Now who would guess that this self-deprecating two-storey walk-up with its plain lines and quaint deco port-holes is one of Ottawa's most notorious buildings? Crouched between an 1880s Victorian brick house and the more recent "The Beer Store", 511 Somerset West looks only too happy to forget that it was ever "The Gouzenko Apartments". Of course, that was never its real name, but try telling that to local history buffs.
The story has been told many times — Blair Crawford's version, penned for the Ottawa Citizen last August, is as good as any I can find. His story of Igor Gouzenko, the Russian cypher clerk whose defection "started the Cold War", as people like to say, begins on a sweltering night, much like tonight actually...
Sept. 5, 1945 was hot and muggy in Ottawa. The Second World War had ended just three days before with the surrender of Japan and it was less than a month since the Americans had ushered in the nuclear age by dropping their Fat Man and Little Boy atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Read the entire article here. And when you get the the part about the Gouzenko signalling the police from his neighbour's bathroom window, I believe that would have been the upper porthole on the left. If you want to know more, John Sawatsky's book Gouzenko: The Untold Story (Macmillan, 1984) is a good place to start.
Prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King spent that Wednesday putting the final touches on the throne speech, to be delivered the next day in Parliament — one that praised the sacrifice of Canada and its wartime allies and called for “a new order founded on world security and social justice.”
Also that evening, a 26-year-old cipher clerk named Igor Gouzenko set out from his Somerset Street West apartment for the 45-minute walk to the Soviet Embassy in Sandy Hill. He was sweating when he rounded the corner to the compound on Charlotte Street...
Three years after his defection, Gouzenko's story was made into a move starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney — The Iron Curtain even features a cameo appearance by the building itself, 511 Somerset West.
