbolizes the dialogue between the Upper and Lower Canada reliefs. If you haven't done so try it out. It's an amazing effect.

Shortly after its installation on the northeast corner of Parliament Hill the bench had to be boxed up to protect it from being damaged by the building of the new Centre Block after the fire of 1916. That Herculean effort and the resulting hive of construction activity on the Hill may have been another reason for setting aside completion of the Edward VII memorial for more important priorities. (Photo: LAC)

The 1912 Ottawa Journal article on the Baldwin Lafontaine monument also mentions that Sir Edmund Walker, Chairman of the Arts Advisory Committee and Chief Architect David Ewart had been scouting Parliament Hill in search of suitable sites for sculptor George Hill's George Brown and D'Arcy McGee memorials, which would as The Journal reported 'be erected at an early date.' For McGee 'twas not the be. As the finishing touches were being applied to him at a Brussels foundry in early August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium. Fearing that the statue would be seized and melted down for German armaments the Belgian makers carefully buried D'Arcy McGee. Containing two to three tons of metal, the Germans were said to have gone to particular pains to find it. As the war neared an end and the Germans were driven out of Belgium the statue was dug up, none the worse for its time underground. It was eventually returned to Canada and erected on the rear of Parliament Hill in 1922. (Ottawa Journal, February 10,1923; LAC a034427)

I have been crawling out onto a ledge at the Supreme Court of Canada looking for foundry marks (or at least as far as I can without being dragged away by the RCMP). Truth and Virtue were likely to be fabricated in England, France or Belgium because at the time Canada had no fine art foundries. My question is would it have been feasible for Allward to ship his clay models to Europe (say in late-1913, or early-1914), have them cast, fine finished and patinated, and then returned to Ottawa before the outbreak of WWI? Or is it possible that they were hostage to circumstances similar to D'Arcy McGee's statue? Just asking.

By 1922-23 Walter Allward was seized with his entry in the competition for a Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, which he won. This wasn't completed until 1936 and it became his magnum opus, the work with which he is most identified. The location proposed for Edward VII's memorial was soon claimed for Sir Wilfrid Laurier, by Louis Philippe Hebert and unveiled by the future Edward VIII in August 1927. Originally intended to the at the top of a grand flight of stairs built into the hill, the site was the personal choice of Mackenzie King who felt that standing here his late mentor would enjoy looking out towards Union Station and all that it symbolized vis-a-vis the railways' role in expanding the nation. Although Jacques Gréber toyed with the idea of placing an Edward VII memorial in Major's Hill Park for his memorial Edwardvs Rex Imperator would have to settle for King Edward Avenue.

ARGO - YOUNG MODERNISM AND THE ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH GROUP OF OTTAWA (AND MONTREAL)

January 8, 2018, 6:39 pm

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Now here's a talk that I'm really looking forward to. The Architectural Research Group of Ottawa (ARGO) and its companion the Architectural Research Group of Montreal, operated in the mid-1940s. It was a collective of young radicals ready to smash the mouldy old pottery that was Canadian architecture. ARGO's members included the group's patrician founder Hazen Sise, Douglas Simpson, William Goulding, and Sid Lithwick. Presenter Dustin Valen is an emerging scholar in the history of modernism, recipient of many awards (SAH Society of Architectural Historians, Radcliffe Schlesinger Library, J R Smallwood Foundation, Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture, and Heritage Ottawa's Gordon Cullingham Award), and author of numerous papers and articles. The lecture is scheduled for January 17, 2018 at 7:00pm, Ottawa Public Library, 120 Metcalfe Street.

The HO lecture is likely to highlight the national importance of ARGO's more esoteric members. But it also laid the foundation for an Ottawa based career. The group's Secretary was one of the city's pioneering modernist architects, Watson Balharrie (1910-1967), who contemporaneous with his association with the group gained some early fame by placing second in Progressive Architecture Magazine's competition for a 'Small House in Georgia'. The winning design was featured on the April 1946 cover of PA's publication Pencil Points.

The Journal's description wasn't exactly accurate. It wasn't a bungalow and its dimensions were more like 28 by 42 feet. While it would take some time for Watson to really put his modernist theories into effect, the citation furthered his effort to stimulate the state of architectural practice in Canada. He was active on several RAIC committees, served on the jury for the first Massey awards for architecture, and taught at McGill University School of Architecture where he would encounter John Bland. Ottawa Journal, February 18, 1946

Watson Balharrie was in good company. The Small House for Georgia first place award went to a son of the south - native Alabaman Hugh Stubbins, Jr. who by that point was transplanted to the rarified climes of the Harvard University School of Architecture and Cambridge, Mass. Stubbin was called an architect of icons, which included the Kongresshalle Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (1957) and the silver penny whistle shaped CitiGroup Center in New York (1977).

Watson Balharrie trained as an architect through apprenticeship in local firms, becoming an accredited member of the OAA in 1944.

The competition's programme requirements called for a house suitable for a Georgia family of four - father, mother, boy of five, and a girl of two, living on an income of $3,000 a year. They could only afford a house not to exceed 1350 square feet on an inside lot 60 ft by 150 ft.

Balharrie's small house was a modified side split-level, with the tiny bedroom wing above the basement. The largest space, the living and play area included a storage unit over the fireplace for card tables, chairs, and a projector, etc. This may reflect the fact that he was an amateur film maker and a keen participant in the Ottawa Cine Club. Film was an important element in ARGO's mixed media promotion of modern planning and architecture.

The house was designed for a narrow lot, but offered a variety of outdoor spaces, including a front entrance court, a rear terrace, and a walled play and clothes drying yard. The jury was 'not particularly attracted by the external appearance of this solution' and found that the 'separation of the two wings was more expensive than the program required', although Stubbins' design looked like it would have been much costlier to build, on a lot wider than the competition allowed. There was plenty of nit-picking - they questioned the arrangement of the furniture in the children's bedrooms (continuous built-ins along two walls) and the efficiency of Balharrie's projector storage hide-away without the addition of another door at the narrow end.

At the same time Watson designed a very small house for his own family in the Civic Hospital neighbourhood, where he would live for the rest of is life.

The rules described the Georgia climate in some detail, and the emphasis on 'realism' meant that it must be economically buildable of materials actually on the market, which is why Balharrie captioned his house as realistic.

And it wouldn't be an Ottawa story without a Mackenzie King connection. During the Dominion-Provincial Conference of January 1946 the Prime Minister and Premiers took time to view ARGO's ground-breaking exhibition 'You and Your City' at a reception for the conference delegates in the Chateau Laurier. No modernist, in referring to his own interest in planning King said that the display came as 'a surprise to some of us' but gave the exhibition a positive send off on its tour across Canada, where he hoped that it would stimulate an interest in every community it visited. ARGO's influence would spread. Ottawa Journal, January 30, 1946.

Cultivating Canadian Modernism
The Architectural Research Group of Ottawa and Montreal
a lecture by Dustin Valen
January 17, 2018 - 7pm
Ottawa Public Library
120 Metcalfe Street

DEY'S DEMO IN DETAIL: SAMPLING THE NCC'S HISTORIC PHOTO TROVE

January 22, 2018, 7:46 am

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Hundreds of hitherto unseen historic photographs are coming on line. They have been boxed up since being deposited at LAC by the National Capital Commission's Information and Historical Division over forty years ago (Accession1986/04). They are now being described and digitized by the Archive's DigiLab project. The images span a period between the early 1900s and the late 1970s. This arresting shot of the Dey's Arena demolition is taken from an album series entitled 'Federal District Commission 1927-1932'. Library and Archives Canada has added a new crowd-sourcing feature which encourages researchers to submit comments or additional information on these pictures via e-mail at bac.centredeliaison-
liaisoncentre.lac@canada.ca                                                                                         
This was Dey's third rink, technically known as Dey's Rink Arena, or just Dey's Arena to distinguish it from Dey's Rink (number two) which operated at Gladstone Avenue and Bay Street until it burned in 1920.

When it was built it was one of the largest in Canada with a capacity of 7,000 - 2,000 of whom were standees. (Ottawa Journal - April 30, 1927)

The oddly-shaped lot created its signature elongated oval rink, much different from the NHL's modern specifications of 200 by 85 feet with corner radii of 28 feet.

It also hosted Christian Revival Crusades, roller skating, rallies, wrestling matches, and concerts.

During the demolition which occurred mid-1927 the stands were carefully deconstructed. (Photo: LACe99990858-u)

It appears to have been an orderly process, with the lumber carefully stacked for salvage, leaving only the steel frame of posts and roof trusses. (Photo: LACe-999908859-u)

The Arena had been sitting on leased land for just twenty years, when the property was required for the creation of the Confederation Park scheme. This coincided with the building of the Dey Brothers' new Auditorium at Argyle and Metcalfe Streets. (Ottawa Journal - April 30, 1927)

Dey's Arena (on the right) backed onto the Rideau Canal's basin, where some shipping was still being carried on. (Photo: LACe999908856-u)

Teams of horses hauled out the former docks' old timber pilings, while dump trucks began to tip their loads of dirt into the basin which was sealed with a coffer dam to contain the fill. (Photo: LACe99990857-u)

To create the southern fringe of Confederation Park the Federal District Commission had to remove the remnants of the industrial activity, warehousing, and docks that had dominated the west bank of the Rideau Canal. (Photo: LACe-999908773-u)

Steam shovels removed the heavily contaminated soil to the east of the Arena. (Photo: LACe-999908773-u detail)

For over fifty years the adjoining site was the location of a coal yard, where the material was offloaded from barges that had travelled up the Rideau Canal. The adjacent canal basin was originally engineered by dredging a swampy area. This combination of coal piles and wet ground is likely the source of the carboniferous ooze that continues to leach into the Rideau Canal to this day.(Ottawa Fire Insurance Map 1912 - Plate 31 detail)

The arena site was levelled and brought up to the grade of the surrounding streets. (Photo LACe-99990873-u)

A new ornamental retaining wall sealed the landfill from the Rideau Canal. (Photo: LACe-999908875-u)



And the whole mess was capped by a layer of grass. (Photo: LAC - not catalogued)

It was an astonishing transformation, all completed within a year. (Photo: LACe999908876-u)

By 1928 the evidence of the wharves, Dey's Arena, the turning basin, the coal yards, and the warehouses had disappeared. (Photo: LACe999908873-u)

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ECHO DRIVE BUMPS INTO HENRY'S BOAT HOUSES

February 1, 2018, 8:22 pm

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Here are more quirky finds from the newly scanned and catalogued National Capital Commission collection at Library and Archives Canada... a glimpse of long forgotten recreational boating on murky waters. While the construction of a scenic driveway along the west bank of the Rideau Canal was a priority project for the Ottawa Improvement Commission once it was established in 1899, the building of a similar drive on the canal's eastern edge took another 30 years to get underway. On this side the wide stretch between Fifth-Clegg and the Bank Street bridge had been left with a natural shoreline, a remnant of the broad watercourse that had been dredged out and deployed for this portion of the canal.

But the eastern embankment wasn't entirely unused. In 1912 a lengthy section was leased to W.J. Henry, a local taxidermist who established a floating clubhouse for Henry's Boat House (the gabled white building at the left) and three multi-bayed boathouses for the members of the Ottawa Motor Boat Club - the long flat row to the right. To the Federal District Commission they were an unsightly hindrance, inhibiting the path of the new scenic route, which would be known simply as Echo Drive until it was renamed Col. By Drive in 1966. (Photo: LAC e99990839u)

The expansion of the scenic driveway system was approved in July 1929, but delays in settling property acquisitions, road alignment and technical designs delayed the onset of construction into the early 1930s, by which time (after a change in governments) it had become a Depression era make-work project. (Ottawa Journal, July 20, 1929)

The 1928 aerial photograph shows the four structures, with the OMBC's boathouses tucked up against the canal's steep banks and Henry's attached to the mainland with a jetty. Even before the driveway plans nearby residents had been asking for their removal for many years. (Photo: geoOttawa)

The same section of the Rideau Canal, with the aquatic obstructions removed (leaving only 'Pig Island') as it appeared in 1958 fifty years later. To build the driveway the FDC constructed a new retaining wall several yards out into the canal and backfilled for the roadbed. (Photo: geoOttawa)

A disaster hastened the removal of one of the obstructions to the FDC driveway. At six o'clock in the morning of September 24, 1931 a fire swept through Henry's Boat House immolating the frame building and destroying over 100 canoes. The total damages were estimated at $20-30,000. (Ottawa Journal. September 24, 1931)


There was a personal drama too. As the flames spread Mrs. K. Henry, who between the months of May and October lived in the residential quarters above the boat house, was rescued by her 16-year old daughter Doris using a ladder to gain access. They both emerged from the scene with singed hair. (Ottawa Journal, September 24, 1931)

The Henry family chose not to rebuild, clearing the way for the driveway.(Photo: LAC e999908839-u, detail)

The OMBC's multiple boathouses (with observation galleries on top - this section of the canal was used for regattas and races) were untouched by the fire, and the original plan was to leave them in place and construct the retaining wall in behind them. This decision was reversed and while the FDC was negotiating with the club for their purchase, at $1500, on December 27, 1931 these boathouses were also destroyed by fire. Vagrants and hobos camping within them were blamed. (Photo: LAC e999908838-u, detail)                      
High above the canal bank's white pine covered slopes was the original Echo Drive, which had been redeveloped with fine homes. (Photo: LAC e999908838-u)

Up here the road was narrow, but scenic. This must be one of the latest examples of wooden plank sidewalks (ca. 1929) in Ottawa. Shortly after the creation of the driveway was announced the property owners between Riverdale and Bank petitioned the government to include their blocks within the scope of the project, by adding a solid wall to prevent cars from going over the edge - a not infrequent occurence. Their request was turned down. (Photo:LAC e999908829-u)

Little has changed in the intervening decades - still no sidewalks. (Photo: Google Streetview)

Echo Drive closer to Bank Street with more board sidewalks. (Photo: LAC e999908830u)

It's a pleasant place to walk. From now on I will never pass by here without thinking of the amazing cluster of buildings that once floated down below. (Photo: Google Streetview)

LAKE FLORA: THE FEDERAL DISTRICT COMMISSION TAKES ON A SOCIAL MISSION IN HULL'S BACK STREETS

February 9, 2018, 8:32 am

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When the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation's version of the Federal District Plan and the agency designed to implement it - the Federal District Commission - was unveiled in April 1927 one project stood out in marked contrast to the others. While the FDC's programme for building more scenic driveways, a new bridge across the Ottawa River, and the creation of large central park in the centre of the city were all linked to the City Beautiful, Beaux Arts, and Olmstead-esque schools of design, the transformation of 30 acres of wasteland in the most hardscrabble streets of Hull was really a holdover from the late Nineteenth Century's urban reform, social gospel, and public health missions. They sought to uplift the minds and bodies of the city's poorest and most disadvantaged citizens and Hull's Lake Flora, a natural feature which had gone from a sylvan pond to a noxious cesspit, was the ideal candidate.

The playground created out of Lake Flora was later renamed for J-E Lafontaine, the Mayor of Hull and subsequently Liberal M.P. for the area. When serving as the head of the city council he had taken some of the initial steps to remediate the land here. Incidentally after the enabling legislation for the FDC was proposed in 1927 he was unalterably opposed to the creation of a political Federal District, declaring that 'the people of Hull were perfectly happy as they were now, but if they were taken into a Federal District their rights - or the rights of the minority - would suffer'. The Ville de Gatineau's interpretive plaque recounts some of the park history (Barbara Ann Scott performed an exhibition skate here in 1948) and the environs (the small rickety scrap wood houses typical of Old Hull, knows as 'matchsticks').

Lake Flora and its smaller deeper neighbour Minnow Lake appeared on the City of Hull's 1886 plot plan. Minnow was named for its bounty of the tiny fish. Its waters bred a small stickleback species of variegated fluorescent colours. Flora was named for the profusion of flowering aquatic plants that covered its surface. The unnumbered lots and unopened street allowances in the block of land immediately to the north were left undeveloped because this area was a dense tamarack swamp, which was eventually incorporated into what would become the Lake Flora park.

The Parc Lafontaine's modern boundaries are a combination of the surrounding street grid and a curve from the original shoreline. Today one quadrant of the park is filled with new recreational facilities, tennis and basketball courts, an outdoor pool, community centre and baseball diamond. (Photo: geoOttawa 2011)

The park that the Federal District Commission created in 1927-29 had few amenities, primarily the ball diamond which remains in the same position to this day. Here it is two years after opening. (Air Photo 1931/A3331)

As the city and its industries grew Lake Flora had become a stinking mess. Sewer lines emptied into it, garbage was dumped here, and the effluent from a nearby porkery drained its discharge of animal waste directly to the lake. The new playground would bury that foul history and cap it with a healthy membrane. (Photo: LAC e999908919-u)                              
Lake Flora (3) and Minnow Lake (2) as mapped on Hull's 1902 Fire Insurance Atlas key.

It sits almost dead centre in the middle of the Ile de Hull, an island formed by the Ottawa River and Brewery Creek, a channel that diverts water from above the Chaudiere Falls and empties at a location further downstream.

Building the Lake Flora Park was a lengthy process. Much more fill than anticipated was needed to level up the old lake hollow and the costs climbed - $19,391.76 in 1927, $33,331.07 in 1928 and at least $15,000 in 1929. Those are sizeable sums for this kind of work in the 1920s and it is fair to say that as well as providing public spirited benefits the FDC was seen as an instrument of patronage to spread some money around in Hull. (Ottawa Journal, May 2, 1929)

The future Lake Flora was a bright white spot on the 1928 aerial, taken mid-Winter, when the park was half way through construction. (Photo: geoOttawa)

The playground was bounded by some of the area's poorest streets where a jumble of houses sat crowded together on narrow lots with no yards. (Photo: LAC e999908919-u)

With the City Council, the Mayor, and prominent citizens in attendance the Federal District Commission Chairman Thomas Ahearn opened Lake Flora park on September 19, 1929. He said that 'the Commission was only doing its duty by Hull in transforming the Lake Flora site into a decent, healthy playground for the children.' As the Ottawa Journal noted Hull's greatest eyesore had been changed from an offensive smelling dump into a 30-acre refuge which was badly needed and which would 'keep the children of Hull off the streets'. (Ottawa Journal, September 29, 1929)

It was conceived using the FDC's standard design vocabulary - capped aggregate concrete fence posts, malleable iron and oak slat benches, and two banana-shaped rockeries. I don't know how much fun this would have been for the children playing here but the goal post hints that wholesome activity was to be had. When he opened the park in 1929 Ahearn indicated that 'possibly later on a bandstand would be erected equipped with amplifiers to tune in on radio concerts'. (Photo: LAC e999908919-u, detail)

Over 80,000 cubic yards of fill had been used to bury the stagnant remains of Lake Flora, which was then cross brushed and top dressed with a layer of playground sand. The park could now accommodate as many as four games of softball simultaneously. In the coming years the Lake Flora ball teams would fare well in the area's leagues. (Photo: LAC e999908919-u, detail)

Hull's lakes were areas of refuge following the city's three Great Fires. To outrun the advancing fire of 1900 its citizens had fled to the damp shores of Lake Flora (which escaped the blaze) and remained camped out there for months as the city was being rebuilt.

Before the lake was drained it was a dangerous place. In the winter children frequently fell through the ice and had to be rescued. As this account of Mr. Urban Viau's plight reveals even after the water was diverted by a pipeline to the Ottawa River the remaining bed of mud, five feet deep in some locations, was still hazardous. And the outfall of contaminated water had been directed to a point upstream of the Ottawa River's ice-cutting operations, poisoning the harvested blocks with typhus germs.


Prompted by the Federal Plan Commission's General Plan for the Cities of Ottawa and Hull which was just getting underway in 1913 Hull's civic leaders were thinking big, offering Lake Flora to the Canadian Pacific Railway as the location for their long promised CPR station. A few months later some prominent residents with other ideas suggested that 'a driveway run clean through the heart of Hull.' They noted that when Lake Flora was turned over to the city by the executors of the Wright Estate 'it was distinctly understood that it was to be turned into a park.' Their plan recommended a scenic driveway ('one of the prettiest in the Province') beginning at the Interprovincial Bridge, going right through the swampy areas, converting Lake Flora into a park. (Ottawa Journal, May 17, 1913)

In 1950 Gréber's General Report for the National Capital Plan would have transformed the FDC's modestly designed but socially meaningful improvements to Lake Flora into a horseshoe shaped plaza.

Blasting a cannonade of linked monumental allées through the city's blocks.

By 1965 these plans had been largely ignored and with no new municipal investments the park's few attractions had been been left to slowly run down. (Photo: geoOttawa, 1965)

When Gréber's acolyte, architect Edouard Fiset, was retained by the NCC and the City of Hull to devise a master plan for urban renewal (Hull 1962) he saw it as a canvas for neo-Corbusian planning theory.

The park would become the 'park' in his 'towers in a park' scheme. Eight thousand of the twenty-five thousand residents who would be displaced through slum clearance could be housed here.

The park is still surrounded by modest houses. (Photo: Google Streetview)

Almost all traces of the FDC's original landscape design have disappeared.                                   
Refurbishment of Parc Fontaine continues to figure in Gatineau's long-term vision for a ring of attractions encircling the oldest parts of the city, with the ancient contours of the Flora Lake bed (concept bubble number 9) still dead centre. (Photo: Destination-Gatineau!)

LUMBER AND LEISURE LEGACIES AT LAC LEAMY LAKE

May 13, 2018, 8:57 am

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It was a mixed crowd that gathered on the eastern shore of Leamy Lake on Monday, July 24, 1961.  Residents of Hull in various states of attire, civic officials in business suits, and a few Mounties. Photographer Ted Grant was there on assignment for the National Capital Commission. Glowering weather threatened the event - the opening of a new recreation centre nestled into a parkland refuge that is being enjoyed to this day - the Lac Leamy Lake beach, picnic and playgrounds. (Photo: Ted Grant, LAC e9999904520)

Leamy Lake's new $69,000 beach pavilion was described as sleek and modernistic. Its 172 foot long folded roof sheltered men's and women's change rooms and a restaurant that opened to both sides. It was designed by Hull architect René Richard, who also designed a contemporaneous beach pavilion for Plage Mousette, several high schools and other municipal buildings. (Photo: NCC Annual Report, 1961)

An estimated two thousand spectators were there to witness the official opening. The Lac Leamy Lake beach project had been initiated by the City of Hull the previous year, with substantial planning and financial assistance from the newly reconstituted National Capital Commission, which had built a mile of parkway to provide access. (Photo: Ted Grant, LACe999904528)

(Ottawa Journal, July 25, 1961)

Eric Thrift, the NCC's new General Manager presided over the opening ceremonies. He had just been recruited from Winnipeg where he had served as the Chairman of that city's Metropolitan Planning Commission since 1945. Platform decorum was somewhat different in 1961, as the gentleman holding his raincoat in one hand and a cigarette in the other demonstrates. (Photo: Ted Grant, LAC3999904530)

Hull Mayor Armand Turpin was also puffing away. (Photo: Ted Grant, LACe999904531)

Unfortunately the one-hour concert planned by the RCMP band (donning their raincoats) had to be cut short once the showers arrived. (Photo: Ted Grant, LACe99904519)

Although it had its origins in the lumbering business in the mid-1900's, a hundred years later most of Lac Leamy's shoreline was bounded by undeveloped woodlots and agricultural fields.

The lake is named for Andrew Leamy, who started a lumber mill here in the 1850s. In 1853 J.R. Booth arrived from Vermont to build the mill for him. With the money he earned Booth set up in business on his own, the start of his timber and lumber empire.

To service his mills Leamy cut an intake canal to bring water in from the Gatineau River. This influx would later prove to be a problem for the creation of a beach on the lake, as polluted water entered the lake.

Leamy Lake is notable for being the birthplace of the Canadian cement industry. A deep bed of limestone provided the ideal raw material. 'Between 1830 and 1840 Ruggles Wright, son of Philomen Wright, started making lime and hydraulic cement here. His son C.B. Wright continued producing cement until 1900. In 1889 the original process was improved and changed to Portland cement manufacturing. Not until 1909, however did the Canada Cement Company emerge due to consolidations brought about by Max Aitkin, Lord Beaverbrook. ('The Canada Cement Story', 1967)

The noise, dust, and vibration from the cement plant was an impediment to any recreational development on Lake Leamy. Once the business shut down, the site of the Canada Cement Company's mills, silos and yawning quarry would find new uses. (Photo: City Archives CA010002)

The transformation is to be seen on this map of the Leamy Lake navigation canal, laid out to provide boat water access to the Casino du Lac-Leamy, which sits at the edge of the old quarry - now flooded. (Fisheries and Oceans Canada)

The beach would be 1,000 feet long and 100 feet deep. The lake had to be dredged and lined with thousands of tons of gravel and sand. Despite the noxious neighbour and the plumes of dust emerging from its smokestack a recreation centre was approved in 1960. The Federal Government had begun to acquire land in the area as early as 1947 to implement the railway relocations recommended by Gréber's forthcoming General Plan for the National Capital. In 1965 the NCC negotiated the purchase of a 250 foot strip of Lake Leamy shoreline from Canada Cement in order to build a recreational trail all the way around the lake. (Ottawa Journal, January 25 and February 18, 1961)

The pavilion's jaunty roof, a ripple of smooth white fins flies free of the enclosed spaces below, with open ventilation in the gap.

The roof's material is difficult to determine. from these photographs. The last time I saw it I didn't take note, except to determine that it was light and massive at the same time. Solid precast concrete would be too weighty to be carried by these steel post and laminated wood supports. Perhaps they were hollow forms cast from a shot concrete mix. They might have been fiberglas. (Photo: Ted Grant,  LACe999904528)

With a 500-car parking lot they were certainly expecting large crowds. Until the NCC's recreational pathways arrived it was the only way to get there. It has since filled in with some tree canopy, and some of it has been reclaimed for sand volleyball courts and tot lots. (Photo: geoOttawa)

At some point Leamy excavated a discharge channel from the lake out to the Ottawa River. You can see the plume of Gatineau River water entering the lake at the top. Crossing the channel at the right is a narrow bridge, once part of Highway 8 that joined the City of Hull with the Village of Pointe Gatineau. It was abandoned when Fournier Boulevard (the road to the left) was built.

That old bridge eventually became part of the bike path. It was built in the early 1900s and in recent years was deemed unsafe.

Set into the bridge was this iron drainage grate made by the Limoges and Freres Foundry of Hull.

The NCC has recently rebuilt the bridge with a new road bed and these box trusses which are strictly for decoration.  It has been renamed the Mawandoseg Bridge, which means 'Land where we gathered for celebration' in Algonquin. To avoid any degradation of the turtle nesting habitat below they reused the old footings. (Photo: NCC)

René Richard's bracingly breezy pavilion was a modest monument to the provision of high quality design for public spaces. For various reasons after forty years it had outlived its original functionality.  Too bad that the NCC failed to uphold its mandate to support and protect its architectural heritage by not restoring the building.

But the new pavilion is a worthy replacement, slightly extending the footprint and reinterpreting the original's approach with a dramatic roofline sheltering the spaces below.

The knuckle joints where the wooden support columns meet the ground have been repeated. This is to keep their feet out of the water.

As tree forms they sprout laminated beams to carry the inverted V-shaped roofing system.

Sliding barn doors (also used on the original pavilion) can close of the interior spaces.

I don't know how long the restaurant survived after 1961. Today there is just a concession stand.

The 2000s version has turned out to be more Colorado lodge-like than its 1960s Space Age predecessor. 

Today Lac Leamy Lake is a very chill place, but probably less popular than it once was. For Gatineau's urban residents who don't have cottages, it attracts a mix of senior couples eating lunch together, bikers (the leather kind), older men getting a tan, various sportifs, rowdy teenagers, and many new Canadians, all contentedly sharing this sylvan space. (Photo: Ted Grant, LACe999904517)

THE L.H. MAJOR & J. SOUBLIERE, & LAPORTE-MARTIN, & LCBO NICHOLAS STREET WAREHOUSE

May 22, 2018, 11:17 am

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On September 1, 1911 L.H. Major and J. Soubliere Ltd. purchased a deep lot on the west side of Nicholas Street south of Laurier from the Kirby Realty Co. for $4,635. Three years later the partnership moved into this stylish silica-lime brick and dressed limestone building. The relatively narrow formal frontage disguised the commercial operations going on in the Kahn-system concrete structure behind it. This sturdy little complex stood here until the late 1970s and its surroundings were radically altered in the intervening decades.

Major and Soubliere's 11,500 square foot warehouse, designed by W.E. Noffke was conveniently situated beside Ottawa's railway centre on a hill above the Central Depot tracks with sidings for receiving and distributing their lines of imported liquors, wines, cigars, cigarettes, and specialty groceries. The firm had established itself in 1907 as a rival breakaway from the long established S.J. Major food and wine business where L.H. had served as treasurer and accountant, and partner Soubliere worked as a commercial traveller. Their new venture grew rapidly. 'The growth of this enterprising and up-to-date business is a study in the growth of trade in Ottawa. It is a most vivid and striking demonstration of the fact that the days of small things in Ottawa is a thing of the past. A visit to this firm's handsome new structure at 160 Nicholas Street, which has the best wine cellar in Canada, is a most eloquent proof of this truth.'(Ottawa Journal, April 14, 1914)

The aerial perspective drawing showed a large open loading yard beside the warehouse, but in fact it was hemmed in by other buildings (mostly residential) on the west side of Nicholas. In May of 1929 the block was photographed by the stills division of the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau in preparation for the area being cleared of almost all of its structures for a city beautification project. The warehouse would be spared this fate. (Photo: LACe999908769-u)

The block's rear view, seen from the Laurier Avenue Bridge, was less salubrious. The bold lettering painted on the building's backside indicates that the business had changed hands. In 1922 Major and Soubliere was taken over by Laporte-Martin Limitée, Montreal based importers of fancy foods. (Photo: LACe999908774-u)

Their house brand was sold under the 'Victoria' label. (Ottawa Journal, August 1, 1924)


Looking across the cleared Nicholas Street properties the warehouse's south side and its loading docks is revealed. (Photo: LACe999908790-u)

Aerial photos from 1931 and 1933 show the progress of the Federal District Commission's building removal work. Once cleared of everything but the warehouse the land was graded and grassed over. The FDC's objective was to screen and buffer the railway lines from Sandy Hill and a newly widened Nicholas Street that even then functioned as one of the principal arteries into the centre of Ottawa. The landscaped strip was planted with quick growing Lombardy poplar trees.

To hide the horrors of the railway land the landscaped strip would ultimately be planted with a row of fast-growing Lombardy poplar trees. (Photo: LACe999908775-u)

Some of these columnar giants can still be seen in this 1967 shot of the National Capital Commission's new scenic driveway that replaced the tracks once Union Station was moved to the outskirts. (Photo: NCC Library)



These properties north of the warehouse were designated for demolition. Although it's labelled 'the north west corner of Nicholas Street at Laurier Avenue' from the street names painted on the cornice above this barber shop this was actually the south west corner of the intersection. (Photo: LACe999908770-u)

However the buildings on the north west corner were also demolished, and the vacant land turned into a playground, albeit one with unwholesome and dangerous surroundings. (Photo: LACe999908786-u)

A one-gallon stoneware jug imprinted with the Major and Soubliere mark could be had at Yardley's Antiques for $150, discounted for the chip.

One of Laporte-Martin's most popular imports was Le Soleil baby peas, cooked and canned the same day that they were picked by expert Belgian chefs. (Ottawa Journal, October 22, 1923)

The Laporte-Martin business lasted less than five years. In 1927 the property was sold to the Canadian National Railways and leased to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario as a liquor storage facility for $1 million of alcohol supplying 14 counties in Eastern Ontario. Thus the building escaped demolition while its neighbours were being cleared away. (Ottawa Journal, November 2, 1922)

By 1934 as the landscaping of the area was being completed critics of the FDC were demanding that the liquor warehouse be acquired and demolished for park purposes, but both the building's owners and occupants were obstacles. In 1957, with their lease expiring in two years the LCBO announced that it would be building a new warehouse at the city limits on Highway 31. After the Liquor Control Board had abandoned the warehouse the City of Ottawa stepped in to claim the building (still owned by the CNR) for the widening of Nicholas Street, but discovered that it had been leased to the University of Ottawa for 10 years. Ten years after that Major and Soubliere's building fell before the road-building demands of the Regional Municipality and the NCC's long held wish to create a 'park' on what was left.

1965 (top) and 1991 (bottom) aerial photo comparisons of the warehouse location. (Photos: geoOttawa)

Co-incidentally, on the exact day that L.H. Major announced his new building on Nicholas, S.J. Major Limited advertised the opening of their new warehouse on York Street, designed by C.P. Meredith. In 1925 it was merged with the food giant, National Groceries Ltd. Much bigger and more forward looking, it has survived a series of changes in use. (Ottawa Journal, April 14, 1914, Google StreetView)

High-style design must have run in the family's blood. Founding patriarch Sylvanie Joseph Major died on June 5, 1903.  He was buried with some pomp. Notre Dame church was entirely draped in gold-trimmed black. The funeral cortege which stretched along Sussex from St. Patrick to Rideau was led by hearse carriage led by four-in-hand jet black horses, where it was met by a 10-foot high catafalque. S.J.'s remains were then taken to the family's mausoleum in Notre Dame cemetery.

NOULAN CAUCHON'S CRAZY, MAD, AND GOOD PLANNING SCHEMES

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Between 1911 and 1914 Noulan Cauchon (b. 1872) issued a torrent of planning propositions published in the pages of the Ottawa Citizen. Crudely drawn but conceptually vivid they expressed his pent up energy and wild theories. Cauchon was a colourful, dynamic engineer turned town planner popular among his fellows. He later became the Chairman of Ottawa's Town Planning Commission and the city's first full-time planner. In this post he produced forward thinking ideas for housing subdivisions, zoning regulations, environmental conservation, traffic management and economic development. They went largely unimplemented due to the city's overcautious Council's and sheer stinginess. Cauchon was a persistent critic of the Federal Government's plans for the capital, offering counter proposals at every turn. Nonetheless because of his tireless public lectures, publications and conference presentations Noulan Cauchon was one of the best known Canadian planners of his day.

First - a little personal information. Cauchon was a follower of the Canadian branch of the Men's Dress Reform Party which advocated looser more breathable garments for men - open collars, loose shirts and shorts for better air circulation. He was famous for wandering the streets and attending Board of Control meetings lightly clad. That's him posing in some of his designs. (Ottawa Citizen, August 22, 1930 and April 29, 1933)

And for a time he lived here at 27 Goulbourn Ave. Cauchon was the son of Joseph-Edouard Cauchon, a journalist, Conservative politician and Lt-Governor of Manitoba. Married late in life to Marguerite Louise de St-Denis LeMoine, from a prominent French Canadian family. They had no children. When he died in 1935 he left an estate valued at $350,000 in cash with additional assets.

As for his planning schemes Cauchon's 1910 'Proposed Diversion of the Rideau Canal by Way of Dow's Lake and the Chaudiere' is certainly arresting. It was associated with one of the biggest unrealized navigational projects of its day. The existing canal would be stopped up near the bend in the Deep Cut south of Waverley Street. To the north railway tracks could run to the centre of the city along its empty channel. Since the canal's section reaching to Dow's Lake would no longer be needed for boats it could be spanned by five new low-level crossings. The heavy black lines are the locations of the new canal channels from Dow's Lake to Nepean Bay which would need no locks, and a daredevil run straight through the Chaudiere Fall which would need a lot of locks. (Ottawa Citizen, July 16, 1910)

Years later as Past President of the Town Planning Institute of Canada Cauchon used an aerial photograph of this area to illustrate his address to the Toronto Chapter of the OAA. In it he would summarize many of his theories on transportation and land use. (RAIC Journal, July 1926)

Cauchon was a fervent supporter of the Georgian Bay Ship Canal which if built would dramatically alter the City of Ottawa region - in effect opening the potential for a deep water 'national port'. (Ottawa Citizen, February 12, 1913)


The Georgian Bay Ship Canal was intended to create a direct route for ocean-going vessels between the Port of Montreal and the Upper Great Lakes. From its western terminus the course of the French River would join Lake Nipissing. From there it was a short link to the Ottawa River which would be flooded and controlled by massive dams.

This allowed for a major intermodal port east of Ottawa to be accessed by all railways which serviced six rail-decked jetties projecting into the river, for loading and unloading. This new industrial area was to be connected to the city by a diagonal roadway. (Ottawa Citizen, June 1, 1912)

There would have been more dramatic changes near the centre of the city. The conservation dam, raising the Ottawa River levels above it stretched the full width between the Ontario and Quebec shorelines. Shipping traffic was to be diverted through Hull, disgorging at the mouth of the Gatineau River. Cauchon's scheme was to 'put the whole Ottawa River through one monumental power house, eliminating the inefficiencies and ugliness of the individual industrial developments in Ottawa and Hull.' He cautioned that the position of the powerhouse and penstocks as shown was 'only diagrammatic and not intended as accurate'. (Ottawa Citizen, December 15, 1914)

This proposal set forth by Naulon Cauchon married the Georgian Bay Ship Canal with two local problems - the delays caused by at-grade road crossings over the railway lines entering Ottawa from the west, and the city's search for a clean water supply. The marshy areas along the river contained by a dyke would be filled for a sedimentation basin holding the city's water supply. New unobstructed railway lines ran on the own rights of way on top of the dyke. (Ottawa Citizen, September 4, 1911)

Ottawa's typhoid epidemics of 1911 and 1912 which infected over 1,000 in each year brought the newly formed engineering partnership of Nolan Cauchon and R.L. Haycock to public attention. To investigate the source of the infection Cauchon donned a diving suit and slipped into Nepean Bay searching for water system's intake point. Once located, he dove through the pipe travelling on his belly on top of a kiddy-car device until he found the cracks where sewage from Hintonburg was entering. While hundreds more died a protracted debate between the city's water treatment and anti-water treatment factions raged. At the time most people, who called the treatment chemicals 'dope', preferred raw water and the search was on for an uncontaminated source. Engineers Cauchon and Haycock joined the competition to design a system that would supply clean water. (Ottawa Citizen, December 13, 1913)

The C. and H. plan was to sink a deep intake pipe into the middle of the Ottawa River at the head of Lake Deschenes, where it would theoretically be upstream from pollution sources. From here it would be pumped six miles uphill to a holding reservoir at Chelsea. The flow back to Ottawa's Fleet Street pumping station (another 6 miles) was gravity fed. (Ottawa Citizen, December 13, 1913)

Two other schemes proposed even more distant sources in the Gatineau Hills where the water rights of 31-Mile Lake or McGregor Lake would be secured for the city's water system and pumped back to Ottawa. In the end those civic officials who had long denied the germ theory of disease spread were swept from office. After the Mayor resigned, and the City Engineer and Chief Medical Officer fired, the city opted for a filtration and treatment system. (Ottawa Citizen, December 20, 1913)

To say that the Canadian Pacific Railway was miffed when its rival the Grand Trunk Railway was about to open its Ottawa terminal would be no exaggeration. The CPR wanted a terminal of its own, provided that the City of Ottawa could provide a suitable location and a right of way for its tracks. In 1911 Cauchon, who had worked for the CPR devised this plan for a second great station across the Rideau Canal from the GTR while transforming Connaught Place into a sweeping open plaza that 'would form a magnificent gateway to the Capital and a magnificent main approach to the Parliament Buildings'.(Ottawa Citizen, November 14, 1914)

It was an idea that was picked up by Edward Bennett four years later in the Federal Plan Commission Report of 1915, although he moved the second station south of Union Station and decked over the Rideau Canal.

In 1911 Cauchon proposed filling in Dow's Lake, which he termed a 'shallow and useless body of water.'(Ottawa Citizen, November 27, 1911)

A ring dam could be constructed at the southern end of the lake. The landfilled remaining portion could be combined with the reclamation of the adjacent Booth Lumber Co.'s Fraserfield piling yards for a really large parade ground. Later Cauchon would agitate for the Central Canada Exhibition removal from Lansdowne Park to a new exhibition grounds on the lands southwest of the lake between the Rideau Canal and the Rideau River where Carleton University now sits. (Ottawa Citizen, November 27, 1911)

Cauchon hated the Beaux-arts plans for the ensemble of departmental buildings designed by the likes of John Lyle, Maxwell and Maxwell and Sir Robert Borden's favourite by British architect Aston Webb (above) expected to be built along Wellington Street west of Parliament Hill.  He used a composite photograph to demonstrate that the two sets of buildings did not harmonize. It was the craggy profile of the Gothic vs. the broad flatness of modern neo-classic that clashed he said. In his public lecture on the subject Cauchon used a photo of Mont-Saint-Michel's silhouette as an exemplar.(Ottawa Citizen, April 8, 1913)

Not that he was immune to Beaux-arts and City Beautiful planning, as demonstrated by his 30,000 seat open amphitheatre which was a feature of his 1916 plan for the City of Hamilton.

In his presentation to the Hull Board of Trade on how that city could be modernized by systematic replanning an artistic bridge connected Hull with something called the King's Way. (Ottawa Citizen, July 25, 1913)

In angle and alignment it predicts the Portage Bridge over Victoria Island and the Boulevard des Alumettieres which would be built many decades later.

In his more megalomaniac phases Cauchon was tinged by the legacy of Baron Haussmann. When showing slides of his proposal to turn Lyon Street into the King's Way he followed them up with comparative views of the Champs Elysées. (Drawing signed by Cauchon, March 5, 1912)

This grandiose diagonal Dufferin Boulevard sprang from the corner of Rideau and Nicholas Street, sliced right through Lowertown crossing over a dam to control Rideau River floodwaters just below Porter's Island. From here it became an eastern extension headed for those Georgian Bay Ship Canal industrial lands. (Ottawa Citizen, November 14, 1914)

At his most theoretical Cauchon elevated planning into pure abstracted geometry. The 45-degree angles form the fundamental building blocks of hexagonal planning, where a honeycomb of streets and traffic circles avoids the congestion-making pinch points of the gridded street pattern.


Cauchon was occasionally hired by the Federal Government. He was asked to 'prepare and outline an artistic scheme which will embrace not only the beautification of the Hill, but also improving from a scenic viewpoint the banks of the river from the Rideau Canal locks down to Kent and Lyon Streets.'(Ottawa Citizen, January 28, 1913)

Clearing up loose debris from the Ottawa River shoreline wasn't sufficient for Cauchon. He seized on the environmental degradation that was going on across the river. A proto-environmentalist, he was an early champion in campaigns against air and water pollution. For the Government however this was the smell of progress and it didn't appreciate his intervention. (Ottawa Citizen, April 13, 1913)

He wasn't consistent in this effort. Noulan Cauchon wanted to set aside large industrial zones on the open lands that were still available at the edge of the city. As Chairman of the Town Planning Commission crafting a comprehensive zoning by-law with segregated land uses was one of his primary administrative preoccupations. When it was finally passed in 1925 it was of limited effect and came under attack at the Ontario Municipal Board by the Ottawa Land Association, a property rights pressure group. (Ottawa Citizen, March 30, 1911)


This map showed the most desirable areas around Ottawa and Hull with elevations of 250 to 300 feet for parkland reservations to be connected by parkways across the lower land. (Ottawa Citizen, June 29, 1912)

The Federal District Plan was less generous with park space and interconnections. (E.H. Bennett, Consultant on Federal District Plan, January 1915)

He wasn't only concerned with parks. Infrastructure for economic growth was important too. Cauchon believed that the Ottawa Electric Railway urgently needed extended streetcar lines the full length of Somerset with bridges over the Rideau Canal and the Rideau River to reach an area near Eastview designated as Factory Area No. 1 and the Notre Dame and Beechwood cemeteries. (Ottawa Citizen, June 19, 1911)

To open up lands for new housing in Ottawa South and Ottawa East he wanted a rapid transit belt line encircling the city. He came to see housing supported by good planning as his most important mission. In his final months of life he served as the professional adviser to the Parliamentary Committee on Housing which produced the National Housing Act of 1935. (Ottawa Citizen, June 12, 1914)

Noulan Cauchon's planning masterpiece was the Federal District Plan of 1922. Jacques Gréber credited it as the foundation of the 1950 General Plan for the National Capital. Before he was hired by Mackenzie King, they had met while Cauchon was on a lecture tour in 1934 and discussed Ottawa's planning problems. It predicted many of the key principles of the later plan - the establishment of a national capital region and the creation of Gatineau Park. (Journal of the Town Planning Institute, April 1922)

The 1922 plan sketched out an ambitious railway relocation scheme that was very similar to Gréber's, including the Walkley Road rail yards south of the city.

Almost all of the Ottawa River shoreline between the Chaudiere and Britannia Bay was to be de-industrialized and become a park, connected to other parks by greenway corridors. The cross town tracks would be converted into a 'Rapid Transit Highway'.

And Cauchon had not abandoned his dreams for the Georgian Bay Ship Canal. Here he replaced it with the 'Ottawa Cardinal Canal' a deep water ship channel that would link the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers.

Plans for the Wellington Street government buildings west of Parliament Hill and the final design and location of the National War Memorial were still fermenting when Cauchon stepped forward with his own. WWI was to be commemorated by the Vimy Way National Memorial. Starting on Cliff Street at the foot of Bronson it was envisioned as a processional road following the Ottawa River banks below the steep cliffs of Uppertown and Parliament Hill. The climax was reached at the bare rock outcropping beneath the site of the current Supreme Court. As he described it 'A feature of the Vimy Way proposal is that where it cuts Cliff Street into a miniature canyon it will thereby isolate to the north a large block of rock from the mainland. It is proposed that this large isolated core of cliff be moulded and heightened architecturally from the water's edge upwards into a soaring, colossal unique cenotaph - a symbol of glorified national being. (Ottawa Town Planning Commission Report 1925)

Vimy Way more or less followed the route of today's mixed use pathway until it reached the Rideau Canal. From here it ascended to Major's Hill Park where you would find a new National Art Gallery and a Concert Hall. (Ottawa Town Planning Commission Report 1925)

In response to the Federal Government's 1927 Confederation Park plan, Noulan's T.P.C produced this, which combined an updated version of the Major's Hill Park section of 'Vimy Way' hinged by its 'Confederation Place' gyratory traffic circles to a widened Elgin Boulevard down to Lisgar Street. Major's Hill Park was linked by a bridge over the Rideau Canal entrance locks to Parliament Hill. The plan pointedly positioned a new City Hall in place of the old one, which Cauchon called 'the most magnificent site available'. It was land that Mackenzie King had earmarked for his Confederation 'Square'. King, still annoyed by the Ottawa Town Planning Commission's alternative proposal for Confederation Park countered that 'It would be a mistake for Ottawa City Council to assume that the Federal Government went to the expense and trouble of acquiring and tearing down the Russell House and other buildings in the heart of the Capital in order to provide a site for the City Hall. (Ottawa Citizen, June 27, 1928)

Cauchon died after a sudden onset of pneumonia on October 28, 1935. His name would be invoked for years afterward as the city continued to ask 'What would Noulan do?' when a knotty planning questions arose.' In 'Noulan Cauchan - An Appreciation' a tribute written a year after he died the architect Percy Nobbs remembered Cauchon's hot temperament. 'Noulan Cauchon loved argument. He believed in agitating people's brains. A big strong warm man, he would grip an opponent as if in a vise, and shake him like a terrier does a rat, to reinforce a point on which he felt strongly.' You can certainly see some of that insistent character in those early schemes of 1911-1914. (Ottawa Citizen, October 28, 1935)

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As the year 1960 approached the leading edge of the Ontario's baby boom wave would soon be reaching college entry age. The race was on for university expansions. Eager to reap an anticipated bonanza of provincial funding, on February 5, 1959 the University of Ottawa made known its intention to finish its levelling of thirteen square blocks of Sandy Hill. Ottawa U had already grown considerably by developing a large tract of land south of Somerset Street between Nicholas and King Edward Avenue. It's that trapezoid in the upper right hand corner of this map. For over 70 years this was the site of a sports facility, the Varsity Oval.
ADVISORY: This is a hefty post. It started out as a small investigation into the Oval's history and ballooned into something else.

The Varsity Oval stadium's four distinctive arches stand out in this 1930 panoramic view taken from across the Rideau Canal on the west bank at the corner of the FDC Driveway and Waverley Street, when the building was brand new. This was the third grandstand to be built at the Oval.The $23,000 contract was awarded on March 18, 1930 and it was completed in time for the University of Ottawa's annual May 24th field day. The Ottawa Artificial Ice Co. plant, which made 50 tons of ice from double distilled water every day is on the right. (Photo: LAC e999908789)

And here is the stadium in profile, looking down Nicholas Street a few years later. Construction of the new stadium was announced in the Ottawa Citizen on February 24, 1930: 'Presaging an active campaign to attain the former place of eminence which was occupied in the world of athletics by the Institution, the University of Ottawa has decided to go ahead with the construction of a grandstand on the Oval this spring. Plans have been prepared by Noffke, Morin and Sylvester architects. It will be erected as a unit that may be added to as demands for further space are apparent.'(Photo: LAC e999908791)

'The building will be of steel and concrete and entirely fireproof The roof will be of steel. A seating capacity of 1,000 will be available in the first unit. The structure will tower high enough so that it will have an impressive appearance from the far side of the Rideau Canal and is in full view of passengers on trains entering Ottawa. In the centre will appear in concrete the lettering "Université d'Ottawa" with the word "Stadium"'. (Photos: The Fulcrum, 1953)

There has been sports, racing and recreation fields for football, lacrosse and cricket near the dead end of Somerset Street East since 1885. The grounds were delineated by a ring of trees in this detail from a 1895 oblique bird's eye view of Ottawa. (Map: LAC e010745318)

Before the construction of the 1930 Noffke, Morin and Sylvester stadium there had been earlier stands on the site. The Ottawa University Athletic Oval (this 1901 fire insurance plate splits the grandstand in two) was opened with a Capital Bicycling Club rally on July 27, 1899. The next day the Ottawa Citizen wrote 'The formal opening of the new Varsity Athletic Oval, which took place last night, was one of the finest sporting events that has taken place in Ottawa for many years. To say it was an immense success would be putting it mildly. There were over two thousand people present, and they left at the conclusion of the program loud in their praises. The grounds presented a most enchanting appearance...' (Map: LAC e010689389)  

                             

'What with its dozen of big arc lights, which shone forth in their brilliancy at every few yards around the track, the grass plot which is as level as a billiard table and the grandstand, with its mass of humanity, the greater number of whom were members of the fair sex, attired in their pretty summer costumes, it was indeed a sight which will not be forgotten by those present. And then the racing - and what racing it was. Every number of the card was a race worth going miles to see. There were innumerable eye-lash finishes, and one dead heat, but not a loaf in any of the various events.'(Ottawa Citizen, July 28, 1899) (Photo, this is actually the first stadium at the Oval built in 1888: The Fulcrum, 1953)

The Oval, with its stadium, outbuildings, track, and two playing fields only occupied the northern half of this big wedge of land. The Ottawa Artificial Ice Co. and a station for the New York Central/Ottawa and New York Railway were neighbours. Through the years new lines like the Canadian Northern Railway trying to gain rights of way into the city centre had threatened to slice through Ottawa U's grounds. but the University held firm. Here is an aerial view from 1933. (Photo: NAPL A4571-26)

Under the pressures of post-WWII growth the University of Ottawa Oval's days were numbered, or as this caption reads sports yields to science for the construction of a new science and engineering complex. In the intervening years the itty-bitty stadium was never extended as originally planned. (Ottawa Citizen, February 20, 1956)

It was still around a year after the ground breaking, as the steel for Ottawa U's new Electrical Engineering building was going up. (Ottawa Citizen, February 18, 1957)

A month later the demolition of the Varsity Oval was underway and the steel roof was being peeled away. (Ottawa Citizen, March 27, 1957)

It was one of the biggest pieces of recreational land close to the heart of the city, although a fair remove from the centre of the University of Ottawa campus at Laurier and Cumberland. (1950 Map by Hammond and Co.)


A site plan for Ottawa U's science and engineering complex was published in early 1956. It would incorporate all of the disciplines in eight separate departmental buildings, running off a central heating plant. (Ottawa Citizen, March 29, 1956)

A tabletop model was photographed for the Association of Professional Engineers. Most recognizable is the Chemistry Department with its attached assembly hall, to be placed kitty-corner at Somerset and Nicholas. (City of Toronto Archives/Association of Professional Engineers)

The orientation of the Chemistry Building was rotated to directly face onto Nicholas Street, with a teaching auditorium, now known as Marion Hall, tucked in behind. It was named for the head of the chemistry department Dr. Leo Marion, who incidentally was the brother-in-law of the building's architect Jean Serge LeFort. (Ottawa Citizen, September 5, 1957)

The five engineering buildings connected by covered walkways stood to one side of the complex's central plaza. The promised completion date was 1961. However by then only one engineering and two science buildings had actually been finished. (Ottawa Citizen, March 29, 1956)

Until 1959 Ottawa U's acquisition of Sandy Hill had been largely piecemeal. They had gradually bought up all of the buildings along Waller and Nicholas Street, trying to make a contiguous swath of land joining the old main building with the new science and engineering campus on the Varsity Oval site. In a single stroke they announced their intention to move all the way to Henderson, one block east of King Edward Avenue. Objections from Sandy Hill residents living in the targeted blocks mounted but their resistance was futile and the feud is simmering to this day.  (Ottawa Citizen, February 5, 1959)

In a gratuitous gesture as each historic brick house, row or apartment building was expropriated or purchased the university covered them with institutional grey paint which marked them as doomed. As a nod to more recent heritage considerations some of the facades (but not the sides) of those buildings which survive, like these on Stewart Street, have been stripped of the paint. (Google Streetview)                           
The other shoe dropped with their 20-year redevelopment plan which included a major university hospital as its centrepiece. It prescribed an array of monstrous buildings wildly out of synch with the prevailing modernist architectural vocabulary of the 1960s. (Ottawa Journal, December 15, 1960)

The designs had been produced by Jean Serge LeFort (1905-1982) who had been on retainer as the university's chief architect since 1950. Born in Ottawa he was educated at the University of Ottawa and trained as an architect in the office of Noffke, Morin and Sylvester. He later studied at MIT, practised briefly in Montreal and opened his own Ottawa office in 1936. Other than Ottawa U work his practice generated a score of competent but conservative religious buildings and separate schools on both sides of the river. (Ottawa Citizen, December 15, 1960)

Prior to his work for the University of Ottawa LeFort was best known for his design for the Eastview (now Montfort) Hospital on Montreal Road (1950-53).

The Ottawa U proposals were somewhat more regressive. It has to be remembered that in the early 1960s the new Canadian universities were the test tubes for architectural experimentation. To call these campus buildings coherent and consistent would be too generous. In truth, their oppressive monotony was almost Soviet style. (Ottawa Citizen, December 15, 1960)


U of O Fine Arts student Dennis Faulkner made the news when he called the master plan’s buildings ‘unimaginative, lifeless and completely devoid of aesthetic consideration’. He described their design as a continuation of the campus’s existing buildings, ‘huge rectangles of grey stone sliced by monotonous rows of windows’. His criticism was echoed by Ottawa’s architectural community and found a national audience in Canadian Art magazine. It had a remarkable effect. (Ottawa Citizen, March 15, 1961)                          

To understand his concerns you need to recapitulate Jean Serge LeFort's record at Ottawa U. LeFort developed early schemes for two buildings in 1948 and 1949. The School of Medicine at Somerset and Nicholas was designed out in 1954 but funding gaps delayed its opening for a few more years. The stair tower to the left of the main entrance deployed one of his favourite devices - a vertical strip window, and a cross to emphasize the institution's religious origins. (Ottawa Citizen, August 21, 1954 and Google Streetview)

It was something (and the only original element that has survived) that he had tried with a stack of glass blocks in his first building for the University of Ottawa, the 1947 bookstore and extension department at 1 Stewart Street. (Google Streetview)



The Faculty of Arts, slightly more ornamented than the medical school, came a year later. In the 1960 plan it was to have been expanded by adding enormous wings to the north and south. (Ottawa Citizen, June 27, 1955 and Google Streetview)



But before the Medicine and Arts Faculties were built the Electrical Engineering building was the first to be constructed on the Oval lands. (Ottawa Citizen, November 22, 1956 and September 21, 1957)

LeFort's plans for slightly more adventuresome buildings to house the law and social sciences departments (left) and the biology department (right) were developed in 1958 but never realized. They were of the 'modern functional style in Indiana limestone' to conform to the six new buildings previously constructed. (Ottawa Citizen, November 28, 1958)


A biology building scaled back from the 1958 proposal was finished in 1960. Some of it has survived behind the new Biosciences building. (Ottawa Citizen, February 22, 1960 and Google Streetview)

According to one official the storm of public criticism of the 1960 plan 'was one of the best things ever to happen to the university'. In early 1961 they met with a group of local architects who brought along James A. Murray, a professor at the University of Toronto School of Architecture and the editor of the Canadian Architect magazine. By February 1962 he was presenting concepts to the university and was hired as their planning consultant on June 4, 1962. (Ottawa Citizen, October 3, 1963)

John B. Parkin Associates' plan (detail above, with the University of Ottawa's domed administration building at the lower right) for re-making the banks of the Rideau Canal between Laurier and Confederation Square had hit the city with a thunderclap in 1962. Murray declared that 'Nowhere in North America exists such a comparable opportunity for wonderful continuity for bringing into design relationship  two such major activities as university and urban development along such a beautiful natural feature as the Rideau Canal.'

The key concept of Murray's 1963 development plan was to close most of the city streets west of King Edward Avenue. This allowed for a car-free internal circulation network meandering through a sequence of sub-campuses with different functions - science, medical, residential, historic and a central campus in the middle. Rather than LeFort's serried ranks of identical buildings, the university would be sprinkled with irregular architectural massing and asymmetrical siting. For the moment the plans for a new hospital had been shelved. (Ottawa Citizen, June 6, 1963)

If Jean Serge LeFort, on the left, harboured any resentment over having his vision for the university so soundly rejected it was well hidden in this publicity photo. In fact he and Murray joined forces to immediately begin designing three buildings in the newly approved style. (Ottawa Journal, June 6, 1963)

Their first joint effort was for the men's residence originally called Tabaret, but now known as Marchand. Its siting was intended to push the campus closer to the Rideau Canal, with the expectation that once the railway tracks than ran here were removed and Nicholas Street eliminated (an element of the Murray plan) the university would find itself in a new park-like setting. (Ottawa Citizen, December 9, 1963)

It was a break from LeFort's endless expanse of Indiana limestone and kicked off the university's move to establish a taller hard edged urban wall along the canal corridor. The residence's most interesting feature was its west facing double height common rooms.

The set-up was not repeated in the similar residence that was built next door. (Google Streetview)

They included a kitchenette floating on a mezzanine level, which has since been walled off. These look like great social spaces, but given the solar roller-blinds probably hot as hell. 

Their second collaboration was for a women's residence on College (now Copernicus) Street. Unremarkable except for a thick band of stone at the roof line.  (Google Streetview)

The third Murray-LeFort design was MacDonald Hall with a dash of colourful curtain wall, now demolished. (Photo: Capital Modern)

You may remember the canal-facing end of the MacDonald, where James Boyd's pixilated mural 'The Eyes' was installed in 1973. After three decades the paint had worn off. (Photo: uOttawa)

Just before the building had to be sacrificed in 2016 for a much bigger one Boyd's mural was restored, with an accompanying QR code. Rising above it is the cruciform shaped hot gas discharge tower of Ottawa U's Maintenance Services Building (1970-72, Murray and Murray, and Lapierre). The central heating and cooling plant, with two miles of subterranean piping, was an unexpected requirement when the university learned that it would not be able to hook up to the Government of Canada's central heating plant. (Photo: uOttawa)

Its replacement, the STEM building by Perkins+Will Architects promised to recreate The Eyes - but the effect as depicted in this rendering doesn't work in real life.

Voting on a special levy to build James Murray's $3.5 million Student Social Centre was presented to the student body in March 1966. The centre would consist of four levels almost entirely fronted in glass. It would contain a 1200 seat theatre, a ballroom large enough to accommodate 400 couples, two large cafeterias, a drug store, barbershop, games and television rooms and offices for the student newspaper, government and association. The Student Centre would be surrounded by a sunken garden in the middle of the campus. It had been strongly advocated for by student union president Jock Turcot who had been killed in a car accident on Christmas Day 1965. (Ottawa Journal, March 24, 1966)

The sod was turned for the new University Centre six years later on November 26, 1971. (Ottawa Journal, November 25, 1971)

As completed the Bauhaus-y University Centre was a much scaled down version of Murray's scheme, and it was named in memory of Jock Turcot. (Google Streetview)

Over time James Murray's 1963 master plan had been modified by the addition of tall towers and enclosed passerelles between the buildings. The visits to City Hall for development approvals proved to be fractious. In addition to design concurrence from Ottawa's Building Appearance Committee, the city had to authorize the many municipal street closures. Charlotte Whitton felt that the university was throwing its weight around by trying the circumvent the usual process (the Ottawa Planning Area Board and the Board of Control) when it tried direct political pressure on City Council's Aldermen. (Ottawa Journal, October 5, 1967)

The plan had to be updated again in 1968 when the University of Ottawa was promised a 400-bed teaching hospital, medical research facility, and new School of Medicine (buildings 23 b-c-d on this model) which would be located on the proposed King Edward Freeway. This brought the MLM architectural consortium - Martineau, Lapierre, and Murray and Murray - into the project. For the next ten years they would design most of Ottawa U's new buildings, some exceptions being Gordon S. Adamson's Faculty of Law building and David and Boulva Architects' Faculty of Education. (Ottawa Journal, February 21, 1968)

In 1965 as the planning was still underway the future campus was a densely packed residential neighbourhood. (Photo: geoOttawa)

As in most master plans that evolve through multiple iterations the final result was a blend of elements taken from the separate versions. By 1991 there remained a number of surface parking lots to be filled, but it did not prove to be a lesson in the evils of urban renewal. The University of Ottawa is a compact downtown campus with buildings and open spaces both good and indifferent. (Photo: geoOttawa)

The 1970s generation of MLM Consortium's design took the University of Ottawa's institutional style in a decidedly Brutalist direction. Remember the Ottawa Artificial Ice plant south of the Varsity Oval? Ottawa U bought the property in 1968 for this. (Ottawa Citizen, April 9, 1969)

It was the most complex and expensive of the MLM buildings in Ottawa U's 1970s expansionary period. Col. By Hall is a set of four interlocking square office and laboratory blocks punctuated by large stairway towers. (Ottawa Citizen, May 28, 1969)

Its almost windowless walls - only thin strips of glazing were mandated by some of the labs within - the 'hot' labs were blast proof. The inside is a maze, but for their remarkable scale the cavernous stair towers are worth a visit. (Photo: Vik Pahwa Photography)

The library (MLM Consortium) was designed to hold almost a million books and 2,000 students at study. It's set in a depressed well and connected to the other buildings by a sunken concourse and elevated walkways. The plan was laid out with a grid of modules that are 22 and a half feet square which was echoed in the thrusting boxes. (Ottawa Citizen, May 16, 1970)

The architects said that the sculptural expression of the exterior was 'intended to be strong and forceful and yet refined in its massing. The materials are deliberately few, simple and natural to ensure distinctive boldness in the entire design.' They claimed that it harmonized with the university's historic neighbouring limestone buildings by variations in the pre-cast's textures - ribbed, rough, and smooth. But it's really a thin, derivative and tidied up expression of a Brutalist style that was at the height of its popularity. (Photo: Vik Pahwa Photography)

The Physical Education Building was the boldest of the group. The cantilevered upper floors were going to be stepped out, but this was smoothed out by an angled curtain wall. To contrast with the windows the cast-in-place concrete walls were left raw and board marked. (Ottawa Citizen, August 1, 1970)

Elevating one of the wings over the street was a dramatic gesture, but in a misguided attempt to brighten it up the University of Ottawa has covered over its bare concrete surfaces with a thick coating, hiding their natural gnarliness and and the paint is now peeling away. This has been done all over the campus. (Photo: Charles Akben-Marchand)

One of the University of Ottawa's best buildings was already on the drawing boards as the 1968 master plan was being completed. The Child Study Centre was designed by the brief but brilliant partnership of Schoeler, Heaton, Harvor and Menendez. It was sandwiched between their cigar-shaped PSAC Building on Gilmour Street and the multicoloured Ecole Secondaire Charlebois on Alta Vista Drive at Heron Road. (Photo: Charles Akben-Marchand)

While waiting for their new building the Centre was located in temporary accommodations in the former LCBO warehouse on Nicholas Street. S,H,H and M's early concepts for the Child Study Centre show a more heavy handed treatment of the wall projections which would be refined on the upper stories of the final version with glazed boxes. (Ottawa Journal, May 20, 1969)

The Child Study Centre was attached to LeFort's Faculty of Medicine building. (Photo: Charles Akben-Marchand)
Additional blocks in two more wings were suggested in an even earlier version. (Ottawa Citizen, March 22, 1969)

Mindful of the heavy traffic on Nicholas Street the western elevation was flat and solid. It provided a protected outdoor play area for the 80-100 children who would be under study by psychologists and social workers - a sunken garden for the tot lot The most dramatic feature was a louvered stepped back terrace on the upper storey, a brise soleil for the large windows . (Ottawa Journal, August 1, 1970)

The Centre was demolished for a new Social Sciences building in 2008.  The precast panels had not weathered very well, and in its final years the lower play area had to be shielded by a wooden hoarding. (Photo: Charles Akben-Marchand)

The raw concrete stair tower standing proud from the the rest of the building was its Brutalist exclamation point. (Photo: Charles Akben-Marchand)

With the requisite board marks and the finesse of the circular staircase descending into the sunken garden. (Photo: Charles Akben-Marchand)

The University of Ottawa's most recent master plan of 2003-2015s by Urban Strategies . The existing buildings (most of them) are picked out in yellow. The consultants proposed filling out the rest of the blocks with towers on podiums.

The uOttawa campus would be pulled further south, well beyond the Varsity Oval. A new node could sprout up clustered around the Lees LRT station.

ANATOMY OF A FORGOTTEN STREETSCAPE: SOMERSET

October 17, 2019, 11:10 am

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This street scene was shot on a late winter’s day in 1955. The City of Ottawa’s Department of Planning and Urban Renewal was documenting derelict buildings on land ready for redevelopment. Their target was a short section of the north side Somerset Street just west of Bank.

Incidentally, the city photographer managed to freeze a slice of social and commercial history. Shortly thereafter this group of ramshackle structures was cleared away for a modest modernist building and a parking lot. First to move into the new building was a hair salon, and has been in continuous use as such until very recently when the Somerset Hair Studio moved to Chinatown several blocks to the west. 

Waxing nostalgic over the vanished past can be a sentimental trap, but this photograph gives us permission to indulge. (Photo: City Archives)

The site has become totally unrecognizable. The only surviving element is a cindercrete chimney. What follows is an annotated reading of what has disappeared. (Photo: Google Streetview)

This is a tiny late 19th century wood frame house that had been modified by the addition of two storefronts in the early 20th century. The left half was the Royal Barber Shop with three chairs and a sunny window containing advertising cards for those smelly lotions and unguents like Wildroot hair dressing oil.

Its mate, Eddie’s Home Made Candies was the most prim of those establishments pictured. They appear to have set up shop just a year before being evicted. The awning, under which stands a shadowy gentleman watching this photograph being taken, has been lowered to prevent his hand dipped chocolates from melting in the winter sun.                    

In 1956 Eddie Legault relocated his candy shop to 356 Elgin Street where up to ten employees also produced peanut brittle, caramel kisses and lots of chocolate bunnies.

Ottawa Citizen, March 24, 1956)


Bill’s Joke and Magic Shop, opened here in the late 1940s was the home of tasteless gags and novelties like the whoopee cushion and plastic vomit. It also carried seasonal items and costume rentals. When the building (we only glimpse the side of it) was demolished Bill’s business moved onto Bank Street.                                              

They landed in two successive locations - 246 and 213 Bank Street, finally closing in 1995 just after the marking of National Laughter Day. The owner blamed the high cost of parking. (Ottawa Citizen, June 22, 1995)

Apparently some quality food was available at the Somerset Grill. You can see the surveyor’s chalkboard easel marked up with an address leaning against the building’s wall. This was a common device for keeping track of these photo surveys. A confectionary and greasy spoon, one of the counter stools sits in the window, the grill had been converted 50 years earlier from a house into a business. The upstairs where they rented out rooms remained residential, and somebody’s laundry is set out to dry on the balcony.                        
Finally the word THE appears on the edge of a stone-faced building in the upper right corner of the photo. 

If you were to back up the rest of this inscription would have read Royal Bank of Canada which had established its Bank and Somerset branch around 1910. It was subsequently modernized, which explains the difference in lettering. The building was re-faced with plain stone panels in a 1948 renovation, which included the 1955 photo's incised letters. (Photo: LAC0109349990)

They erected a new bank building (Douglass and Ross, Architects) on the site in the mid-1960s and closed 20 years later. (Photo: RBC Archives)

Before leaving the bank altered the building's Bank frontage (Garry Stunden Architect). Today it has become CoCo, the Ottawa outpost of the world's largest chain of bubble tea shops. (Photo: Google Streetview)
A condensed version of the post has appeared in the Centretown BUZZ.

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ANATOMY OF A FORGOTTEN STREETSCAPE: GLOUCESTER

October 20, 2019, 9:44 am

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It was likely the stark contrast between new and old that drew the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s urban planners to document the corner of Bay and Gloucester in 1971.                                        

The CMHC was trying to forecast the future by picturing a modern office building rising above this higgledy-piggledy collection of doomed housing.

For reference purposes this is that block of Gloucester Street today. To a great extent their vision has come to pass. (Photo: Google Streetview)

Forty eight years later this is the last old structure still standing in the block, a dormered 3-door row at 339-43 Gloucester Street. It’s typical of hundreds of similar row houses built just before WWI, in fact there was an identical building across the street.

The row is about to be demolished for a high rise apartment.

Workers’ terrace housing built in the early 1870s once dotted the area. There is a surviving example called ‘Quinn’s Row’ nearby on Nepean Street. The slightly sagging Gloucester row and the adjoining ca. 1910 flat roofed neighbour at the left were razed for a condo’s 5-storey parking structure.

The CMHC photo also captures two of the city’s graceful ‘acorn style’ incandescent street lights, later replaced by the   triangular ‘cobra head’ fixtures with nasty orange high pressure sodium bulbs, and now converted to slim energy efficient white light emitting LEDs.                                                

The Nepean Street row, an almost identical four-door terrace with similar canopies over the front doors was built by Patrick Quinn.

Because of its first listing in the Ottawa City Directories it was assumed to have been built ca. 1889. Later research suggest that it was built in another location much earlier and then moved on logs to this site

The heritage designation of 245-251 Nepean Street was an initiative of the Centretown Citizens Community Association in 1985. Since then it received its bronze plaque,  and had to have its original front clapboarding replaced with modern stock that doesn't match the old more narrow siding that's still on the row's end walls. 

The back of a stop sign marks the Lyon Street intersection. Beyond this stood the Dunne Apartments (1913). It was a fireproof building offering large 4-room suites renting for $25 a month with all mod cons, and a roof deck for clothes drying. The Dunne was a product of the early apartment house building boom that seized Centretown once apartment living was deemed respectable for middle class families. It was demolished for a parking lot serving Minto’s Carlisle Apartments.                                                              
Centennial Towers was Robert Campeau’s first major foray into office building. A highly speculative venture for its time because of the distance from the commercial core, it’s credited with dragging the city’s central office district several blocks southwest. The building height of 150 feet (just at the permitted maximum) presaged Campeau’s future limit-piercing battles. Planned in 1964, the name commemorates the Charlottetown Conference of 1864, not the centennial of Confederation as is popularly assumed.     
      
The first major lessee of the cruciform Centennial Towers was the newly formed (1965) Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. In the distance at the right is a wing of the Sir Wilfrid Laurier Building.
 
Before it was broken off from the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources to form DINA, Northern Affairs was scheduled to move into this complex which was going to be built by the Department of Public Works (architects - Page and Steele, Moody and Moore and Partners, 1964 unbuilt) at the edge of Confederation Heights. The site was eventually used for Taxation Data Centre.

Instead the Government of Canada looked to the private sector for office space accommodation. A block away from the Centennial Towers local developers like the Bourque family continued to absorb the Government of Canada's expansion, this time for the Department of Labour at the Sir Wilfrid (1965, George Bemi Associates).

Contemporaneously, on the other side of town at Rideau and King Edward the Department of Citizenship and Immigration moved into Bemi's E.A. Bourque Memorial Building.

The Centennial Towers renovation removed the lively mix of precast panels, re-skinned the building with featureless mirror glass, and enclosed in the drive-though entrance with its hidden off-street front door.

The former bay window projections were wrapped in these wimpy bulges.  
    

And the plural ‘Towers’ is really just a single unified tower with four wings.

TAKING THE BANDAGES OFF THE MEDICAL ARTS BUILDING'S FACADECTOMY

October 25, 2019, 8:11 am

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As heirlooom buildings go the Medical Arts Building is an old chestnut still roasting on the fire. It was once deemed unworthy of protection. In 1985 when the local community association submitted 180 Metcalfe Street for heritage designation the City of Ottawa refused. In 2015, thirty years later it finally designated the building for its historic and architectural value as ‘a unique and well detailed example of an Art Deco building in downtown Ottawa’. The Medical Arts Building has now gone under wraps for a façadectomy. When the bandages are removed several years from now its historic south, east and north walls will re-emerge attached to the bottom of a 27-storey condominium apartment tower. The project’s commencement also coincides with the 90th anniversary of the medical building’s opening in the 1929.

For its time this structure was a model of modern efficiency, designed for a real estate consortium of 50 local doctors and dentists who had visited similar developments in Montreal and Toronto for inspiration. Despite its opening of the eve of the Depression their investment was successful.

The doctors’ office suites would include small waiting areas with wicket windows for settling bills, and examination rooms. Tiled and terrazzo surfaces were used for a germ resistant  environment. The building provided shared services like the x-ray department and a laboratory for test results. In the basement there was to be an assembly hall for the meetings of medical and dental societies, a boardroom for the Ottawa Medical Arts Building Ltd., and a vault for the storage of documents and private papers.

The building’s promoters boasted that it was equipped with ‘the most modern plumbing equipment to be found anywhere in Canada’. In addition, metal chutes for the disposal of medical waste fed an incinerator, and one of the elevators was sufficiently large to accommodate patients on gurneys who needed to be transported between floors. Piped compressed air from a central plant was available for the dentists.

In launching the building the doctors promised that it was ‘the intention of the administrative committee to have the building open daily except on the Sabbath from eight o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, and its staff on the elevators, telephone exchange, etc., will be all females who will wear distinctive uniforms of battleship grey with silver facings.’

This ostentation would gradually disappear. With the advent of newer technologies and suburban medical dental centres the Medical Arts Building went into a long slow decline and the doctors sold their building to a property developer many years ago.

To stabilize the exterior walls prior to the removal of the rest of the building a double row of concrete-filled steel pipe pilings has been sunk around the building. Because the area is underlain by a deep seam of marine clay, to deal with the soft soil conditions the Medical Arts’ steel frame rested on floating footings, strong enough for an additional two storeys that were to be added later but never built.

The new development (RLA Inc.) is definitely a trade-off. Will its height, bulk and scale actually crush the insouciant spirit of one of Ottawa's favourite heritage buildings? It will join a thicket of towers that is transforming this section of Centretown.

By the 1920s Metcalfe Street was slowly trending downmarket from mansions for the great and the good into tourist homes, apartment conversions, and professional offices for doctors and dentists. (Photo: NCC Library - Ottawa Streets)

The Medical Arts was a major interruption on the Metcalfe streetscape (seen here looking north from the Lisgar intersection) which had been settled as an exclusive enclave for Ottawa's barons of commerce and senior politicians. (Photo: LACe010934940)

In a special supplement the Ottawa Citizen deployed a palm frond waving allegorical figure proclaiming the new Medical Arts Building as it emerged from a blinding sunrise. She stands on a notification that the architects Noffke, Morin and Sylvester moved their own offices into the new building. (Ottawa Citizen, May 25, 1929)

The Ottawa Journal's special insert on this new and imposing building stressed its commercial success. 'Although only completed within the past week the new medical Arts Building is completely filled with tenants. Every office and suite within the large building has been rented and there is already a waiting list of doctors anxious to locate in the building'. (Ottawa Journal, May 23, 1929)

Perhaps the chief glory of the Medical Arts Building was the wrought iron parking lot fence supported by very tall orb-bearing posts. During the last ten years they were gradually scrapped one-by-one, the final few being removed a few months ago.

The flamboyant fence was a feature of the original scheme, although it enclosed a much smaller parking lot which was expanded as the houses behind the building were bought up by the doctors and demolished for more and more parking. The post's design was replicated as the lot grew and the fence crept further down Nepean Street.

For greater telephone efficiency every doctor and dentist in the building was connected on one exchange, serviced by a switchboard operator in the main lobby routing all of the incoming calls. In addition to the reception desk the ground floor conveniently offered patients exiting their doctors’ appointments with prescriptions in hand the Medical Arts Dispensary furnished with a custom built Harley-Davidson motorcycle in white livery with a mortar and pestle shaped side-car that guaranteed 15-minute delivery on orders within the city limits. (Ottawa Citizen, May 25, 1929)

In planning the building the doctors had intended to have two retail spaces, 'one devoted to drugs and the other devoted to surgical and dental instruments'. Instead they rented the second space to the Bank of Nova Scotia for a new branch where 'Commercial customers and the public generally will find every banking facility placed at their disposal at the "Medical Arts Building" branch of this bank'. (Ottawa Journal, May 23, 1929)

It was this unrealized behemoth planned for Metcalfe Street between Albert and Slater that brought to light a federal scheme which could have scuttled the Medical Arts Building. Before getting to that story here's a diversion into the realm of the unbuilt. A 335-room hotel to be known as the 'Royal Ottawa' or the 'Ambassador', with an accompanying 500-car garage on Slater Street, was announced by the Hampton, Frost and Co. of New York and Boston. Lockwood, Greene and Co. of Spartanburg, South Carolina were the architects. The Ottawa Hotel Committee (a team of civic minded boosters formed to find a replacement for the loss of the Russell House hotel) had solicited the project. which didn't get off the ground. (Ottawa Citizen, May 25, 1928)

Just as the Medical Arts Building Co. Ltd. (the doctors' holding company) was completing the purchase of lots for their new building and the building permit was about to be issued, news of the hotel scheme uncovered a proposal being considered by the Federal District Commission and the Prime Minister to dramatically widen Metcalfe Street between Wellington Street and the Victoria Memorial Museum. This would open up a grand vista that was eventually moved east to Elgin Street. Both the Medical Arts Building and the new hotel were in its path. Eventually the plan was rejected as impractical and too expensive. (Ottawa Journal, May 25, 1928)

The lot's chain of ownership lists a who's who of Ottawa's bankers, architects, business magnates and fine old families.

The first version of the 180 Metcalfe Street development (Roderick Lahey Architect Inc., 2015) was floated by Toth Holdings Ltd. which had bought the building from the doctors in 1984. It proposed a glassy tower on a buff brick podium for mixed hotel/condo. Those plans got city approval, but were abandoned.

The property was subsequently picked up by Jadco,  Montreal developers who have dropped the hotel component but adopted the detailed conservation plan for preserving and restoring the three historic walls (Robertson/Martin Architects, 2014).

The updated conservation plan (Robertson/Martin Architects, 2018) details which elements are to be maintained, or removed, repaired or reproduced and reinstated. The elevator penthouse has been demolished in its entirety and will be reconstructed.

The new plan is distinct in that the tower will now be framed in darker brick, and the podium's cladding will no longer attempt to mimic the Medical Art's buff brick.

This is the schematic drawing for shoring up the Medical Arts Building's old walls in situ, structural steel bracing that will also holds the three-decker construction trailers (Remisz Consulting Engineering Ltd.)

The most significant alteration is to lower the Metcalfe Street entrance to grade and cover it with a hard shell canopy. The awnings are a gratuitous addition.

Unfortunately they will block one of the building's character-defining elements - the arch and column copper spandrel panels.

It's unlikely that those 50 doctors and dentists who delivered their own modern medical centre in 1929 could have imagined urban hipsters lounging on its rooftop 90 years later. If in the world of heritage, façadism is always second best to a full building preservation we have to admit that it does look like fun.

FROM WAVE-RULER TO CHROMACOLOR: TUNING IN TO R.P.T.

November 1, 2019, 8:07 am

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The quaint ear-tingling name belies its connection to the dawn of the electronic age. If they were still in business today (November 1st) would be the 100th anniversary of Robertson, Pingle and Tilley's founding - initially as piano dealers who branched out into phonographs, then radios, early tv's, hi-fi's and colour television. A piece of their monogram 'R.P.T.' shot through with an arrow appears in this photo, taken just before the re-opening of Sparks Street after one of the temporary pedestrian malls of the early 1960s.

The complete overhanging electric sign can be seen in this snapshot of the first temporary Sparks Street Mall of 1960. In front of it is the NCC's pavilion, a model of their Capital of Tomorrow plan for downtown Ottawa with a tent and display panels designed by John Leaning.

For most of its lifespan Robertson, Pingle and Tilley was located at 58 Sparks Street on the ground floor of the Ottawa Electric Building.

In 1950 the R.P.T. neon sign was one of many overhanging signs on Sparks, when the street was colourful, crowded and slightly messy.

It was still blazing but its days were numbered in early 1970 as Ottawa's new Signs By-law on a mission to remove street 'clutter' started to remove them. With the permanent mall came a permanent pavilion for the NCC (another model) with the Commission's public information centre in the building behind.

Stores move around and it can take some laborious cross-referencing of city directories etc. to track their progress. Robertson, Pingle and Tilley has left us with a handy roadmap of their march of progress. (Ottawa Citizen, February 12, 1935)

When Charles Robertson, George Pingle and Percy Tilley formed their partnership in late 1919 each of them had some experience in other establishments selling pianos and record playing machines. They launched the first store with 'A Car Load of Brunswick Phonographs Just Received'. (Ottawa Journal, December 19, 1919)

'Their ambitions were modest, as was their beginning, which was conservative and safe, and they opened their first store at 525 Bank Street. It did not serve its purpose for this baby firm.' (From a 1935 retrospective look at the company's history.)

The little storefront still exists and with the exception of a new front door is largely unaltered. After locating here, a rather insalubrious location because of its proximity to the noisy Bank Street railway overpass, the firm experienced 'lusty growth and soon had to have larger and more comfortable quarters'.

Within a year they announced their relocation 'nearer to the heart of downtown' at the corner of Bank and Cooper Street which opened for business on October 15, 1920. (Ottawa Citizen, October 9, 1920)

Curiously this date was misremembered as 1922 in their own retelling of the corporate history. 'The demands of the business soon required still more room. Instead of seeking a new location, in 1925 R.P. and T. took in the upper floor of 270 Bank Street and fitted it up with audition rooms where phonograph records could be heard in quietness and where the tones of the long-planned-for new piano might be heard and judged at its best'.

The Bank Street store was demolished in the early 1970s, but this building at Bank and Nepean is a close approximation of the premises where 'with the passing years well known music houses were obliged to follow the trend of the times in meeting the demands of their clientele by adding to their stock radio receivers'.

R.P.T. wasn't the first business to start selling radios. That honour probably goes to Welch and Johnston which was selling radio receivers in 1921 when they were tricky devices with earphones. With national manufacturers, amplification horns, and regularly scheduled broadcasting by 1925 radio sets were available for the home listener. (Ottawa Citizen, October 13 and 14, 1925)

'Be sure to tune in. Trusting reception is good and that you will enjoy our efforts, we are yours truly...'. R.P.T. sponsored a special hour of music on radio station C.K.C.O.'s Sunday night broadcast. The station was Ottawa's first starting out with a 100-watt transmitter broadcasting for a few hours in the evening in a studio rigged up in the house of Dr. G.M. Geldert on 284 Somerset Street West in 1922. (Ottawa Journal, March 27, 1926)

This was the era of the mega-watt radio stations with powerful signal strengths that reached Ottawa with splendid reception from places as far away as Cincinnati, Chicago, New York and Kansas City. You needed 7 tubes of 4 different specifications. (Ottawa Citizen, March 22, 1929)

The move from 270 to 154 Bank Street was an opportunity for a price-slashing 'Everything Has Got To Go' Big Removal Sale. (Ottawa Citizen,  March 18, 1929)

With their third move R.P. and T. travelled still closer to the business centre of the city to 154 Bank Street near Laurier. (Ottawa Citizen, May 16, 1929)

'Here the premises were fitted out with every convenience that a music house required. Two floors were equipped with record booths and piano rooms, and with a generous floor display area topped off by a whole floor devoted to the repair department. In a short time the phonograph business had practically gone and the record booths were remodelled for radio sets'.

R.P. and T. lasted less than 6 years at this address, which is in the middle of the Slater-to-Laurier Bank Street Heritage Conservation District still surviving and awaiting redevelopment.

154 Bank Street is part of a row that was to be incorporated into an abandoned 2012 Bank Street development.

The four-stage march of progress was summarized in this 1929 advertisement which was simply doctored up for the next move. (Ottawa Citizen, May 16, 1929)

'February 11, 1935 finds the firm of Robertson, Pingle and Tilley Ltd. located in what is conceded to be one of the finest business locations in the city of Ottawa, the ground floor of the Ottawa Electric Building. Here Robertson, Pingle, and Tilley will have five thousand square feet of floor space and a number of changes have been made to the front of the building to suit their particular needs. A door has been placed in the centre with spacious plate glass windows at each side.'

The building was the headquarters of the hydra-headed Ottawa Electric Company, an amalgamation of the Chaudiere and Ottawa Light, Heat and Power Co's., the Ottawa Gas Co., and the Ottawa Electric Railway Co. Their sources of power, the gasworks on Lees Ave. and hydro generation station on the Ottawa River are flanking it left and right. (Ottawa Citizen, March 13, 1928)

At nine storeys it was well below Ottawa's 110-foot building height limit on Sparks Street, but because of its sloping site was 10 floors on Queen Street. where it was just under the limit.

Promotional supplements in the dailies charted the course of the Ottawa Electric Building's progress from architect J. Albert Ewart's presentation drawing, the structural steel by Dominion Bridge, and the Indiana limestone clad Sparks Street elevation which featured the largest sheet of plate glass in Ottawa. (Ottawa Citizen, November 28, 1926; March 13, 1928)

The principal public space is a corridor running the length of the building. The lighting fixtures are sympathetic but a modern replacement. It was originally illuminated by large tear-drop pendants. The stairs at the left lead up from the Queen Street entrance.

Two polished Royal Mail post boxes are affixed to the Belgian marble walls. The one for large envelopes and parcels is out of service, but the letter box still has a daily pick up.

Looking in from the Sparks Street vestibule. The doors and windows on the right once offered views into the Ottawa Electric Company's commodious lamp and appliance showroom.

They  can be seen in the background of OEC's display of all things electric. There was equally big showroom in the lower level for larger home appliances.

Thomas Ahearn and Warren Soper, 'Pioneers of Electrical Industries in Canada' and founders of the Ottawa Electric Company are remembered on a bronze plaque unveiled at the building's opening. It states that it stands on the site of their original office, which is not precisely true. It stood nearby but not in this exact location.

It was Lotta Hitschmanova's Czech accented voice intoning '56 Sparks Street, Ottawa' at the end of her many public service announcements for the USC that made this one of the most famous addresses in Canada. This was commemorated in Harold Pfeiffer's high relief plaque now installed outside the front door.

In addition to raising funds for the Unitarian Service Committee she travelled the world in a peaked cap and uniform of her own design.

Incongruously the Sparks Street elevation of the building incorporates the free-hanging set of Corinthian pilasters. In the central two you can see the holes and some rust stains that are witness marks of R.P.T.'s illuminated sign guy wire anchor attachments.

This is a detail of the drawing published on November 27, 1926 announcing the construction of the Ottawa Electric Building.

To advertise their move to 58 Sparks Street in 1935 R.P.T. simply appropriated the Ewart rendering and added their own name to the ground floor, moving the building's name up to the third floor cornice. It was some expansion. 'As well as the area on the ground floor the firm has space on other floors as well. On display there are the latest models of 'Round the World' long and short wave radios, electric refrigerators, electric stoves, electric washing machines, as well as a fine assorted stock of such electrical goods as lamps, light bulbs, irons, warming pans, humidifiers, etc.'

The globe was shrinking. You could 'dial the world' on multiple bandwidths 'All-Wave' and 'Dual Wave' radio models, listen in on police calls and amateur transmissions. (Ottawa Citizen, February 12, 1935)

They published a schedule and tuning guide for international listeners for broadcasts ranging from South America and Australia to Europe and North Africa. (Ottawa Citizen, February 12, 1935)

In their larger store (the former Ottawa Electric Company showroom) R.P.T. had the room enlarge their white goods department for home appliances. Even as late as 1935 people were reminded that 'Eventually you will buy an Electric Refrigerator. Why Not Now?'. The Kelvinator had a nifty four chamber freezer compartment and three crisper drawers. At $250 Depression-era dollars they weren't cheap. (Ottawa Citizen,  March 21, 1935)

This salesman's card from a decade later boasted that they sold everything electrical for the home.

This ad reminds shoppers that they could use the Ottawa Electric Building's through-block location by taking the shortcut through the 55 Queen Street entrance. Your new Zenith Chromacolor could be had starting at $1050. In the 1960s and 1970s R.P.T. expanded again by wandering all over the map to four more locations - Carlingwood Mall (the location of its final store) and briefly to Elmvale Shopping Centre and Billings Bridge Plaza. (Ottawa Citizen, October 11, 1969)

Along with the shopping mall locations for one year R.P.T. re-entered central Ottawa at Bank and Maclaren, premises later used by the Looking Glass boutique.

Robertson Pingle and Tilley closed their Sparks Street flagship shortly after 1970. In 1976 W.H. Smith opened Ottawa's largest (8,000 square feet) book store here. After that petered out the space hosted a variety of commercial misadventures, stood empty for some time and is now Postal Station 'B'. Elsewhere R.P.T.'s business operations hung on until the early 1980s. (Ottawa Journal, November 12, 1976)

COCA-COLA BOTTLES AND THE PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS

November 7, 2019, 9:00 am

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The Coca-Cola Co. of Canada’s former bottling works at 340-42 Queen Street is no more. This summer it was reduced to a mound of rubble for a future multi-towered condo development to be known as ‘Moon’. After Coke’s departure for more modern facilities in 1949-50 this two-storey red brick utilitarian building enjoyed subsequent incarnations. It was first sold to the heiress of a beer brewery fortune who leased it to the Government of Canada which used it as the Veterans Affairs Central X-Ray Records Depot, the Transport Department Supplies and Stationery Division, and the House of Commons Stationery Office. More recently it was a variety of dives - the Dill Pickle restaurant, the Glue Pot Pub, and an upstairs strip joint with a businessman's lunch menu.

That was also be connected of one of Ottawa’s most lethal public health crises adds to its checkered past.

Coca-Cola was bottled at the Queen Street plant for forty years. Its construction in 1919 (delayed by WWI) was associated with a panic over the purity of the city's water supply that had emerged in 1911-1912. The large plate glass windows facing Queen Street were intended to provide the public a full view of the operations to assure them of 'the methods which insure the beverage being of the purest... bright, clean and sanitary throughout.'. (Photo LAC)

The bottling works in June 2019 just prior to the demolition. In the intervening century the building had been somewhat altered but still retained its original industrial character.

Coca-Cola wasn't widely available in Ottawa until ca.1906, although a tonic known as Coca-Wine 'for the Fatigued of Mind and Body, Nervousness and Sleeplessness' was available at all druggists. Delicious-refreshing Coke was usually served by the glass at soda fountains where the syrup was mixed with carbonated water from various sources, including the city's mains.

The bottling of beverages of all sorts boomed when drinking from the tap turned potentially lethal and the Coca-Cola Co. was quick to advertise that none of it was used in their bottles. While it had previously been available by the glass at soda fountains in drugstores and cafes, the Coca-Cola Co. of Canada took advantage of this marketing opportunity by rushing to open an Ottawa plant in 1912, assuring the public that they shunned city water. Of course bottled drinks had long been seen as a safe alternative to dubious municipal water systems. (Ottawa Citizen, September 25, 1912)

The crisis is long forgotten, but the disastrous typhoid epidemics of 1911 and 1912 were not only severe tests of the Ottawa’s new public health administration, they were full-blown panics seizing the city for two successive summers. Before the outbreaks were finally ended thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths had occurred in each year.

A delay in reacting to the crisis was the fault of Ottawa’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, who believed in the ‘miasma’ theory of germs spreading through malodorous vapours in the air. This was bolstered by a vocal raw water movement advocating the health-giving benefits of untreated Ottawa River water, calling the recommended chemical treatment a ‘dope’ that would sap the life of Ottawa’s manhood. (Ottawa Journal, July 11, 1912)                  

Other experts were brought in to prove that the typhoid contagion was water-borne. The source of the disease was in the city’s pipes. The supply taken from an intake pipe in the Ottawa River near LeBreton Flats had served the city for decades. Seepage from the outdoor privies of Mechanicsville and Hintonburg, running through Cave Creek into Nepean Bay was discharging sewage directly into the river just above the pipe, where it entered the city’s waterworks untreated. (Ottawa Citizen, February 7, 1911)

After several inquiries and investigations modern chemistry prevailed, and the Medical Officer of Health fired. By 1913 Ottawa’s municipal water supply was being sanitized with doses of hypochlorite of lime and some years later city water would be used in the production of Coca-Cola. Until then the public had to contend with dubious claims like this. (Ottawa Journal, August 7, 1912)

Coca-Cola’s first local bottling line started up at 319 Sparks Street. The water, guaranteed to be non-city was sourced from natural springs which the company had purchased in Russell, Ontario. At the plant this spring water was further distilled, carbonated and combined with the syrup using high speed machinery in a positive pressure environment.

A four hundred percent increase in sales forced the company to build this larger premises in 1919. Treated city water was deemed safe enough when the new plant at 340-42 Queen Street opened. The recent construction of the city’s booster pumping station on Laurier Avenue supplied adequate quantities. After it arrived at the bottling works it was additionally zapped with electricity, purified with ozone and filtered.

The public was introduced to the new plant at an open house held in September 1919, when workers in white uniforms served served them with all the Coke they wanted to drink and gave out an array of corporate branded souvenirs. The opening was marred by the news that the company was being charged with secretly hoarding 250,000 pounds of sugar (which because under WWI-era restrictions was in short supply) in a Winnipeg warehouse. Nationally, it was using over 40,000 pounds a week. (Ottawa Citizen, October 11, 1919)

 'The Coca-Cola is bottled by the famous 'Sprout Eureka Low Pressure Filler'. This wonderful machine handles the bottles, the carbonated water and the syrup - putting in just the right proportions of each - by compressed air, and without the touch of human hands. Air shot into the bottles counteracts with the pressure of the inflowing liquids. This enables the bottle to fill slowly and causes the water, gas, and syrup to mix thoroughly.' The 'Miller Hydro Washer Machine' (at the top) supplied the line with freshly sterilized bottles.

This was the building's garage bay. 'Since Coca-Cola came to Ottawa in 1912 the business has steadily increased every year. The first year one wagon took care of all of our deliveries. Today our delivery system has grown to three trucks and two wagons constantly in service, to supply the demand for the most popular soft drink in the world.'(Google Streetview)

From the back you can see that the 1919 plant incorporated the stone walls of an older building that had been on the site. (Google Streetview)

More of the older stone became evident during the demolition.

The Coca-Cola Co. took out a building permit valued at $835,000 on November 1, 1948 to construct this new plant on Bronson Avenue, designed by Mathers and Haldenby of Toronto. The land became available with the removal of the crosstown C.N.R. tracks as per the recomendations of the National Capital Plan. (City Archives)

Coca-Cola hoped that its proximity to the future Queensway would ensure its accessibility to road transportation. Instead it spelled its doom - the property was expropriated by the N.C.C. for the highway's construction in 1958. Coke moved out and ultimately the building was sold to the Ottawa Board of Education.

While the Queensway came perilously close, for decades the building was spared. With another Queensway widening it has finally been demolished.

In a complicated land deal with the N.C.C. in 1961 Coca-Cola purchased property for a new plant in a industrial park in the east end, which it built in 1963. Both Coca-Cola and its rival Pepsi-Cola moved to new bottling plans on Coventry Road. They were demolished for St. Laurent Shopping Centre's overflow parking lots in 2001. Pepsi's bottling contraption at the right doesn't look much different from the Sprout Eureka Low Pressure Filler.

Coke's fifth bottling plant in Ottawa is now firmly located on Hawthorne Road.

A final note on the question - did Coca-Cola actually contain cocaine? Coca-Cola claimed to be “lively as a cricket”. This short but ominous social notice from the Westboro branch of the W.C.T.U. also suggested that this beverage had an image problem.

Two of the ingredients in Coke’s original secret formula were infused extracts of coca leaf and kola nut. The latter produced caffeine, and the former was the basis for you-know-what. Although the Coca-Cola company successfully managed to eliminate the cocaine content from its recipe in 1903, the rumour that the drink contained the drug persisted - giving it a somewhat louche reputation.                                   

By 1911 the U.S. Pure Food Department’s definitive testings proved “freedom from deleterious drugs”. In 1912 Canada’s Inland Revenue Department had used its own Queen Street laboratories (steps away from Coca-Cola’s Ottawa bottling works) to produce the same results. By the time that their Ottawa plant went into production this clean bill of heath was heavily promoted in advertising a product that was ”cocaineless, wholesome, harmless and even beneficial”. (Ottawa Journal, May 28, 1912)

The Coca-Cola 1912 bottling operations in Ottawa started up before Coke's distinctive 'shirtwaist' bottle design came unto use. It was developed in 1915, and later made its was to the Canadian market.

For shipping and delivery they came in two-four's packed into wooden cases. The new $40,000 plant was capable of producing 185 two-dozen packs an hour. As demand was expected to increase there was enough room to add a second bottling line.

The somewhat blowsy mixed-use character of this block of Queen Street would linger into the 1970s when high-rise development began to take over.

With the arrival of the Coca-Cola's replacement building the sleek conquest will be complete.

BANK STREET CHAMBERS vs. MRS. HAIG's BOARDING HOUSE

November 14, 2019, 8:17 am

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Well, perhaps I did - in the mid-1950s while being taken to a Disney movie (Old Yeller?) next door at the Capitol Theatre, but it didn't register. 
Judging by the few photos of it (all partial views) this building was one bulbous beauty. The Bank Street Chambers can be summarized by a short item published just before its construction: 'The contract for stone and brick work on the building to be erected at the corner of Bank and Albert Streets by Dr. Cousens and R.J. Davidson, was awarded by the architect, E.L. Horwood, to P. Kennedy at $10,000. The building, which is to be 99 by 60 feet and four stories high, will cost about $25,000 when completed. The first story will be of cut stone, the others of pressed brick and iron frame-work for the bay windows in the front.'(Photo: LAC, quotation from Ottawa Daily Citizen, August 8, 1895)

Initially known as the Cousens-Davidson Block, this was the first major commercial building in Ottawa to be designed by Edgar Horwood, who would become the city's pre-eminent architect in the years bracketing the turn of the century. The 'projecting windows similar to those in the Central Chambers' suggests an inspiration that Horwood was seeking to rival with a corner tower that was loud and proud. (Ottawa Daily Citizen, June 27, 1895)

The building had an inauspicious start. At 10 am on Saturday August 10, 1895 the side wall of the structure next door collapsed when the excavation for the Cousens-Davidson Block was being dug.  As the Daily Citizen put it 'The appearance of the rooms exposed to view was grotesque in the extreme, furniture, bedding and clothing all adding their mite to the confusion of fallen plaster and brick.' No one was injured but Mr. R. Lake of the 43rd Band had his trombone buried in the debris, and a desk containing a watch and a sum of money tumbled out and lay beneath the pile of brick and mortar. It was quite an attraction. Two days later The Journal reported that 'thousands of people who had read of the crash in the evening papers visited the scene. Saturday night especially the corner of Bank and Albert was black with people taking in the sight'. (Ottawa Journal, August 10, 1895)

A photo taken shortly after the incident suggests that The Journal's illustrator may have exaggerated the extent of the sagging interior walls and floor. There was some dispute over who was at fault. The architect claimed that he had warned the neighbour (who insisted that his wall was strong enough) that this might happen. The picture clearly proves that the excavation undermined the fallen wall by several feet. And demonstrates the fragility of a one-wythe brick veneer not tied to flimsy stud framing. Within days of the collapse Horwood and the damaged boarding house's owner reached an agreement to construct a party wall for the side of the new B-S-C Block which would also close in the exposed rooms next door. Of passing interest is a glimpse of the flat-roofed building across Bank Street, seen just to the right of the West Block's tower.

It was originally a steam bakery for biscuits converted ca. 1899 into the Minto Chambers, a 30-room hotel with banqueting facilities and shops on the ground floor - including one that figures in the Bank Street Chambers story. (Photo: LACa016442)

There's a small picture of the Chambers in a plate from The Hub and The Spokes by Anson Gard (1904) which highlighted the work of architect Horwood. He liked to punctuate his buildings with distinctive corner towers.

The 1912 Ottawa Fire Insurance Map (Plate 40) gives you a general idea of the building's footprint, deep and narrow commercial premises separated by brick partition walls, a central entrance corridor with one standpipe for fire suppression, and a hoist elevator. By this point the house next door (separated by an extra thick fire wall) had become a Chinese laundry.

Blurry, but it's the only full frontal view of his Bank Street Chambers that I've been able to find.

And after being shorn of its protuberances and re-wrapped two times, it's still there. (Google Streetview)

Almost all of the neighbouring buildings in this 1931 aerial photo have disappeared. (NAPL A3332-73)

The Bank Street Chambers' roof from the top of the Jackson Building, in the early 1920s with Horwood's conical tower and his later (1899) Sun Life dome at Bank and Sparks speaking to one another from two blocks away. Situated mid-way between them (with white awnings) is Horwood's 1905 flat roofed Trafalgar Building. (Photo: LACa012618)

And the same image garishly tinted for a postcard.

Ketchum's, a fabled Ottawa business dealing in sporting goods was one of the first shops to rent one of the commercial storefronts.  Zeb Ketchum was a bicycle enthusiast who helped to usher the cycling craze into the city. They offered a repair bay and storage facilities for overwintering your bike. Ketchum's carried a full line of sporting gear including shooting supplies. From an Ottawa Journal article of November 19, 1896: 'A very daring robbery was reported at police headquarters this morning. Some time during the night a plate glass window in Ketchum and Co.'s store in the Cousens Block, Bank St., was smashed and a revolver and a quantity of cartridges stolen.' The Ketchums quickly expanded into the unit next door, and left for Bank and Sparks some years after that.  (Ottawa Journal, May 31, 1897)

The Geo. G. Nettleton jewellery store was located at the Albert Street corner for over 50 years. They were the first to remodel their storefront by adding a graceful arch over the front door and boxing in the stone column that Horwood had deployed as a device that would give the appearance of supporting the rounded tower above. Nettleton's modernization may have been necessitated by an accident that occurred on January 17, 1936 when 'A three ton truck loaded with coal broke through a sidewalk grille at Bank and Albert Streets at 8 a.m. today and smashed into the jewellery store at the northwest corner'.

They had moved from across the street (in the Minto Chambers building) in 1923, and would return to that general location in the mid-1970s once the Metropolitan Life building was opened. (Ottawa Citizen, March 28, 1923)

A sign in the window of the store next door dates this photograph, taken by the Department of Public Works in advance of Jacques Gréber's first visit to Ottawa to the fall of 1937. The Bank Street Chambers has a long association with the Liberals - for many years the National Headquarters of the Liberal Party of Canada was situated in the building.

It was the campaign headquarters for J.H. Putman, Chief Inspector of the Ottawa Public School Board running as the Liberal candidate for Ottawa South in the 1937 Ontario provincial election. Putman lost to the Conservative George Dunbar, but Premier Mitch Hepburn's Liberals were returned to a second majority. (Ottawa Citizen, September 24, 1937)

This building was only partially captured in photos of the Capitol Theatre. The Bank Street Chambers' cornice line was broken by a central pediment, and the three-decker projecting oriel window bays were especially beefy. (Photo: LAC)

Unfortunately by the late 1950s these accretions would have looked hopelessly antiquated and the building suffered a drastic renovation. At the same time the original name was removed and the Chambers renamed as the BANKAL Building. (Photo: Theater Treasures)

While nothing so bad as what befell the Capitol Theatre, these indignities were compounded by the new façade's colour scheme. What happened?

It was heralded as 'A Bright Modern Building On An Old Ottawa Corner' with a colourful exterior motif, a bright new look, a startling transformation, and a radical facelift on a dingy brick office building. (Ottawa Citizen, November 22, 1958)

A serious fire struck the Chambers around noon on Sunday, March 30, 1958. 'Crowds gathered on Bank Street during Sunday's fire at the Bank Street Chambers at Albert Street. The blaze flared up from the Modern Miss Dress Shop and ate through the upper floors to the roof before firemen brought it under control. More than 30 offices above the stores were damaged by fire and water.' The upper floors had sustained the worst damage, and nearly every window in the building had to be broken by the firemen to prevent a smoke explosion. (Ottawa Journal, March 31, 1958)

When the building changed hands eleven years earlier in January 1947 the new owner had said that it 'would be renovated and a new front built in the near future'. This was limited to the storefronts, and it would take the major fire of 1958 (although the stores suffered several fires in the intervening years) to complete the modernization.  'Long an Ottawa landmark, the Bank Street Chambers, damaged by fire some weeks ago, is taking on a new look as workers apply a modern front. Adjoining the Capitol Theatre building the reconstructed chambers will give a new look to this section of Bank Street.'(Ottawa Citizen, July 24, 1958)

The green and yellow steel facing with a baked-on finish was described as a first for Ottawa. 'The colorful exterior of the Bankal Building is enhanced by areas of black ceramic tile  and entrance pillars. The total effect is a striking one which improves the whole busy intersection.' Inside the former office space's masonry walls were blasted out, strengthened with structural steel, and fitted up with a moveable wall system baffled by noise-deadening ceilings. Tenant parking was available on a lot that had been cleared of a row of old houses. (Ottawa Citizen, November 22, 1958)


Nettleton's embraced the renovation by adding three small showcase windows on Albert Street, and revealing what had been covered up for so long. (Ottawa Journal, April 26, 1960)

I never pass by this corner without imagining the slightly gaudy exuberance of the Bank Street Chambers. The ground floor would have been clad in massive pieces of the red sandstone that forms the column's base.

The jewellery store's finely crafted polished steel showcase window frames still exist, but for a purpose that would have made Mr. Nettleton blush.

I'm guessing that they carry gay stuff too.

When the building was completely resurfaced with a slightly Post-Modernish treatment in the mid-1980s the original name was returned to the building, perhaps by an owner with some sense of history. There is now a very large copy of the 1937 photograph and a tribute to Edgar Horwood in the lobby.

A silhouette of the new Bank Street Chambers was used by one of its first tenants, in the days when 'telecopier' numbers and Telex addresses were still in use. (Ottawa Citizen, December 5, 1987)

As soon as it was ready for occupancy architect Edgar Horwood moved his own office into the Bank Street Chambers, where he stayed for about ten years. In 1914 at the height of his reputation he was appointed to replace David Ewart as the Chief Dominion Architect of the Department of Public Works. It was an unhappy tenure blemished by his brother Victor's conviction for graft while he was serving as Manitoba's Provincial Architect. This episode dragged Edgar's political mentor, DPW Minister Richard Robert into the scandal, tainting both of them. His career never resumed its lustre after Edgar Horwood was unceremoniously dumped by the government in 1918, and he designed just a handful of buildings after that.