802-804-806 Somerset West

I'm told that a restaurant is forthcoming at 802 Somerset West, an address I remember as the India Food Centre. I'm also pretty sure that 806 was where I did my laundry, back when I first moved out of home in the early '70s.

Forty-five years later I find myself wondering when and how this building came to be, and trying to get better acquainted with the little patch of ground it occupies, at the western end of Chinatown.

To that end, I'm putting together a time line of sorts which should be sufficiently long-winded to deserve a page of its own — see you here then...

Ottawa, west of Bank, 1879

Here's a little gift for anyone who gets frustrated wrangling the online/pdf version(s?) of Belden's 1879 Historical Atlas — County Carleton, with its chopped-to-bits map scans with their overlaps and half-duplications. I know there's got to be at least one of you out there besides me.

This map shows Ottawa west of Bank Street circa 1879 and is composed of either six or seven (I lost count) screen-grabs variously stitched and pasted into place. Hopefully, if you click on the image, then "view image" or "open in a new tab", then embiggen, you should get an end result large enough to let you read all those tiny words. Or just download the bloody thing and be done with it. Blogger has shrunk it somewhat but it's still useful at 950x1600.

Note the then-position of City Limits along Division (now Booth) and Ann (now Gladstone) streets. And don't be looking for the Queensway — neither it nor the CAR/ Grand Trunk rail line which preceded it were built yet. Speaking of built things, remember that this map shows lots surveyed, not necessarily those built on. Many of the lots depicted, especially to the south and the west, were shrubby, rocky, sometimes marshy ground back in 1879.

Expect a few errors. Was Russell Island (upstream from the Chaudière Falls) ever really called "Rossell Island"? Maybe it was... it's underwater now so I don't suppose it cares any more.

246 Kent Street

This little building was likely purpose-built around 1965 as an apartment/office duplex. At least I've got a newspaper ad for that year describing it as such, further claiming it to be "new"*. The spot was at one time (1912) the backyard stable (green arrow) of a Mr John Burke, horse trainer, who lived at 262 Nepean.

The current footprint is roughly square — about 20' by 20' gives us all of 400'sq per floor. A mailbox count suggest three apartments.

* A building of like configuration is clearly visible on a 1933 aerial photo, but looks to be gone by 1958. That's the sort of thing that gives time-travelers headaches.

Look on my works ye mighty...

Earlier this week, articles from both the Ottawa Citizen and the CBC announced the probable demolition of the three-storey Sears (originally Simpsons-Sears) building on the southwest corner of the Carlingwood shopping complex. Take a moment to read Matthew Kupfer's piece (CBC) here, and Wayne Scanlon's (Citizen) here.

Mr. Kupfer pretty much sums things up in his first few lines...

The Carlingwood Shopping Centre has applied for permits to demolish the former Sears store at the corner of Carling and Woodroffe avenues. Bay Ward Coun. Mark Taylor said the mall approached his office a few days before submitting the official application and has informed its other tenants.
"They've looked at options to try to save the space, utilize it, repurpose it somehow and they have future tenants in mind that they're in discussions with," Taylor said.
"The building just isn't viable. It's very old," he said...

Both articles acknowledge the loss of Sears as an "anchor store" and both allude to possible mixed-use development of the space, including "residential" units (the c-word being avoided for the time being). I especially like Kupfer's article, as it includes his own photo of building, iconic "SEARS" lettering* removed, looking truly forlorn in one of our recent late-summer downpours. Sears, as you probably recall, filed for creditor protection in 2017 and held its last liquidation sale in January '18.

Unsurprisingly, Urbsite has already researched the building, posting a piece on its architectural history and that of its St. Laurent counterpart back in spring of 2010, illustrated with several original photos pointing various niceties of design. Get yourself educated here.

Simpson-Sears Carlingwood opened in November of 1955, and the rest of Carlingwood opened mid-March the following year, two weeks ahead of the Easter weekend.

Keystone, anchor, whatever, you get the idea. The above was published in the Ottawa Citizen on Wednesday, March 14 (giving readers plenty of time to plan their weekends) as part of a multi-page advertising announcement ahead of Carlingwood's grand opening. I've red-boxed the reference to the Laurentide Room "self-serve" restaurant (cafeteria) — how long did it last? what (if anything) replaced it? and what happened to that mural? Andrew King, please, if you're reading this...

I was interested to learn that the Carlingwood building both opened and closed as a Sears store, bidding customers adieu in January of this year. Bankruptcy notwithstanding, I'd call 62 years in the same location a jolly decent run, old man!

At some point, the Sears store gained a third floor and, for reasons which made sense to someone at the time, had some of its ground-floor windows blocked, either with cement or that lurid faux cement siding that's making the rounds. The latter move made the building less welcoming, something that never helps sales.

I'm always curious to know what stood on a site before a particular whatever was built. In this case it seems to have been hay, as this declassified aerial photo reveals...

Carling and Woodroffe, ten years before Simpsons-Sears was built

I've highlighted the land that would become Carlingwood Shopping Centre in gold — (the field boundaries don't exactly match the current outline of the parking lot).

In Ottawa, we tend to think of satellite suburbs as a post-war phenomenon, but in the above photo we see the community of Woodroffe, established before WWI, enjoying its view of the Ottawa River. Some of the oldest riverfront homes were demolished to make way for the "SJAM Parkway".

Here's a parting shot of Simpsons-Sears Carlingwood, taken by Newton of Ottawa in late 1955 or early '56. Note the "double decker" construction, the ground-floor glazing and the old OTC bus...

*      *      *

*On the subject of lettering, it seems that when the Rideau Centre** opened in 1983, Eaton's (as the "anchor store") wanted the complex to be called the "Rideau Eaton Centre". The proposal was nixed and the store had to make to with an "Eaton" sign on its outer wall.

When Eaton's folded in 1999, Sears took over the space. I remember cycling past the building as the the Eaton's sign was being taken down. The Sears sign went up at the same time, so for a brief moment in time, it read "Seaton" — I wish I'd had my camera for that one.

**When Carlingwood opened, the Ottawa Citizen took to calling it a shopping center (more often than not), while the Journal favoured the frenchified centre. Some stores in the complex ducked the issue by referring to the "Carlingwood Shopping Plaza".

Cubby-de-Hole

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.

 *      *      *

*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.

363 Nepean Street

I'm sure this house was the talk of the neighbourhood when it first appeared on a block of otherwise dour Victorian houses and corner stores. Now it sits, a stranded time-traveler nestled in the southern "armpit" of the Bowery Condo tower, 255 Bay Street.

The house is a grab-bag of styles, but I can bracket its construction to some time between 1933 and 1958, relying on a pair of grainy aerial photos. Between Goad and the City Directories, the lot seems not to have been built upon prior to 1923 — which is to say that #363 may well be the first and only house to have ever claimed this patch of ground.

Bolling Terrace, 496-502 Someset West

This is the western side-elevation of Bolling Terrace, a row of four 2½-storey brick-veneered homes built circa 1888 (a sign out front gives 1890). They sit on the SE corner of Somerset and Lyon, adjacent to Dundonald Park. As the sign indicates the end unit is home to Darling Vintage antiques and clothing (mostly clothing, mostly women's).

The ghost sign "O.[?] Desjardins" may refer to Oscar Desjardins, a barber. The second line looks like it could read "Hair Cutt...". Mr Desjardins shows up in the early 20th century City Directories, working at various barbershops and may have eventually opened his own.

Spy Stuff

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.

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...

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.

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.

Twin Towers

Esplanade Laurier at dusk, as seen from Lisgar Street. Behind and to the right looms Plaza 234 at Laurier and O'Connor, the "old EDC building", of late home to an expansion of Shopify.

The 23-storey Esplanade Laurier building (Olympia and York) opened in 1975 to less fanfare than I'd realized. Newspaper mentions from that year are mostly small placements announcing businesses opening in (or relocating to) its two-level shopping concourse — now largely deserted. A brief, perfunctory mention appeared on December 1, when R.U. Mahaffy wrote (Ottawa Journal)...

The white-marble-clad towers were, I seem to recall, well-received by the public, curious to know what an "esplanade" might be. Satisfied that it was actually just a building, our attentions turned elsewhere... until the building, miffed, started shedding slabs of marble onto the sidewalks below.

Urbsite's August 10 2011 article detail's l'Esplanade's protracted decline ("Bleakest Block?") — read it here.

Urbsite mentions a large emergency power generator which for several years blocked l'Esplanade's Gloucester Street sidewalk. This was apparently a response to perceived 9-11 threats — it was finally taken away some time between spring 2015 and spring 2016. Given Saudi Arabia's recent suggestion that it might fly a jet liner into a Canadian Building, one wonders whether that removal was premature...

The Esplande's construction consumed an entire city block — a "block-buster" if you will...
...whatever. This is what the Bank/Laurier/O'Connor/Gloucester block looked like a decade before l'Esplanade opened its doors. Click the pic to avoid eyestrain.

geoOttawa, 1965

The west side was lined with the sort of apartments-above-storefronts we still see a fair bit of on Bank Street today. The rest of the block was a mix of single and multiple dwellings. An educated guess would date the singles to the late 19th century, the blocks to the early 20th.

By 1965, at least a quarter of the block had been taken over by parking lots, marking the incremental demise of old houses in the years prior to the big event. The process continues apace through the older parts of the city, condominiums having assumed the role once held by office towers.

After the Storm

A grotto of Marian Mystery, Saint Patrick's Basilica, Kent Street. That which man hath set upon a pedestal, God restoreth to His garden...

House of Grey Cement Animals

132 Pretoria (at O'Connor) was built circa 1900, a time when the northeast part of what we now call "the Glebe" was transitioning from a tract of market gardens into part of Ottawa's southward suburban spread. #132 was purpose-built as a corner store, and spent most of the 20th century fulfilling that role.

The building was massively renovated at the beginning of the 21st by Christopher Griffin and his wife Oresta Korbutiak. Griffin veneered the exterior with quick-drying cement into which he incised images of animals — abstract birds, stick-figure deer, fishes, and a diving whale. From a distance, the creatures blend into a textured flow — up close, they suggest petroglyphs. The branching tracks of a recently-removed Virginia creeper add an aged, rustic effect.

Although Griffin works as a graphic artist, his penchant for cement has found expression not only on the walls of this house but in his sculpting of molded bird and mammal forms, like the bear we see here — waiting for a concrete salmon to leap up from the sidewalk.

If you're in neighbourhood, take a moment to look at the section of wall to the right of the door frame. With the help of a local researcher*, Griffin and Korbutiak have assembled a list of the building's previous tenants, and pressed their names and dates into the concrete...

2007-          Oresta Organic Skin Care Confectionery
2001-2007  Christopher Griffin Studio
1984-1997  Fairmart Kit Kat Corner Store
1964-1984  F&N Confectionery
1954-1964  Poirier Confectionery
1936-1954  Bebb Grocery
1934-1936  Cavanaugh Groceries & Fruit
1931-1934  William & Theresa Rath
1922-1931  Bebb Grocery
1920-1922  James Stevenson, Shopkeeper
1918-1920  Henry & Kirk, Grocery
1913-1918  Morris Gansburg, Grocer 1912-1913 O'brien & Whitehorne
1911-1912  James & Robert Cochrane
1908-1911  Alfred Day Grocer
1905-1908  Jeremiah Driscoll, Merchant
1901-1905  Usher Grocery

 *...chronology assembled by Gillian Magnan.

Bird, Man

A signature character by Drew Mosley stalks the alleyway terrace at Union Local 613, 315 Somerset Street West.

TacoLot, Nepean Street

Here's a taco stand tucked into a parking lot at 194 Nepean, just west of Bank. The building reminds me of a mid-century pre-fab. If so, does it have a cellar? It's clearly visible on aerial photos at least as far back as 1965, when, I'm guessing, people lived here, given its overall house-like appearance.