Well now that's densification for you ... "We're gonna build a brick tunnel between two old buildings and open a store in it."
Presently home to the "Coupe de Ville" hair salon, 494½ Somerset West is air-gapped from #494 by about a foot and a half (remember when we all had feet?) but it's joined at the hip to Bolling Terrace on your right. Actually, I think it's using Bolling's brick veneer as its exterior wall. Is that even code? Not that I'm Larry Law or anything...
Construction, per my spotty set of City Directories, occurred some time between 1916 and 1923 — the structure housed a Chinese laundry* in the latter year — which means this cubby-hole is almost a century old if it isn't already. I remember shopping here shortly after Thuna's herbs and health food store moved in from Bank Street in spring of 1972. After that, things get hazy... smoking LSD and such.
According to a 2012 National Post article, #494½ was, for a while, the nameless studio of Stefania Capovilla, hair stylist to various big names on Parliament Hill, including "Stephen Harper, ranked No. 1 this year by the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine on its Well-Coiffed World Leaders list. 'Possibly the best-defined side part in the Western Hemisphere,' the magazine proclaimed." So there you have it, Harper's legacy was born in this manger.
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*The early Directories are well-peppered with "Chinese Laundries". These seem to have opened wherever the need arose, that is to say in mostly "white collar" (if you will) neighbourhoods, abundant in a government town like ours.
This proliferation was met by the Directory compilers with a strategy (or lack thereof) that would be less than acceptable today. The laundries were often listed as businesses but not people. Contrast "Graham Mrs. Adele, florist" with "Chinese laundry". Yellow people, white shirts — that, it seems, is all that mattered.
