a flock of faces in Centretown

 These characters started popping up over the past winter. I'm always on the lookout for new ones!

densification then: 198 O'Connor

 The Kitchener Apartments at 198 O'Connor were built in 1914. The honorific likely refers to the British War Secretary Herbert Kitchener, who was at the time assembling a large volunteer army in the early days of WWI.

WWI-era patriotic postcard

The Kitchener replaced a Victorian 2½-storey house of a build similar to the two we see flanking it to this day, explaining why it looks to have been somewhat shoehorned into the lot. 

The original #198 — Goad, 1912

Advertising for the Kitchener began in late 1914 — "up-to-date, latest improvements" — and the 1915 Might directory lists twelve occupants including a doctor's office on the ground floor.

Ottawa Journal — December 7 1914

Might Directory for Ottawa — 1915

255 Nepean Street

 I'm coming up with circa 1912 for this modest late-Edwardian apartment block. By then, limestone foundations were a dying breed. Goad (sheet 38, "reprinted, May 1912") depicts a three-storey, brick-on-wood "apartment house" without the present entryway/balcony appendage. Ads for the building mentioning "flats" with balconies appeared no later than 1925.

The lot originally served as the back-yard and sheds for a set of row-houses facing onto Kent, across from St. Patrick's Basilica.

Goad, 1912 — the red arrow indicates 253-255 Nepean. The row to its left, was eventually replaced by the Kent Place apartments at 225 Kent. Aerial photos show the old row extant until at least 1933.

Where Once Irish-Town...

 The first house at 427-429 Lisgar was a small wooden double built in 1875 or shortly before, when this neighbourhood was the heart of Ottawa's Irish Catholic community — St. Patrick's Basilica was, and still is, less than 100 yards to the north. 

The present structure is likely pre-1900. The halves have themselves divided further, hence the four mailboxes (two hidden behind the tree.) The strange wooden structure in the middle of the facade apparently houses a spiral staircase affording outside access to the upper apartments.

Old Eastview — time travel

 In my April 7 post I described a house in what is now Vanier, and mentioned its near-rural setting back in the 1930s when it was first built. I pointed out that McArthur Avenue was still a two-lane roadway at the time, and I've come across a photo that illustrates the fact. I honestly can't remember where I found this image. The typewritten caption has been partly cut off, but it clearly pertains to a report on a traffic accident...

"Re J. Connolly, truck damaged on McA[rthur]... Ont., on June 5th, 1931.  Photograph taken 100 feet East of cr[ossing]... standing on switch.  The switch... crossing."

An arrow labeled "truck" invites us into the landscape — let's have a look around.

Definitely rural-ish. We're looking west, down McArthur Avenue, indeed a narrow two-lane affair — dirt, possibly macadam. One hundred feet distant, a train track crosses the road. This is Ottawa's oldest railway line, opened as the Bytown & Prescott in the dying days of 1854. An already old-looking house sits just beyond the tracks. A wooden house appears at this exact spot on my oldest Ottawa top-map, dated 1906. Of course, the house could be older.

I assume the car belongs to the man on the tracks. I assume the man on the tracks is involved in the accident investigation. I assume there were two people in the car — the man on the tracks and the photographer. Evidently, the person in the passenger seat left (his?) car door open.

Now here's something odd. Notice the concrete sidewalk on the north side of the road, ending at the tracks. If you look carefully, you'll see that it seems to duck into the trees at an angle, a short way down the road. We can confirm this arrangement — it appears in an aerial photograph from 1933, two years after the accident.

The yellow X (lower right) marks the spot where we stepped into the picture. The photographer stood in the north lane of McArthur, just behind the maple tree that appears as a roadside smudge on the aerial.

The the train tracks (Canadian Pacific by this time) are clearly visible. The "switch" mentioned in the caption would have shunted trains onto the siding that splits off of the main track in the upper right.

And there's the sidewalk. It probably helps to know that the road running up to the left at an angle is Montgomery Street, which at the time connected McArthur to Montreal Road about 80 yards (remember yards?) from the Cummings Bridge. So the sidewalk wasn't just hiding in the trees, it had places to go. As for ending at the tracks, well it to end somewhere, didn't it? McArthur was heading east into farmland, and farmland doesn't have sidewalks.

Notice the yellow T on what looks like a pale market-garden plot. The T isn't for garden, it's for tennis. I count five courts. Shortly after the aerial was taken, the darkish square immediately to the north would become even more courts. That property is now the Selkirk and Mayfield apartments. In the upper left corner, what is (for the moment) the loading dock behind the Emerald Buffet was, as of 1933, a lumber yard.

I've highlighted two other features. S is for school. Eastview Public School opened in 1910. It became the J. O. Swerdfager (a former principal) Public School in 1956 and since 1980 has changed names more often than I can count. The building still stands.

H is for house, tucked into a wedge-shaped lot on the southeast corner of Montgomery and Selkirk. This dwelling, with its signature truncated pyramid roof may date to the 1910s, it may have been associated with J. H. White, one of Eastview's first mayors, and it may once have been home to the Plouffe family of local barbering renown. Research want's doing.

McArthur, as you might have guessed, was eventually paved and widened. The train tracks were replaced by the Vanier Parkway.

I never did find out anything more about the accident.

The Queen Elizabeth, 201 Metcalfe

 The recently renovated Queen Elizabeth apartment building on Metcalfe Street was built in 1939 by Isidore Stone. Its name commemorates that year's North American visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) on the eve of WWII — think "The King's Speech."

Yes, that "King's Speech."

Stone built the Queen Elizabeth as a companion to the Stonehall Apartments across the street. "Stone" hall, get it?

If my image looks grungier than usual, I've been reviving my attempts to simulate the appearance of early 20th century hand-coloured postcards — and I have seen a few that look at least as grim as this. View full size to confirm that my Sony RX100's one-inch sensor didn't skimp on resolution.

Here's a brighter, albeit grainier image from the late summer of 1939. 

Check out the trees, the car and the above-ground wiring. Notice the little iron-tubing fence at the SE corner of Metcalfe and Lisgar, put there to keep people from cutting across the grass. If you view the full-size image you can just make out the "201" in the faux-sandstone, above the split-porthole glazing on the doors of the main entrance.

401 Queen Mary, Overbrook

 This two-storey seems to date from between 1945 and 1955. It invites comparison with the Sandy Hill double in my previous post (no, really) — again with the faux-quoins and the low retaining-wall surmounted by an iron fence.

The crowd-stopping feature here is the cladding of ornamental, molded-concrete brick — view the full-sized image and be amazed. Or at least amused.

There's a rumour afoot that the house and lot sold for just under one million dollars last summer. Considering that it's a double lot (side yard), you start to see its development appeal.

a nice job in Sandy Hill

 353-355 Stewart Street in Sandy Hill was built as a double during the 19-aughts. Many larger homes in Sandy and Centretown were eventually divided into apartments by floor, sometimes with external staircases to access the upper units. Sometimes these add-ons worked, too often they were eyesores. I'm not sure how many units this address comprises, but this audaciously upfront (sorry) stairwell (added in 2007) works, beautifully. The scale and style respect the neighbourhood's design history while the faux-quoins and simple lintel keystones tie the old facade to the new. The angled entrance offers a modernist nudge-and-wink, while the retaining wall and wrought iron fence remind us that Sandy Hill was a neighbourhood of distinction — and still is.

Old Eastview — 43-45 McArthur Avenue

 When this charming Spanish-Colonial double was built in the mid-1930s, Vanier was still called Eastview, and McArthur was a two-lane. Back then, the house stood at the edge of an expanse of farmland. Behind it, perhaps incongruously, was a one-acre grouping of tennis courts.

As you might guess by its present appearance, the house is slated for demolition, though when, and to be replaced by what, remain vague. It has stood vacant for several years and has "since been the subject of break-ins and unfavourable activity."

a storied shoebox on Albert

 Here's another shoebox, this one at 222 Albert, this time clearly made of cinderblock, with a depth-to-width ratio of a prodigious 5:1. Trust me, trust my measuring tape.

The site was a carpentry workshop through the mid-to-latter 1800s. In the mid-1880s a Mr. John McFarlane built a 2½-story brick house here. A foundry-owner and real-estate dealer, McFarlane died intestate in June 1911 (heart attack, Central Station, shortly after breakfast) and his various properties became the subject of a protracted family inheritance squabble. For some years 222 was run as rooming-house, making the news as a "disorderly house" (girls, alcohol, presumed prostitution) in February of 1928.

Newspaper mentions suggest a continued residential nature through the 1930s, but by no later than 1943 the address had become the "Oriental Club," which variously functioned as a Chinese restaurant, food store and social club. I suspect that the present structure dates, very roughly, to 1940-ish. In September 1966, the Oriental Club was busted as a gambling den. Gambling was again documented in 1970 at the the "Chinese Club," same address (Ottawa Citizen November 17).

September 20 1966, Ottawa Citizen

Google Street View indicates that 222 Albert became home to "One Hour Cleaners" no later than 2007. The long-lived, much-loved Cathay Restaurant next door (gold cladding in the main image) closed in 2010.

On the subject of the Cathay, and Ottawa's "original Chinatown," please take a few moments to read Alison Mah's "Capital Builders" article about Bill Joe.

shoebox-style

 119-121 Slater is an oddly styled building, though not the only example of this sort of thing I've come across in the downtown core. It presents as a single-storey business address of modest frontage, but extends back to a surprising depth — like a shoebox, indeed, almost like two shoeboxes glued end-to-end. To be precise, the building is three times as deep as it is wide.

Obviously 20th Century, probably cinder-block (possibly Hayley), I'm having trouble fixing a date on the structure because in so many aerial photos, the office tower immediately to the west is so tall as to block one's view of the lot. Goad shows a narrow, 2½-storey brick house here ("#121") in 1912. At that time, newspaper ads suggest this was the home of G. W. King, paperhanger, whose wife was wont to run ads for servant girls, "preferably Protestant" — hey, with a name like "King"...

Going way back, (Goad 1878) there was a curling rink on the site. Canadian or what, eh?