Urbsite

HORSE POWER.

2011-12-18T17:51:00.000-08:00

URBSite has been a little intermittent of late, but there are posts in the gate for 2012. To close out this year here's a nostalgic love letter to our hoofed friends. Above: the grey gelding and open delivery sleigh of the Slinn and Sholdis Bakery.

A cab fitted with snugly bearskin robes stood waiting at the stand on Wellington and Elgin Streets, outside the gate to the East Block.

There was a less ornamental cab stand at Sussex and George just beside the public fountain-horse trough. These muddy roads must have offered some resistance to the sleighs.

When winter finally passed the fleet converted from steel runners to wheels. Hitching posts were interspersed between the young street trees.

There was a hay market operating in front of the ByWard Market (the second one, built 1876 and demolished 1926 - James Mather, Architect).

On Sparks Street the snow was removed by hand and loaded onto the Ottawa Electric Railway's wagons. The is the Metcalfe-to-O'Connor block looking east.

The same block, south side; it looks like cold, wet work.

J. Templeton's Centre Town Livery, Hack and Sales Stables were located on Albert Street east of Bank. This is the Ottawa Diary Co.'s grey mare and sleigh No. 15.

The stable leased Victorias, Broughams, Landaus, Tally-Ho Coaches &c, &c. There were a lot of horse drawn vehicles on the streets as late as 1910.

This photo is about fifty years earlier. T.W. Chisnall's Livery, Buses and Cabs was at 68 Queen Street, just west of Elgin. Tally Ho! and Happy Holidays.

HO-HUM HERITAGE, BY THE BOOK

2011-11-20T18:42:00.000-08:00

OK, it was actually a Book Market ('World's Largest Bookstore') - the last commercial tenant in this late nineteenth century block on Dalhousie Street. The building had received a radical makeover ca. 1950 when the middle floor was refaced with jade green glass tiles.

Ta-da! ...almost a year later spent mostly under netting, the property is still for lease. What emerged from behind the scaffolding was a pale (literally) imitation of the pre-modernized facade. A sincere effort, but was this absolutely necessary, and did they actually lose more than they gained?

Relatively speaking brick commercial Italianates are still commonplace. The mid-century modernes are disappearing fast. Around the corner the last remnants of Joe Feller's jazzy menswear store on Rideau Street are about to go. Removing the large Book Market sign had damaged the glass tiles but their lurid green had been undimmed by the passing decades.

Once the tiles were off it was easy to see how the earlier reno had been done. The two central windows had been shorn of their hooded lintels and blocked up using bricks recovered from the demolition.

The two square plate glass windows were popped in and shimmed up with some fairly flimsy framing.

Despite these major interventions, and the removal of the entire storefront beneath, the old brick facade had been holding up without any visible settlement.

The scaffold and nets came down briefly after the front wall demolition, to reveal robust timber floor joists - no sagging after 120 years.

And back up again for the application of the new/old facade.

Gone is the quirky window spacing, brick corbelling, authentic two-over two wood sashes, and fifty percent of the cornice detail - although it was inserted between the original end brackets.

The most damaged elements, the storefront entrance and display windows have yet to be touched, likely awaiting the needs of a prospective tenant's fit-up.

TEMPORARILY SPEAKING

2011-09-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

Like battleships and bombers, Ottawa's Temporary Buildings were a product of the national mobilization that followed the outbreak of World War II. Although the government had commandeered privately-owned buildings all over the city, new offices for the tens of thousands of military and civilian personnel were needed immediately. This was Ottawa's original temporary, a prototype imaginatively named 'No. 1' and the first of four built on Wellington Street between Bay and Lyon.

A fifth smaller temporary was put up east of the Supreme Court. This building never got into the official numbering system, but most recently it became known as the Justice Annex . It is the last temporary building. After sitting vacant for many years PWGSC has confirmed that the only surviving tempo is to be demolished. In 1988 the Federal Heritage Building Review Office classified it because of its national significance. (Photo: Centretowner)

The Temporary Buildings are often described as 'hastily' built. This is the state of the foundations of Temporary No. 1 on November 13, 1939 - only 25 days before the building was ready for occupancy.

They were built almost entirely of wood. The heavy timber frames were studded out with large lumber and covered with diagonal board sheathing for additional strength. Wood panels formed the interior walls (no insulation). Most of the temporaries had interior courts for better light and air circulation.

The first set of temporaries was built on the land between Wellington Street and the Ottawa River that the Government of Canada had expropriated in 1912 for a never realized (another World War had intervened) complex of federal buildings. Apart from the Confederation and Justice Buildings, and the incomplete Supreme Court which was halted by WWII, this tract of derelict houses and vacant lots had been standing empty for almost thirty years. The area was still littered with the ruins of Uppertown mansions, like this wrought iron fence. Since they were situated on top of the Cliff Street Heating Plant, pipes for the heating systems were brought up through the roof of the central boiler house to service the temporaries.

The varnish on Temporary No. 1's floors was drying on December 9, 1939, three months after war had been declared.

Temporaries Nos. 2, 3 and 4 (under construction above) were added during 1940-41. The design is credited to architect T.P. Rankin of the Department of Public Works.

As it turned out Temporary Building No. 1 was the first one to be demolished, in 1960-61.

Its site was used for the National Library of Canada and Public Archives of Canada Building (1965-67).

Temporaries Nos. 2, 3 and 4 stood for another 10 years. This aerial view also shows the excavation for the East Memorial Building underway in 1949.

Since their demolition the land has been used for surface parking, and a temporary parkette along Wellington - the location of the Carlos Ott's thrice-aborted Federal Court of Canada.

After WWII the temporaries became a fixture of Ottawa's civil service life. The size of the workforce never shrank back to its pre-war levels, and they were still needed - infamously uncomfortable to work in during extremes of heat or cold, although the awnings might have been a post-war refinement. This is a city traffic survey being conducted in 1954 in front of Temporary No. 3.

The rest of the Wellington Street temporaries was removed in the early 1970s.

The Department of National Defence's temporaries on Cartier Square ('A', 'B' and 'C') were not demolished until 1980. There were other major complexes at Dow's Lake - Temporaries Nos. 5 and 6, and between Sussex and Mackenzie.

BIBLE CHURCH WALL RESURRECTED

2011-09-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

The Central at Bank and Gladstone (CORE Architects) is a modernist reinterpretation of the classic H-shaped apartment house.

Preserving of the front wall of the 1931 Metropolitan Bible Church was a condition of development.

After a few months in storage and more months under wraps as restoration work proceeded, it's been uncovered.

As the church was demolished its 1930s building technology was revealed - cindercrete walls and hot-riveted steel beams. The condo developers had intended to brace the old wall in place during construction, but safety concerns about its proximity to the excavation meant that it had to be partially dismantled, detatched, moved away and then reattached.

The mortar joints in the upper third of the wall had failed and it was unstable. These bricks had to be removed before the wall could be packed up in a steel sandwich and hoisted away.

It was temporarily placed down into the excavation and moved back into place once the new frame had reached the second floor.

As this big beam was being torn out during the demolition a notation in yellow paint was uncovered - 'THIS SIDE FACES BANK St'.

The canopy which enjoys non-conforming encroachment rights to hang out over the Bank Street sidewalk is to be re-instated as well.

The metal belt course over the third floor windows and the flashing on top of the parapet wall was faithfully reproduced.

Some of the ribbon brick from the Bible Church's 1961 addition was harvested for the old wall's reconstruction.

A tablet at the roofline and half-moon reliefs above the windows are yet to be returned. The restoration included two vents.

Facadism is usually decried by heritage preservation purists - way down the list of desirable strategies. It's true that most historic buildings lose some meaning when moved. Many have questioned the value this elaborate rescue of a middling building.

Was it worth the effort? An anonymous building has been remounted as a little brick nugget in a new metal setting. Both buildings look a little better for this architectural marriage.

MORE SPARKS STREET Then & Now

2011-09-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

Here are some Sparks Street then-and-now quickies.

The middle of three Romanesque Revival buildings on Sparks between Bank and O'Connor was hastily converted into a Nickelodeon movie theatre. In fact I think that this was 'The Nickle' The owners simply tore off the storefront, added some bracing and built a box office in behind.

In the 1920s it was remodelled in black glass tiles and chrome trim as Dover's Sporting Goods and Hardware. A 1990s restoration by PWGSC re-instated an historic-looking shop front.

Lindsay's Furniture store at 187 Sparks Street was home of the bargain three-piece suite and layaways. It was evicted in 1960 when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company announced that the three buildings would be needed for their head office's expansion.

When the size of the Met Life addition was scaled back, the buildings were spared and eventually restored by Public Works. It appears to be kept empty as swing space for the huge Met Life/Wellington Building's gut rehab happening next door.

The Centre (later the Mall) Theatre had a narrow storefront entrance on Sparks. A ramp took you to the auditorium, which reached through to Queen. This is one of the 1967 permanent Mall fountains. For a brief period in the 170s the Murphy Gamble Department store operated as a small Simpsons.

The facade of the commercial row (known as the Sims Building for the furrier who did business here) awaits a restaurant as part of the ReHotel project.

I recycle this shot a lot, but it's a usefully encyclopedic mid-block mid-century view of Sparks Street.

Sandwiched between the Ottawa Hydro Electric Building and the Royal Bank/90 Sparks Street/D'Arcy McGee Building is the Imperial Bank of Canada (1936, possibly Darling and Pearson), an art moderne building clad in a warm honey-coloured stone. Anyone know what kind it is?

It was merged with the Canadian Bank of Commerce in the early 1960s to become a CIBC branch, but closed shortly after that. It has finally found a new use as a stamp store and its restrained 1930s interior can once again be visited.

Next door was a row of commercial Italianate buildings from the 1870s and 80s. The second floor bay window above Laura Secord and Read's was added much later.

66 Sparks Street had been built for John Murphy & Co. Dry Goods.

To the west was the Ahearn and Soper Building. They were the founders of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, and were the first store to market electric stoves in Ottawa.

The buildings were eventually incorporated into R. Devlin's, a fancy goods department store. At the corner of Sparks and Metcalfe, the Hotel Windsor was a holdover from Sparks Streets' Confederation era stone buildings.

It was demolished in the summer of 1960 (the year of the first temporary Sparks Street mall)for a new Royal Bank of Canada main branch, an opulently finished modernist building that lasted barely 20 years.

DE-RAMPING THE SKYLINE

2011-09-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

The Skyline Hotel (Campeau Corporation, 1965-67) was big, bland and white - but impressive nonetheless. After four and half decades of heavy use, five different names and several owners, it is undergoing a makeover that will correct its most annoying feature. In order to get into the main entrance you had to walk a car ramp, or use a dark cave under the ramp's deck.

In fact, the hotel turned its back on the downtown, facing a featureless tract of parking lots that's barely developed since the hotel opened. The cigar-shaped tower sits on top of double height podium - a bit of a bunker that was set above a recessed base, further divorcing the hotel's connection from the street.

The new design (HOK Architects) will move the lobby down to the ground floor, and open the hotel to the street.

In the 1980s the porte-cochere was pimped out with some historicized detailing and heavy coffers on the underside.

The Skyline's white precast porte-cochere was revealed during the demolition.

I got there too late to photograph the scalloped fascia, which followed the profile of the beam ends, and was being loaded into a truck.

The podium's Albert Street side is to be opened up with a secondary entrance, and the ribbed concrete panels will be glazed.

The Albert Street doors originally functioned as an entrance to the convention rooms and main ballroom. In time they were covered up and just served as emergency egress doors.

The car ramp concealed two large exhaust vents that couldn't be relocated, and so the architects made a feature of them by re-incorporating them into a freestanding arch.

In the 1980s remodelling the enlarged overhang was punctured with two small skylights.

The Skyline canopy's roof twin 'beams' were hollow. Each of the 1967 precast elements was delicately removed in from the steel frame in one piece.

The Skyline was designed by Campeau's chief architect Peter Dobbing. He bevelled the edges by cutting back the three outer bays, which was a modest reference to a famous building.

New York's Pan Am Building (Emery Roth and Sons, with Walter Gropius) was clearly an inspiration. But the Pan Am's facets were equally sized.

And The Skyline didn't have the rooftop heliport, a landing pad for a Sikorsky that ferried passengers from JFK in fifteen minutes, at great expense and some danger. The service was discontinued after a series of disastrous accidents.

The hotel's makeover site plan shows its footprint to be more Pan Amish than it actually is.

There are other architectural quotations on The Skyline. The corduroy textured concrete panels are signature Paul Rudolph, and then there are those projecting beam elements.

This is a bit of a stretch, but they might be a nod the Kenzo Tange who employed frequently them as in the Kagawa Prefecture Office

Or the Yamanashi Culture Chamber. Just a thought.

The entire central portion of the Lyon Street facade is to be removed.

The steel frame has been stripped bare, and by the time of this posting the whole porte cochere has been cut away.

With it goes the car ramp.

Place de Ville required a mighty excavation. By February 1967 the hotel tower was being clad and the swimming pool's basin was under construction.

Seen from the seventh floor of Tower 'B' is the East and West Memorial Buildings' arch, and the last of the Ottawa Electric Railway's streetcar barns. Campeau had bought the two blocks from its successor, the Ottawa Transportation Commission.

In 1951 the block that was to become Place de Ville's Phase II was used to park the OTC's new fleet of electric trolley buses. This picture was taken after the East Memorial Building was complete, but before the West Memorial and arch were built.

Phase II was the scene of the last great building height battle. In 1969 Robert Campeau announced that he would build two more towers - forty-five and thirty-nine storey buildings. After a skirmish with the City of Ottawa they were reduced by a few floors, and approved. The National Capital Commission appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board, winning the case and reducing the height to twenty-nine floors.

Again, the building was to be somewhat of an homage to another tall one - the Montreal Stock Exchange Tower (Pietro Luigi Nervi, 1963-67) which had a tripartite shaft separated by drum filled gaps.

The model unveiled by Campeau demonstrated the startling scale of his proposed towers, when seen against their modest brothers - Towers A and B.

In the end the project produced Tower C, and the podium building was moved to the centre of the block. Urban legand has it Campeau provided a tunnel right of way under Queen Street for a future subway line. Prescient? With the Light Rail tunnel moving to Queen Street, maybe it will come in handy..

The drum top was retained for a second hotel's revolving restaurant. There are currently approved plans for extending the podium building by a further seventeen stories.

PAVING SLATER ST, and SOME DISCOVERIES...

2011-08-28T20:59:00.001-07:00

This was to have been a post just for infrastructure geeks, demonstrating the process of road building ca. 1910 through a series of photos from the City of Ottawa Archives. The steps in laying a good roadbed haven't changed that much in a hundred years. But these pictures revealed more than that. Spotted in the distance were two of Ottawa's most archivally illusive vanished buildings.

This is a view of the new road going in on Slater Street looking east from Lyon Street. They started by pouring the concrete sidewalks - massively deep judging by the boy sitting on the edge of the new sidewalk on the left. To form the street bed crushed rock was added in graduated layers of decreasing sizes, then graded and compacted.

The changes in the streetscape from the early 1900s to the early 2000s are total. There isn't a trace of the old to make a good then and now comparison - but here is the same block of Slater, just so you'll know where we are (were).

West of Bank was a mix of industrial and residential uses. The Ottawa Car Company was a complex of assembly buildings that filled most of the block between Slater and Albert Streets west of Kent and east of Lyon. They manufactured carriages, railway cars, and streetcars. Founded in 1891, it was the manufacturing arm of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, controlled by Thomas Ahearn and Warren Soper. The photo shows the final stages of road making. The last layer of gravel was down, and paving was about the begin.

The block was rephotographed in 1938 by the Department of Public Works. (Library and Archives Canada - this is one of a vast collection recently digitized from large format negatives.) By the late 1930s Slater Street hadn't changed that much. The sidewalks were still in good shape, and the company had become Ottawa Car and Aircraft Limited. It might even be the same pavement .

To finish the surface steam rollers compressed the asphalt, a hot bituminous mixture of tar and granular material.

It likely came from Ottawa's asphalt plant on Booth Street, where barrels of tar were melted, mixed with the gravel, and hauled away in horse-drawn carts. Smelly work.

While putting shots of the paving sequence into order, a tall thin church spire kept reappearing in the distance. It looked somewhat like the steeple on Christ Church Cathedral, but the direction was wrong.

And then I discovered this picture of the Bank Street Presbyterian Church from the same angle. Its spire, which was uncommonly thin, stood over 120 feet high.

The stone church had been built at the northwest corner of Bank and Slater Streets in the late 1860s.

The was the Sunday School. When the church was sold to the Booth family for redevelopment in 1912 (as the site of the future Jackson Building) the congregation moved into a much grander edifice, the Chalmers Presbyterian Church at O'Connor and Cooper - now the Dominion Chalmers United Church.

The fire insurance atlas plate from the same year shows the church, the streetcar works, and a third building - the Central School on Kent Street.

Peeking out from beside the gambrel-roofed dormers on these rowhouses in one of the paving series pictures is an octagonal cupola.

It is Central Ward West School's bell tower. The school stood on the east side of Kent Street between what is now Laurier Avenue and Kent Street. The Central School was built in 1869 when public education had briefly been the responsibility of municipal government, and new school buildings were built based on the city's ward system. Although it operated for almost a hundred years, very few photographs of the Kent Street school are known to exist and Heritage Ottawa lists it as one of the city's preeminent 'Lost Buildings'..

Looking down Kent Street from Queen in the late 1930s, amongst this nondescript melange you would have seen a square building at the left in the middle distance.

Again, the comparison with the same corner today shows a very different place.

Zooming in on the old photo, there it is - sandwiched between a billboard and an oval Imperial Oil sign - the Kent Street/Central Ward School. Sometime after the paving pictures were taken the third floor had been raised, and the cupola seems to have gone.

Looking north up Kent from Laurier in a 1938 shot, the school made another appearance. Judging by the number of kids it must have been taken on a school day.

The same corner today. I angled the direction to capture a glimpse of the Justice Building, the only point of comparison between the then and now views.
There was a large paved school yard around the school. In the 1960s it was closed and sold to the Campeau Corporation for the Journal Towers.

EDC's TREES

2011-08-22T20:30:00.001-07:00

The Export Development Corporation's new headquarters at Slater and O'Connor (Beique, Legault, Thuot Architects) is probably one of the best recent office buildings downtown.

Through a sequence of cutouts on the lower four floors the mass of the building at eye level has been slimmed down considerably - disguising the fact that there's a fairly large floor plate looming above.

They created a small entrance plaza with a soaring glass lightbox lobby at the corner. The whole based is wrapped by a continuous projection at the fourth floor, emphasized by another setback above. Unfortunately this design feature has been the undoing of EDC's minimal site landscaping. You can't grow trees under a roof.

The upper corner is cut away too, and topped with another roof projection punctured by four square holes. It was to be landscaped as well.

The holes were actually filled in, but a zoom view reveals two little trees up there.

This is EDC's fourth building with a one block radius. They started out in George Bemi's early 1970s brutalist building across the street, and the '80s moved into the sleek stainless steel tube at Laurier and O'Connor (Gillin Corporation). The third, a midrise office across Laurier (a Bill Teron building of the 1960s) was bought for EDC overflow and reskinned with dark blue glass and metal.

And now for the trees - service berries that are trapped beneath two sets of roofs. They had to be lopped off in order to get under the overhang.

The promised trees at grade were good intentions thwarted by the reality of the site and the impossible growing conditions created by the building above. With a little research it probably would been possible to spec a drought-tolerant trees that might survive this challenge.

Set into shallow planters with no apparent irrigation system, they receive no rainfall and very occasional light. I can't speak to the water system that might be up on top deck.

The O'Connor Street frontage was to have been planted with another row of obedient green lollipops.

Only a few went in, and they have the same problem - the double overhang of the Carrara marble bump out and the deeply overhanging wraparound ledge.

Some trees don't need any help - in fact you can't kill 'em. There's a thriving example growing out from under the north east corner of the Medical Arts Building on Metcalfe Street (Noffke, Sylvester and Morin, 1928).

It's a 'Chinese Elm', a scion of the street trees once planted by the City in the Metcalfe Street boulevards. Today they have been categorized as weed trees, and are not on the list of approved species.

The tree is growing up through a crack in the asphalt, with a Manitoba maple sprouting up around it - kind of a wild urban forest succession plan.

Chinese elms are fast growing but short-lived. By the bare stump you can see that its predecessor was cut away by the building owners about fifteen years ago.

EDC's Laurier Avenue elevation was to be greened up with a living wall of vegetation around the loading bay and underground garage entrance.

This was deleted from the final development, and the slate-grey precast panels were used in its place.

Miss HARMON'S

2011-08-16T19:38:00.001-07:00

The corner of Elgin and Maclaren Streets is a frequently visited location for then and now comparisons, so I am re-plowing some old ground. Here are some recently discovered interior photos.

Miss Harmon's School for Young Ladies looked like a converted house, but it was actually designed for the purpose by the architects Arnoldi and Calderon in 1891-92. It was flanked by smaller residences along Maclaren, and the Grace Church (later St. John the Evangelist) without its square corner tower. There was a fenced schoolyard between the church and the school.

Despite major alterations and a large addition the original school building is still weirdly apparent beneath all of this.

King McCord Arnoldi was the grand old man of Ottawa architects, and his brief partnership with Alfred Merigon Calderon produced many major institutional buildings and houses, of which Miss Harmon's was a fairly modest example.

The original window openings in the first and second floor make the then-and-now match. The main entrance way was moved the the school's central projecting bay on Maclaren Street.

The interior shots were taken by the William J. Topley Studio, presumably to illustrate a prospectus for the school. This is the drawing room, which was likely the private preserve of Miss Harmon and selected guests.

The photo set included one captioned 'Miss Harmon's Bedroom', which seems an oddly intimate subject.

Maria Harmon had started a small co-educational school for the children of lumber kings at a private home in Uppertown during the mid-1860s, when public education in Ottawa was still a dodgy business. The school moved to Wellington Street a few years later and became girls-only. Miss Harmon's went into a larger stone structure at 49 Daly Avenue (a building still used by the Union Mission for men). The date of the incorporation refers to the establishment of its final phase at Elgin and Maclaren.

The school had both boarding and day students. From the look of this classroom they probably received a serious education. This wasn't an academy for needlework and dancing lessons.

Whatever the curriculum, is was taken on hard wooden benches.

The double doors opened onto the girls' dining room.

This is a view from the dining room into the entrance hall.

And the stairway, with a very tall piece of hybrid furniture - a combined hall chair and coat rack.

The music parlour had a highly decorated piano.

There was another piano in the corner of an unidentified room at Miss Harmon's.

I was surprised to see a third piano showing up in this photo of an upper storey room until I learned that music instruction was one of the school's strong suits. They employed a full time Director of Music, Ernest Whyte, who was a composer from the Ottawa area.

Miss Harmon's School closed some time after 1910, by which time the public education system was well established and the carriage trade for educating young women was about to be taken over by the Elmwood School in Rockcliffe Park.

A third story was added to the school building and it was converted into apartments. In the 1940s shop fronts were added along Elgin Street. During the 1970s this became a restaurant which gradually expanded into the sideyard cafe (later enclosed) and up into the second floor of the apartment building.

A mixed use building with storefronts on Elgin Street and apartments above was built in the grounds of the old schoolyard.

In memory of Miss Harmon's School it was called the 'Harman Apartments', but the builders had apparently forgotten how to spell her name.

A PROMENADE AROUND THE ESPLANADE

2011-08-10T07:23:00.000-07:00

For all of its Grade 'A' pedigree, L'Esplanade Laurier (Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden) has been laid low by years of neglect. Olympia and York's second development (1972-1975) in Ottawa after Place Bell Canada (1969-71), it was everything a megablock should be - twin towers on a supersized podium, two floors of retail in an internal mall, on top of hundreds of underground parking spaces.

Admittedly, Gloucester Street is the complex's service side. And as a year-round sun trap it's undoubtedly the brightest and whitest block in the central area. Is it a candidate for the bleakest? It's certainly become a dumping ground for ugly objects.

Shortly after 9-11 a portable generator with Jersey barriers was dumped in the street outside l'Esplanade - supposedly as a security measure to keep power flowing to the Department of Finance inside in the event of a terrorist attack. It was recently upgraded with a pad-mounted unit on the sidewalk, guarded by (get this) a six foot chain link fence.

It sort of matches the recycled parking meter bike rings. I guess that it's intended to keep evil-doers out - but there are openings on all sides.

Maybe the gates are coming later. In the meantime there's just a warning cone.

Of course, it could be dressed up with white vinyl strips like the enclosure in front of the parking garage's exhaust vent.

Long ago the podium above the loading bay and entrance ramp doors was stripped of its white marble cladding after the panels started falling onto the sidewalk. The metal channels for fasteners and the underlying concrete blocks were painted white.

L'Esplanade Laurier was once ringed with trees. Despite their tiny tree pits and minimal watering area they actually grew for a while. Unfortunately, as bastard trees their survival fell into a bureaucratic limbo. Although located on the city right-of-way, they were planted and owned by the developer in the days before legal site plan controls and maintenance and liability agreements.

The openings in the sidewalk were so small, that once the original trees were dead it was nearly impossible to find replacement trees with a root ball sufficiently small to plant back into these holes. In the 1990s the Tree Community of the community association managed to insert a few ginkgo's.

L'Esplanade Laurier was clad stem to stern in a dazzling white carrara marble. The urban legend is that this is the material that had been rejected by the city's Building Appearance Committee when proposed for Olympia and York's earlier Place Bell Canada, shown here in consulting architect Edward Durell Stone's initial flat top version.

So, did O & Y get even by using it at the next available opportunity? As owners of the Olympia Tile and Marble Company (their corporate origins) they had access to an unlimited supply. It was a fateful choice. Within ten years several pieces had fallen off, with some pedestrians narrowly escaping injury. The marble was removed from the lower floors which have been covered up with painted plywood and composite board ever since. Every couple of years they get a fresh coat of paint.

The Bank Street end received an historicizing remodel in the 1980s, with the same stone that's on the Ontario Provincial Court (fake-looking, but real I think). And, a word about these second floor malls, which were intended to be linked together by the 'Plus 15' skywalk system. If you're sharp-eyed you can still spot some of the potential portals. There is one on the north side of the World Exchange Plaza.

The makeover stopped just short of the 300 Laurier tower, where there have been some new problems.

The newer panels have been bashed up a bit.

And there have been some staining issues.

An esplanade is a long, level place to walk - often beside a river or ocean front. This esplanade has a colonnade, which is usually a freestanding row of columns. In Ottawa this term has come to mean those recessed areas under towers. They were once mandated for all major downtown developments. The theory was that when the full allowance was taken for future road widenings, there would still be a place to walk.

Looking east, this could be a dramatic or interesting space, offering some shelter from the sidewalk.

But that covered convenience is barricaded at several points along Gloucester Street.

This demonstrates all of L'Esplanade's deferred maintenance problems in one shot. What to do with these white marble elephants?

One of the newest obstructions is a welcome addition and a sign of life that could animate this block - the new outdoor patio for 'Tosca' restaurant.

L'Esplanade has one of the city's most internationally significant works of art - a large bronze by Barbara Hepworth. The other major artwork, a riotously coloured triptych by Jack Shadbolt that once hung in the lobby of 140 O'Connor Street, has gone missing.

The Hepworth bronze is from the sculptor's 'Family of Man' series (1970) at the Maltings, Snape, in Sussex.

The funkiest 70s hangovers at L'Esplanade are the bunch-of-grapes light standards.

Beneath this backlit 1980s Shopping Centre/Centre d'Achats sign (no need to bother anymore, the stores have mostly gone) is another archaeological scrap.

There's a glimpse of the original signage, big silver letters mounted on precast, which was lit with a wash of light from above.

W-O-O-F!

2011-08-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

The off-leash dog run at Jack Purcell Park has just re-opened. Dogs and their human companions can enjoy new added features like the fenced leashing areas, a special doggy-litter odour absorbing surface of decomposed limestone, and a three-way drinking fountain for adults, kids, and canines. It's also wheelchair accessible.

The dogs' fountain is designed like a dog dish - it fills with water that slowly drains away, so that they don't have to take aim at a gushing spigot. And no, it's not paw operated. The humans have to push the button.

SPARKS STREET in BLACK and WHITE and COLOUR

2011-08-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

Digitized images from the recent past (and by that, I mean within the last 50 years) are frustratingly scarce. Looking for photos of the temporary malls on Sparks Street for an earlier post, I had to content myself with the usual fall-back, grainy Ottawa Citizen shots from the Google News Archive. On-line repositories at the Library and Archives Canada represent a smattering of their collections, which produced some interesting black and white pictures.

And then, a friend recently recommended the small but fascinating Flickr photo pool of 50s, 60s, and 70s Ottawa - which included several views of the temporary Sparks Street Mall in the summer of 1961. So I've woven the two strands together for a revisit.

They matched up with an anonymous news photographer's record of another event in the same setting - a photo shoot of a demonstration on Sparks Street during the Bomarc Missile Crisis of 1963.

This is what the O'Connor to Metcalfe block of Sparks looked like just before the streetcar tracks were taken up in May 1959 and the street repaved. It was this fresh asphalt canvas that prompted the street's merchants into creating the first temporary mall.

This is looking west from the middle block, under the stage. The colour photo set of the mall appears to be jpegs taken from colour slides, unfortunately taken at dusk. I've never had much luck with these conversions, but maybe I am going to the wrong place.

To briefly recap the missile crisis: In 1963, the Diefenbaker government which had resisted nuclear warheads on Canadian soil (although these weapons had been part of their rationale for the Avro Arrow cancellation) split on the issue, forcing an election which brought the Liberals to power under Lester Pearson. They took the missiles, and Ban the Bomb protests like this one on Sparks Street ensued.

The design of the first mall had been pulled together in just a few months with low cost elements like pavement painting and moveable furniture.

Snaking around the flower beds (just some curbs containing dirt) the anti-Bomarc demo circled the mall, and proceeded onto Parliament Hill.

The joy of these pictures is not really in the street furniture or the buildings - it's the people. I like the stance of this couple looking into the stylishly dressed Murphy Gambles' windows, and can imagine the conversation that is passing between them.

Although it is not digitized, the Andrews-Newton Collection at the City of Ottawa has a wealth of 1950s imagery, like these picture of Murphy Gambles with all of its original marquee (I can't resist documenting these subtle alterations through time). The archives has only been able to catalogue of few thousand of its nearly quarter million images, and there is a small on-line exhibition.

It was a time when people still dressed up to go downtown. I have fond memories of this place. In the early 1960s I had a grandmother who took my sister and me to the department store's genteel fifth-floor tea room, which was full of ladies lunching in wrist-length white gloves. The five-globe cast iron light standards on Sparks Street were scrapped in 1962, and replaced with concrete lamp post and cobra head fixtures.

The mall's pre-cast concrete planters were handsome and sturdy, and outdoor cafe restaurant were an exotic and enjoyable novelty for Ottawa. The 'la Macanza' on the placard was the base in Quebec were the nuclear missiles were deployed.

This is the location of the CBC Ottawa Centre (the aborted Selzer Building), with some of the temporary mall's fixed molded fiberglas seats.

The long Italianate Commercial row that stretched from the Bank of Nova Scotia to the corner of O'Connor Street was demolished in 1968 for the 'La Promenade' building at 151 Sparks Street - the first new office to be designed to co-ordinate with the new permanent Sparks Street Mall. It had two floors or retail space, reached by an exterior flight of stairs that landed on the middle of the mall. The stairs were removed in the 1980s, and I am still looking for a photograph of them.

Until they were prohibited by city by-law, Sparks Street had a proliferation of overhanging signs. And while the streetcars ran in both directions, it appears that Sparks was one-way for car traffic.

Does anyone else remember these chunky knit sweater coats? They always had moose, deer, totem pole or lodge motifs.

This blue waste receptacle looks like it would function much better than any model in use today.

The geometric patterns of the pavement markings varied from block to block. They must have been removed each October, when the street was returned to regular lanes for vehicular traffic.

There was a time when there were kids on the mall to warrant a play area. This seems amazingly progressive, but this was the height of the Baby Boom.

The mall was a great place for people watching and the 1963 demonstration was met with a bemused and skeptical crowd of noon hour onlookers.

COOPER'S CRIBS

2011-07-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

This post is about two blocks of Cooper Street between the years 1880-1900 when the street was an enclave for senior officials and the well-to-do.

The house at 251 Cooper Street is a standard Gothic Revival, with pointy gables and a heavy bargeboard, was probably built in the late 1870s.

It's the only building in this archival series still extant. Today it is the Embassy of the Czech Republic.

It was the home of Justice Robert Sedgewick, who came to Ottawa in 1885 to serve as Deputy-Minister of Justice. He was subsequently appointed as a Puisne Judge for the Supreme Court of Canada.

Judging by the size of the street trees (elms), the pictures were likely taken when the Sedgewick's house was about 20 years old. Although Cooper Street was serviced by fire hydrants, there were still board sidewalks.

The house was modernized around 1910. All of the dated Gothic ornamentation was removed, and a Doric porch added. 251 Cooper later became the National Headquarters of the Liberal Party of Canada, and then the University Club.

As in many of these house portraits by Topley, the family was gathered on the front porch for the picture-taking.

The building was enlarged many times, and the front yard has been a parking lot for decades. The location of the fire hydrant hasn't changed.

The Miss Jessie B. Brown house was next door at 245 Cooper Street. The little steps at the curb are for alighting from a carriage, and there is a hitching post nearby.

Across the street at 250 Cooper Street was a much more substantial house, from about 1890. This is the late nineteenth house at its peak, with all of the fencing, iron cresting, planters, awnings, and architectural bric-a-brac in place.

Today it is the site of the twin James and Balfour Court apartments.

The Fraser house, on the north side of this block was built towards 1900, putting its best elevation sideways with a double gambrel-gabled roofline.

The A.Z. Palmer house at 180 Cooper (just east of Elgin) was a typical pale brick Second Empire/Italianate house of the early 1880s.

180 Cooper Street is now the Cartier Place apartment hotel.

Dr. Henry Ami's house was at 111 Cooper Street, where they managed to get the large family dog into the picture.

This is the last house left in this block, otherwise much altered. Although many were built on spec by contractors, to fairly standard designs, there are always subtle variations like these bell-cast eaves.

The best representative survivor of this area is the Bytown Officers' Mess at Lisgar and Cartier, a melange of Queen Anne style, and other oddments.

The John George Bourinot house was at 141 Cooper Street. It was a moderately sized foursquare building, with chunky spoolwork on the porches, batwing motifs in the eaves, and a porte cochere.

Today we are used to seeing these houses as plain brick carcasses, stripped of their Victorian furbelow's. This house is on Lisgar, behind where the Bourinot's would have been.

The relative simple brick body of their house was capped with a complex roof, and a further attic storey.

If you get the chance, look inside the mess for a taste of this high-style excess. Their top floor snug is called 'The Crow's Nest'.

Sir John George Bourinot was a prominent civil servant and expert on parliamentary procedure, who became Clerk of the House of Commons.

Occasionally these Topley house picture are augmented with interior shots, no doubt artfully staged, but an interesting sampling of taste and decor. This is the entrance hall at 141 Cooper Street.

And a less formal parlour with a piano, and afternoon tea laid out.

Sir John's study? Looks a little overstuffed, but comfy. Portieres, heavy draperies hung over room openings, were used in the Victorian home for privacy and controlling draughts.

Local brick and tile works, artglass manufactories, steam powered turning and lathing mills, the jigsaw, and new department stores offering rugs and statuary made all of this mass-produced luxury attainable.

FRIENDLESS, ORPHANED & INCURABLE

2011-07-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

Long before the welfare state and the social safety net, there was the workhouse, the orphanage and the asylum. Charity was meted out to the homeless and indigent by stern bodies dedicated to Christian values.

'Any girl or woman desiring to forsake a life of sin will find a helping hand and shelter if needed at the Home for Friendless Women, 412 Wellington Street' was the notice that ran regularly in the Ottawa Citizen's classified advertisements through the 1880s. The home was located just west of Bay Street. It was a workhouse, operating as a laundry.

And there was childcare. 'Mothers desiring to obtain employment during the day can have their little ones carefully tended in the Home for Friendless Women, 412 Wellington Street. Fee; for children under 2 years of age, 10 cents; children between the age of 2 and 12, 5 cents. A van will run between the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Depot [Sussex and McTaggart] by way of Dalhousie, Rideau and Wellington at 7:30am and returning at 7:30pm. Free Fare.' A 12-hour day. The careful tending of children meant putting them into baskets in the folding room - hopefully not too close to the rotating belts.

The women were drawn from the courts, the countryside, the streets, and jails. Revenue from the laundry largely funded the home's operations. Shortly after opening they were processing over 80,000 pieces a year, by 1900 10,000 pieces a month.

Around 1900 the HFM converted to steam-driven power. This is the mechanical washing drum, empty. Once can imagine this place when it was full of steam, noise, vibrations and the strong smell of caustic washing soaps and sodas.

Some time after 1900, the home moved across Wellington Street to number 399, a property that was expropriated by the Government of Canada in February 1912 for future federal buildings - today still an empty site beside the Library and Archives Canada.

The Home for Friendless Women relocated to more suburban surroundings, on Turner Street which is now Cambridge Avenue just south of Gladstone. It opened in 1914.

Apart from new windows and no shutters, it's basically unchanged

The front and side yard was shielded by a sturdy board-and-batten fence, giving the inmates and their children a measure of privacy (or control to prevent escapes).

The new home appears to have been primarily residential, with no laundry or workrooms.

This is a meeting room in the 1914 building. Its mission had moved on from indentured labour to education.

There was an inscribed tablet on the third floor

Which has since been covered over. The lower half of the entrance porch has been rebuilt in masonry. I don't know when the home ceased to exist, but it is now apartments.

I ascended the stairs for a quick peek. The vestibule smells of old wood, and the hallways beyond look gloomy.

There were two pillars in Ottawa's nineteenth century's segregated welfare system. The Roman Catholic church was there first with its own network of schools, churches, and hospitals and shelters. The mainline protestant churches had to unite to form collective boards to oversee institutions like the Protestant General Hospital, the Protestant Home for Elderly Women, and the Protestant Orphans' Home (pictured above).

The Board of the Protestant Orphans' Home comprised a large number civic minded women and a sprinkling of society matrons.The home was founded in 1864 in a private residence. It moved from place to place as the number of orphans in its care grew. The object was not so much adoption, but placement into service.

The Board purchased the whole block of Elgin between Lisgar and Cooper in 1874, after Lady Agnes Macdonald led a party of women into what was still mostly open pasture land. She recalled seeing several cows. It took over ten years to raise sufficient funds. The cornerstone was finally laid in 1885, and the wards moved in the next year.

It was certainly a step up from Oliver Twist, with small comforts like electric lights on the Christmas tree, fed by open wiring hung from the ceiling - but the appliqued ensign is a reminder of their place in society.

While architecturally the Orphans' Home was a grim Gothic Revival institutional building, these children playing in the snow look like they are having some fun. In 1925 a fire broke out, raising concerns over the safety of the orphanage and its charges. A new fireproof structure was deemed to be absolutely essential. The Board debated rebuilding on Elgin Street versus relocating. In 1930 they sold the property for a row of stores and the Elgin Theatre, and moved to the more humanely-named 'Children's Village' on Carling Avenue, dropping the word 'orphan' from their title.

At the other end of life's spectrum, elderly impoverished ladies were housed in the Ottawa Protestant Home on Rideau Street - but presumably not put to work.

Like the Home for Friendless Women, the 'Perley Home for the Incurables' next door at 415 Wellington Street was a victim of the 1912 federal expropriation .

The Perley Home had been an uppertown mansion built in the 1870s, and converted into an incurables' home in the 1890s as a gift from the Perleys.

The house was pulled down, and the property left vacant until temporary buildings were put up here at the outbreak of World War II. These were eventually removed in 1965 for the Library and Archives.

In 1914 the Perley Home moved into a new hospital building in a more sylvan setting on Aylmer Avenue overlooking the Rideau Canal and the Ottawa Improvement Commission Driveway.

As a modern purpose-built facility, the new Perley Home was a better place to tend the chronically ill, although the barbaric term 'incurables' wasn't dropped until the 1960s. The open brick enclosures are fire escapes, for a safer evacuation of its bed-ridden patients.

The Perley sold its Ottawa South property to a developer for a private retirement residence, and merged with the Rideau Veterans' Home to form a chronic care and rehabilitation centre in Alta Vista.

SIR ROBERT's HOUSE

2011-07-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

There is a Gloucester limestone and iron railing fence along the east side of Wurtemburg Street that once stood guard for a great house.

Today it fences off the front yard of The Watergate Apartment (1970-71, Cadillac Fairview Developments) so-named just before its more famous DC landmark became infamous.

This was the fence at 'Glensmere', the Ottawa home of Robert Laird Borden, Prime Minister of Canada from 1911 to 1920.

Borden purchased the house around 1907, while still Leader of the Opposition. Knighted in 1915, he lived here until his death in 1937.

The house was an outstanding example of the Shingle Style of architecture, so-called because its simple volumes were often covered in wooden shingles. American Colonial Revival touches, like the fanlight windows in the eaves were another typical feature of the Shingle Style. This is the house nearing completion in the mid-1890s.

The Bordens made some minor changes to the ground, by enlarging some of the windows, and adding Palladian details to the entrance.

The design is attributed to architect Frederick J. Alexander, who had started his practice in South Africa. If so it's unique in his career, which was mostly marked by conventional red brick houses in Centretown.

A colonial revival porch wrapped around the river-facing tower. After Sir Robert's death in 1937, his widow Laura Borden continued to live at the house until the early 1940s, when it was sold to the Chinese Nationalist Government, during a visit to Ottawa by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek (!).

The house had originally been commissioned in 1894 by Hayter Reed, Deputy Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs.

While there had been some discussion about declaring the property a National Historic Site in the early 1960s, that designation never happened. The Chinese Nationalist Government maintained its legation here until 1970, when it they sold it for redevelopment.

This is Sir Robert practising his swing on the terraced lawns of Glensmere late in life. The demolition of the Robert Borden house created some stir amongst historians and the still embryonic heritage preservation movement, but to little effect.

The fence could probably use a little plaque to explain things.

SOVEREIGN/McDONALDS

2011-07-17T19:12:00.000-07:00

The Sovereign Building at 71 Bank Street was designed by C.P. Meredith for real estate entrepreneurs Robert Blackburn and George Bryson in 1910.

The ground level McDonalds has just re-opened after a speedy makeover.

The Sovereign's chief architectural virtue is its terra cotta facade and deeply coffered casement windows, still in their original bronze frames.

When the old golden-arched McDonald's sign was taken off some dusty ventilation grilles were revealed. Projecting a foot or so in front of the building, it had also obscured some of the building's stylized egg-and-dart mouldings.

The new storefront has been neatly fitted back into the building wall.

In its previous version the McDonalds front was a Mondrianesque arrangement of squares and rectangles in muted greys.

It's now almost fully glazed (except for the vent) and the primary signage is updated with dimensional lettering, minimizing the golden arches to a small appearance on the overhanging sign beside the door.

The store stayed open for business during the first phase of the renovations.

Finally the contractors moved in for the gut rehab of the interior, and the front disappeared behind a hoarding.

Which was removed to reveal this. With careful editing, it's a sleeker hip look tailored to fit the limited frontage.

The designers have managed to deploy all of the design elements in McDonalds re-branding, the tri-colour panels and the faux-wood siding.

Despite the odd street-level nicks and remnants of something that had been applied with mortar, the Sovereign's century old terra cotta has weathered well.

Except for the five arches above the top floor and a cornice which was likely water damaged and replaced with metal siding long ago.

PHOTOGRAPHIC STORES LIMITED

2011-07-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

One of Sparks Street's best architectural slivers is at number 65, between Elgin and Metcalfe.

The storefront is a 1930s modernization, inserted into the original pilasters and ground floor cornice.

The upper floors are an amazing survival of Italianate Commercial architecture.

The facade is two easternmost bays of the 'Robinson Block' (1870-71, William Hodgson, Architect). The five-bay section at the left, in a lighter brick, was a later addition. The building was typical of at least half a dozen similar commercial blocks built on Sparks in the 1870s.

The three bays at the left were refaced with a curtain wall in 1961 (Lithwick, Lambert, and Sim, Architects).

The gap next to the Canada Life/Saxe Building at 75 Sparks shows a witness mark of the Robinson Block's full height. There is some question as to whether the two storey building beneath (Burgess and Gardner, 1943) is a completely new building or a re-cladding.

This is how the block looked in 1912. The five 'newer' bays of the Robinson Block were demolished in 1908 for the Canada Permanent Building.

Despite their different eras, the 1930s storefront of glass panels and brushed metal trim fits snugly into the old building.

There were several stores selling photographic supplies and photography studios on Sparks Street. The Topley Studio was in the next block, and the Samuel Jarvis Studio one block further on. As a result, the built heritage of the street is well documented with historic photos

The former Photographic Stores has been emptied and the windows papered over for some time.

I wish that I'd had the wits to step inside and photograph the interior in its last incarnation - a souvenir shop.

The business was opened in 1905, and stayed at this address until the 1980s. It capitalized on the booming amateur photography market by gaining a dealership for the Kodak Brownie camera.

The long rectangular window was also the background for a 'Kodak' sign'

The inside was fitted with blond wood counters and display cases. Upstairs 'The Little Gallery' displayed local photographers and painters. There was also a picture-framing department.

I remain a little awestruck by the architectural richness and variety of these early twentieth century commercial streetscapes, when heavily ornamented Victoriana jostled with the first generation of modern office buildings.

The 140-year old fragment of facade at 65 Sparks Street is a wistful reminder.

ROYAL ARCHES

2011-06-30T06:33:00.000-07:00

Ottawa's Royal Visitors used to be celebrated with Royal Arches.

In September 1860 Albert Edward, Prince of Wales came to Ottawa to lay the cornerstone for the new Parliament Buildings. He was greeted with several arches. This one was was put up over Sussex Street, the city's main commercial artery.

Its companion arch was positioned on Parliament Hill. Both were designed by Stent and Laver, architects of the East and West Departmental Buildings.

The Lumber Arch was assembled at the Ottawa end of the Union Suspension Bridge over the Chaudiere Falls.

'The most singular of all the arches erected in the British Provinces of North America in honour of the Prince of Wales visit was the Lumberers' Arch erected near the Chaudiere Bridge. It was sixty-five feet in height, and eighty-two feet in length, and was composed of 180,00 feet of lumber. Not a nail was used in its construction, nor a plank spoiled.' The Illustrated London News, 1860.

The 'Civil Service Arch' stood just inside the main gates to Parliament Hill. It was erected for the arrival of Princess Louise and the Marquess of Lorne - to honour his installation as Canada's fourth Governor General in 1878.

The Lorne and Louise arch was festooned with L's and the banner 'Hail Daughter of Our Queen'.

This bough-covered arch was built for something in 1895. The date does not coincide with a Royal Visit, or the arrival of a Governor General - so its purpose is unknown to me. The location, with the Library of Parliament in the background left, places it at the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Railway Station on Sussex Street.

And here's the mystery arrival. Spectators were gathered at the top of the crenellated towers.

In 1901 the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York (the future King George V and Queen Mary) arrived at a decorated temporary platform built at the Canada Atlantic Railway's Catherine and Elgin passenger station.

The Centre Block was bathed in electric illuminations for the Royal Visit of 1901.

And their Royal Arch which covered the intersection of Wellington and Metcalfe Streets was also lit.

Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, arrived in Ottawa to become Governor General in 1911.

An arch was erected over the Bank Street gates to Parliament Hill.

Many celebrations were staged for the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation in 1927. The carillon in the recently completed Peace Tower was inaugurated on one of the first trans-Empire radio broadcasts in the presence of Edward, the Prince of Wales, and Governor General Viscount Willingdon laid the cornerstone for the new Confederation Building.

The most celebrated guest at the 1927 festivities was Col. Charles Lindbergh who staged a flyover in the Spirit of St. Louis, fresh from his solo flight over the Atlantic.

And, there was an arch over Metcalfe Street.

CROWN APARTMENTS

2011-06-23T19:44:00.001-07:00

And now for something more modest. There's a recessed doorway on Elgin Street that appears oddly out of place.

It narrowly escaped immolation when the building next door burned in 1978. The four-door row at 378-82 Elgin Street was a converted rowhouse.

The burn-out was replaced the following year with this bi-level commercial building (Ala Kantti Associates, 1979).

The Crown Apartments' front door is a series of half-moon arches nestled together - the brick arch, the semicircular window over the door, the window in the door, and the crown itself.

There's another round-headed window on the second floor, directly above. The sidewalk entrance to the commercial row was a mid-1980s addition (Michael Brum, Architect). The Elgin Street Diner's facade is a 1950 brick refacing of a much older building.

The units in the Crown Apartments (all three of them) are above the diner. The arrow points to the rear of the apartment building entrance.

The name and address are picked out in gold leaf - the work of a sign painter from long ago.

LAST LOOK at the LORNE BUILDING - Part II

2011-06-19T14:13:00.000-07:00

'That as soon as possible the National Gallery be housed in a new building containing adequate facilities for display, storage, circulation of exhibitions, repair and restoration of paintings, and in addition, for greatly increased extension and education services.' - Royal Commission on the National Development of the Arts, Letters, and Science (1951). These were the blunt recommendations of the Massey Report on the state of Canadian culture, which lamented that the National Gallery had been carrying out 'a great and necessary work for which it has not had the funds, the staff or the facilities'. Thus began the quest for a new National Gallery of Canada.

A decade later on February 17, 1960 when Prime Minister John Diefenbaker officially opened the National Gallery in its new home, the Lorne Building, the atmosphere was as frosty as the weather outside. It had been a rocky road, after years of bickering over budgets, acquisitions, and the forced resignation of the gallery director who had steered the new building project through a recalcitrant bureaucracy.
And this what the Lorne Building looked like just before the opening. Credit for the design goes to architects Green Blankstein Russell Associates of Winnipeg. Judging by the volume and rancour of the correspondence between the Gallery's architects (for convenience I'll refer to them as GBR) and their masters (DPW) it was a tough job.

As the 2011 demolition began the building still bore a strong resemblance to GBR's design, but in the intervening years it had undergone significant renovations.

The Massey Report had suggested a competition for the new gallery. In 1953 a panel of judges was struck - Alfred Barr Jr. of the NY Museum of Modern Art, McGill's John Bland, with Eric Arthur (author of Toronto: No Mean City) as competition co-ordinator. Eero Saarinen was invited was invited, but I don't know if he showed up. The winning design was a simple rectilinear block, ostensibly planned to go on Cartier Square. The death of Joseph Stalin later that year threw this site into question. Cold War fears delayed the proposed demolition of the Department of National Defense's buildings on Cartier Square to some indeterminate date in the future, and the GBR design became a building looking for a location.

Green Blankstein Russell had emerged as pioneers of modernism in post-war Winnipeg. The winning design for the National Gallery in Ottawa would not have been all that dissimilar to their early 1950s Manitoba Power Commission building - perched on a ground floor of pilotis.

That city was a hotbed of modernism, producing bold buildings like GBR's Shaarey Zadek synagogue (1949-51)... (Thanks to friends in our Winnipeg office for supplying many of these GBR images.)

And the Polo Park Shopping Centre (1958).

Back in Ottawa the new gallery project was still without a home. Other sites were suggested, such as the former railway yards at Sussex and McTaggart and the corner of St.Patrick and Sussex. It was finally decided that the National Gallery could have the block of Elgin between Slater and Albert as a temporary location. And this is what the architects were handed - a proposal for an office building that had been conceived by the Department of Public Works.

The perspective drawing was titled Office Building (Temporary National Gallery), signed by DPW's Preliminary Design Division. (Thanks to Mike for discovering this drawing.) It was to be a shotgun marriage between the Department and the National Gallery. DPW insisted than any modifications designed to accommodate the national gallery had to be entirely reversible, and that the whole project was not to cost one dollar more than their office building.

Within these strictures Green Blankstein Russell were able to deliver a $5 million building that was distinctly more refined than DPW's ponderous block of masonry, cleaning up the Elgin Street elevation with a simplified arrangement of two types of stone, blank walls acting as bracketing end points, and an exaggerated penthouse. But there were other problems. With all of those windows there wouldn't be enough wall space to hang the art, and so the outer walls were fitted with an inner skin of false walls. Without any natural daylight, the floor slabs had to be honeycombed with buried conduits to carry wiring for lights.

At the same time GBR was designing much admired office buildings in Winnipeg, like the Norquay Building with curtain-walled bays divided by stone piers.

With a facade rhythm similar to Lorne's, GBR's large Winnipeg Post office had an office block and an industrial-sized mail sortation plant.

This shot of the post office is from the John Bland slide collection at McGill University. It's a good source for vintage architectural photographs.

In the end the architects had met their design brief - to create a National Gallery that would look like (and could be reconverted into) an office building.

Had they been forced to adhere to the building envelope dictated by the anonymous DPW design?

Using sleeker materials they had made the best of a bad situation.

They had certainly fought to include as much of the National Gallery's programme requirements as they could. Each gallery 'extra' met with resistance from DPW. The ground floor auditorium was a particular point of contention. Public Works felt that they would have no use for this space when it was restored to an office building, and they opposed a raked floor. As visitors to the Lorne will remember, the National Gallery's auditorium would be cursed by a hall with a flat floor, making sight lines to the stage impossible.

And there was the difficulty of trying to display large scale art in low ceilinged office space. The gallery won this concession - an open mezzanine between the fourth and fifth floors.

Another feature of the new Lorne Building was the National Design Centre for the display of Canadian industrial arts, furniture and product designs. It had been opened several years before in the Laurentian Building, which had been demolished for the gallery. Unfortunately the new Design Centre was short-lived.

The building's membrane would prove to be the Lorne's biggest headache. In order to protect its paintings from cracking the gallery maintained very high humidity levels - it was positively steamy inside. This caused condensation, leaks that damaged artwork, and the failure of the outer walls' stone-facing attachments.

After the gallery director's high profile resignation over this issue in 1979, they were forced to remove the exterior envelope, and totally replace the original Queenston limestone and rose granite with facsimile sections of tinted precast and steel spandrel panels enamelled in a faux granite finish The leaky one-over-one aluminum sash windows were also refitted.

The subtle tonal variations in the buff limestone were lost to monochromatic beige, but the fake granite was quite convincing. The columns on the ground floor, unaffected by the moisture problem, kept their original granite facing.

The Lorne Building was met with mixed reactions; everyone recognized that it was a compromise. Green Blankstein Russell went on with more public commissions, like the third Winnipeg City Hall (1962-65).

The tower for municipal offices was a severe slab, but the Council Chambers allowed for a statement with some sense of public occasion.

GBR's best work was for the Winnipeg International Airport (1964). One of a series of modernist Canadian airports (Parkin's Aeroquay in Toronto, and Strutt and Gilleland's Ottawa Airport) they have all been demolished or altered beyond recognition.

The clarity, optimism and rigor of these airport designs marked a high point in Canadian modernism.

They've been consigned to sunny post cards. However Green Blankstein Russell were associated with other Ottawa projects that are still around - The Garden of The Provinces, the Riverside Hospital, and Animal Disease Research Station.

The Winnipeg Airport's passenger lounge was strikingly similar to the Lorne Building's lobby -airy space, daylight ceiling and bold window mullions.

Lorne's stained cornerstone will be kept as a souvenir. Cecil Blankstein and G.L. Russell were both present when Vincent Massey (of the Report) laid the stone in May 1959. The exterior of the building was substantially complete. The ceremony nearly had to be cancelled because of a narrowly averted disaster. That afternoon high winds had detached the eight-story scaffolding from the Slater Street side, sending it crashing into the road below. Before the cornerstone was laid Department of Public Works Minister Howard Green inserted a copper box holding a time capsule that contained various Ottawa newspapers, current coins and stamps, a copy of the National Gallery of Canada Act, and a catalogue of the Gallery's collection.

Those of a certain age may remember the Lorne building somewhat fondly. For a time it was Canada's largest visual arts centre. It was big, it was free, and despite that less than optimal layout it held a vast array of historic and contempory art. I will always be thankful for one of Green Blankstein Russell's nicest victories - the top floor cafeteria (lousy food, great views). In the 1960s this light-filled penthouse location and outdoor terrace was a wonderful meeting place for Ottawa's budding culturati. This one's for you, Susan.

KING EDWARD AVENUE Extras

2011-06-16T08:44:00.000-07:00

Here are extra tidbits that didn't make into the posting on King Edward Avenue. This is the corner of York and King Edward looking north, late 1930s. Today the west side (left) is remarkably unchanged (minus a few trees).

In the 1920s and 1930s architect W.C. Beattie designed a number of art-deco inspired sub-stations like this one on King Edward for the Ottawa Hydro Electric Commission. Beattie was also the architect on retainer for the Ottawa Public School Board.

The transformer hall arch-topped doors were sacrificed for a heavy gauge rolldown, which while more secure and service vehicle friendly, is a lot less picturesque.

The Adath Jeshurun congregation built its synagogue at 375 King Edward Avenue in 1904. Lowertown was home to Ottawa's first Jewish families in the prior decades. With onion domes and a neo-Byzantine caste, it brought an eastern exoticism to the street. As recently as the late 1950s it was flanked by modest woodframed cottages.

In 1957, when they merged with another Lowertown congregation and moved to the Beth Shalom temple on Chapel Street, the synagogue was converted into the Ottawa Jewish Memorial Chapel for funeral services. More recently it has become the house of worship for an Evangelical Christian group.

I don't know much about the Convent of the Good Shepherd/bon pasteur on St. Patrick Street, or when it closed. The chapel was at the left.

Today it is the Embassy of the Peoples Republic of China. The chapel roof and all religious iconography has been removed.

This drinking fountain (and it took a while to figure out that's what it was) was a presentation to Mayor Samuel Bingham from D. O'Connor Q.C.. Here individual tin cups attached to chains perched on a circle of cast iron cup holders. It is placed atop a stone plinth with a carved dedication and was located in a corner of Metcalfe Square. Bingham (1845-1905), a native of Lowertown, was Mayor of Ottawa for the 1897-1898 term. O'Connor was obviously an enthusiastic supporter.

'Metcalfe Square' which has long disappeared straddled Sussex Street, near the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Railway Station. All of the streets north of Boteler were cleared away for the Macdonald Cartier Bridge approaches.

But the fountain , or at least its base, has survived.

It was moved to the front of the John Bingham house nearby at 120 Boteler Street. The Bingham family lived here from 1898 to 2007, when it was sold to new owners who undertook a meticulous restoration that won a 2011 Ottawa Architectural Conservation Award of Excellence.

LAST LOOK at the LORNE BUILDING: Part I

2011-06-13T19:19:00.000-07:00

This is a farewell to Lorne. For such a plain building it has a complicated history. First, the man himself. John Douglas Campbell, the Marquess of Lorne (1845-1914) was the husband of Queen Victoria's fourth daughter Princess Louise. He was Canada's fourth Governor General. As painted in this portrait by pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais, Lorne was a man of artistic sensibilities.

The young Governor General lent his personal support to the early development of Canadian culture, particularly with the founding exhibition of the Canadian Academy of Arts at the Clarendon Hotel (Sussex and George) in 1880.

Lorne presided at the inaugural display of paintings that became the core of the National Gallery of Canada's first collection - including Lucius O'Brien's 'Sunrise on the Saguenay' (hanging above the throne in this print) which still hangs in the National Gallery.

So it was fitting that eighty years later when the NGC finally moved into a home of its own in 1960, their new building was named for Lorne.
In the intervening years Ottawa was visited by many great plans - all of which specified the transformation of the upper end of Elgin Street into triumphal boulevards of one sort or another. The Federal Plan Commission, otherwise known as the Holt Report, was prepared by the Chicago architect and planning consultant Edward Bennett.

Bennett moved Elgin further east onto an elevated plaza in alignment with the Rideau Canal and the railway tracks leading into the centre of the city.

The Lorne's block between Slater and Albert was left behind in this scheme.

That block was under development in May 1912. The fire insurance atlas plate for that year notes that the Laurentian Club, a four storey red brick building was being constructed - on the recently demolished Congregational Church's (1862) property.

Nolan Cauchon, Ottawa's first professional planner, suggested a wide swath of ceremonial spaces stretching from Lisgar to St. Patrick Street for the City of Ottawa Town Planning Commission's plan for the central area. Elgin was restored to its original axis, but widened to four lanes with a centre median.

The plan was re-worked in the mid-1930s, with traffic circles and roundabouts introduced into Elgin Street. The Lorne/Laurentian site is shown with the existing buildings.

The Lorne's future site came into its own with the Plan for the National Capital - positioning it at the western terminus of a new bridge over the Rideau Canal.

A new National Gallery would have been built on the northern edge of Cartier Square.

The Lorne's site was intended for a major public building, like the national concert hall with a bowed front.

Or the location for a new Ottawa City Hall with a clock tower.

After Jacques Greber's improvements to Confederation Square and the widening of Elgin north from Laurier Avenue were complete, this is how the street looked just before the outbreak of World War II. In 1951 planning for a new National Gallery of Canada and planning for the national capital would converge and sometimes clash.

With decades of plans upon plans, the Government of Canada was at last ready to build something.

It would be a compromise in both design and function - but that will make its story all the more interesting.

KING EDWARD's TREES

2011-06-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's post was perceived as anti-growth, but driving a freeway through the middle of Ottawa's oldest and densest neighbourhoods is not the best example of growth. That posting was not just about trees - they were a symbol for loss of habitat. Between 1965-1970 thousands of people were evicted from Lowertown East for the urban renewal projects associated with King Edward's reconstruction.

KING EDWARD AVENUE MASSACRE

2011-06-09T19:06:00.000-07:00

What was Ottawa's worst urban renewal crime? An entire neighbourhood laid waste for a soulless housing project? Tearing out half of the heart of the city for the windy Confederation Square? I think that it was the destruction of the King Edward Avenue greenway - a linear park that ran from Rideau Street to the Rideau River.

Thanks to Marc Aubin of the King Edward Avenue Task Force a trove of historic photographs at the Library and Archives Canada Department of Public Works collection has been discovered and put on-line. Above is southern end of the parkway, looking north from Rideau Street. These are among the most poignant before and after comparisons that your ever likely to see. Look at them, and weep.

The King Edward Avenue parkway system was on the earliest projects of the Ottawa Improvement Commission (1899). Widening the former King Street one block to the east, and acquiring land for a riverside park near the Rideau Falls, the Commission planted a long park with a wide tree-lined ramble down the middle.

Here, in silence, is a set of eight then-and-now King Edward Avenue corners, presented in now-and-then order. The historic photos date mostly from between 1937-39. The contrasting pictures were taken in May 2011.

What happened? In 1965 the chainsaws and bulldozers moved in to clear away the trees and parkway for a road reconstruction that was planned to be an expressway linking to the Macdonald Cartier Bridge. More on that in the next King Edward post...

'Every elm tree cut down on the King Edward Avenue boulevard is scheduled for replacement by a large maple tree. Over 100 large elm trees will have to be cut down on the King Edward Avenue boulevard. A major sewer is going down the middle of the boulevard. The tree roots will have to be cut to make way for the pipe, which is six feet in diameter in some sections. With their roots severed the trees would die. Some of them have been damaged by Dutch elm disease and would have to be removed anyway. The parks and recreation department proposed to plant maples to replace the elms when the sewer work is finished.' Ottawa Citizen, April 1, 1965.

Jules Morin House

2011-06-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

Looking a little anachronistic at the edge of Lowertown is a relic of design and politics. This was the home of Jules Morin (1914-1988), active in city and provincial politics from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The house is situated on the high west banks of the Rideau River, in a row of waterfront apartment buildings that started in the mid-1960s.

The Morin house is an elevated, high-ranch, split-level on a slope, with a one-car garage.

I would date it to about 1958-59-ish, architect unknown. The house is remarkably in tact, with original single-glazed windows, redwood-stained siding and that dazzling white quartz stone so favoured by houses of the era.

The soffits have been repaired, but the sunburst balcony railings and those ubiquitous trumpet-shaped lights are still there.

Despite facing a river view, the back is really the BACK. No picture windows here.

The rear yard is a level terrace perched up over the river, and I am assuming that the scrub growth is fairly recent.

The house sits right at the eastern terminus of Clarence Street, a view which is likely to change..

I can recall redevelopment concepts dating back to the early 1980s. They were all per force, tall and narrow. To view the latest proposal (18 stories by DCYSA Architects) for the former Morin property you can go here.

At the other end of Clarence Street East is the former Anglesea Square, one of Lowertown's most culturally significant spaces (read Brian Doyle's Angel Square). All that history was covered up when it was re-named for Morin, a former milkman and Ottawa City Alderman from 1944 to 1974. Jules Morin was also the Progressive-Conservative MPP for Ottawa-East from 1955 to 1971, in the days when one could hold both municipal and provincial offices simultaneously.

Back to Sparks: BATE & CO.

2011-06-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

This small building fragment at 109-111 Sparks Street is a potent relic from Ottawa's built history. It was described in the Ottawa Tribune of December 7, 1859 as 'a commercial block for Charles T. Bate and Henry N. Bate on Sparks Street near Metcalfe, with residence at rear on Wellington Street for Charles T. Bate.' The Bate Building was designed by Thomas Stent and Augustus Laver, prominent architects who would go on to design buildings across Canada and the United States.

Four floors were added to the Bate & Co. in 1903. The residence on Wellington appears to have been demolished for a bank in the early 1870s. For most of its life the expanded office would be called the Richmond Building.

The Bates operated a grocery store and liquor import business. They became one of the wealthiest merchant families in the city. Sir Henry Newell Bate (he was knighted for his services) was appointed the first Chairman of the Ottawa Improvement Commission in 1899.

The Bate and Co. warehouse stood on the west bank of the Rideau Canal, where goods could be off-loaded and moved into storage, for distribution to their grocery stores.

Although the railway had reached Ottawa by this date (the station was near Sussex and Boteler), the canal was still an active transhipment point.

Stent and Laver also designed the ceremonial archways for the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1860. The is the arch at Sapper's Bridge where the Prince would dedicate the cornerstone for the Parliament Buildings.

In 1859 Stent and Laver had won the competition for the Departmental Office Buildings. This is the East Block under construction around 1864.

And the completed West Block, looking towards the interior of the southwest corner. The 1870s Thomas Scott addition (with the Mackenzie Tower) was attached to the small octagonal tower at the right.

Stent and Laver's Bate Building was small but very stylish for a commercial building in a rustic colonial outpost like Ottawa.

The architects might have borrowed the style from Sir Charles Barry's Travellers and Reform Clubs in London's Pall Mall.

The new storefront on Sparks Street has restored some of the building's original character.

In the 1880s Bate opened branches to sell groceries to the growing residential neighbourhoods, like Centretown. Their Bank Street store was in a different style - red brick Romanesque arches and terra cotta foliate and mask capitals.

The building is just north of Gladstone Avenue. It began as three stories, with extensions to the side and on top.

The Rideau Street branch was almost identical. Although it hasn't been painted over, it has lost its cornice. Both buildings had terra cotta roundels and shaped red sandstone lintels.

The Rideau Street Bate & Co. is on the south side, between Nicholas and the Dalhousie extension.

The Sparks Street building was re-named after the remodelling, but they got the name wrong - no 's'.

DOORS OPEN OTTAWA - June 4 and 5

2011-06-02T09:52:00.000-07:00

There's a Horsey and Sheard building on display during this weekend's DOORS OPEN OTTAWA - the red brick Gothic Revival J.H. Plummer House (1875), at Chapel and Daly. Generally known as the 'Toller House' its was also used by a religious order for many years. In 1999 the house was renovated for the Embassy of the Republic of Croatia. It's one of dozens that will be open for viewing. Consult the on-line guide for locations and hours.

Close Call: The SELTZER BUILDING

2011-05-31T14:44:00.000-07:00

Enough of old buildings. Here is some recent architectural history. Apologies for the number of Wikipages, just trying to fluff my links.

Remember the Eighties? ...the pink marbles, the broken pediments, teal blue, and Palladian windows. Post-Modernism had reached its wretched excesses in 1987 when Ottawa Mayor Jim Durrell invited the Seltzer Organization of Philadelphia, PA to come to the city with this Sparks Street office building project.

The Sparks Street elevation was stepped back to accommodate the Mall's 'right-to-light' zoning, but on Queen Street the Seltzer Building would rise up like the proverbial Chippendale highboy in homage to Philip Johnson's AT&T (now SONY) Building. Both sides of Seltzer displayed street-level arcading and a bowed-out midsection.

Zoning difficulties delayed the project for a decade, and in 1997 the existing buildings on the site (a 1940s art-moderne Woolworths and a 1920s Kresge) were cleared away.

Its later version (WZMH Partnership) was less frothy, but there was still a problem with the Sparks Street frontage - the developer was unable to acquire the three little stores shown as a white box to the right of the base. Eventually the project fell through and the cleared land functioned as a surface parking lot for five years.

Pink stone Po-Mo had been used earlier on the Heritage Place, a 1987 building that actually got built. By the time the son-of Seltzer got underway next door in 2002 (Morguard's Radio-Canada CBC Broadcast Centre) designed by DCYSA Architects the Sparks Street side had morphed into plain brick pseudo-Main Street. With the missing properties now added in, it was a very long facade.

Post-Modernism decreed that buildings must have a bottom, middle, and a top. WZMH (Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden Partnership) included a gently protruding glass belly.

This was resurrected on the final iteration's Queen Street side by architects DCYSA (Desmarais, Cousineau, Yaghjian, St-Jean et Associes).

The highboy chest had transformed into something resembling a 1940s radio console. Sections of beige pre-cast and applied orange strapwork replaced the busy pink marble.

At grade on Sparks Street the first Seltzer Building carried the curved wall all the way to the ground, screened by pink arcading. The former Serlian rounded arch defining the entry atrium was converted to a pointed arch on the second Seltzer.

The historicizing detail (Julia Oberlander, Architecural History Consultant) on Zellers was not entirely gratuitous - it was likely based on one of Sparks Street's long lost Romanesque Revival department stores.

But there were no local references for its aborted neighbour - just some cheezy corporate gee-gaws on a building type that was long past its best by date.

I remember sitting on a community consultation panel with this building's architects who declared their design to be sympathetic and contextual. The monotonous repetition and the lack of street level animation (the CBC had promised to open the windows and provide interactive programming onto the Mall) has proved otherwise.

But on balance, it's probably a good thing that this is the one that got away.

Although not entirely. Po-Mo didn't leave major marks on the central area. Apart from Alistair Ross's Barrister House (1982) at 180 Elgin St. and the Perez Corp's blue glass condo on George St., I can't think of many other significant examples. Of course the surburban office parks are dotted with them. Any favourites, or least favourites?

By Request: HERE'S HORSEY

2011-05-28T14:41:00.000-07:00

The previous post (Dominion United Church) has prompted a request for more on architect H.H. Horsey. He designed public and private buildings all over Eastern Ontario from Belleville to Pembroke and here are a few.

The earliest known Horsey work in Ottawa is the Carleton County Goal (1860-61) on Daly Avenue. It appears to be one of only three surviving Horsey buildings in Ottawa.

Henry Hodge Horsey (1830-1911) was a prolific and well-connected architect active in the middle decades of the nineteenth century - as evidenced by his landing this major public works job at such a young age.

A while back someone asked if I had pictures of the Carleton County Goal's gallows. No pictures so far, but if you enlarge this Fire Insurance Atlas plate you'll see that behind the jail there's a 'Gallow's Yard', surrounded by a 20-foot high stone wall.

Here's another view of Horsey's most important civic work, the Ottawa City Hall.

Horsey designed several churches, including the Congregational Church (1862) at Elgin and Albert Streets, with its spectacular vaulted ceiling.

The church was modified after a fire in 1888, and after another fire in 1911 the congregation rebuilt at Kent and Florence Street - reinstalling the old cornerstone.

Horsey's 'Chapel Court' (1864) at Daly and Chapel was designed for George-Edouard Desbarats, the Queen's Printer. Despite threats, after the assassination of his friend Thomas Darcy McGee Desbarats placed a plaque on his Sparks Street printing works which was promptly burned by alleged Fenians. The Desbarats sold their house to Sanford Fleming for $10,000 and left town. Fleming re-named it 'Winterholme' and although much altered by later additions it's still there.

The George Perley House (1875, with Sheard) stood at Wellington and Bay Streets. It was demolished after 1912 for future federal buildings, but the stone fence remained until the 1940s. Horsey designed houses for other lumber barons such as the Allan Gilmour House (1864) at Bank and Vittoria Streets.

Another penal commission for Horsey was an addition to the Kingston Penitentiary and the Entrance Lodge (1870-71).

Horsey also designed the Warden's Residence, across the street from the jail.

It's been converted to a museum - still open?.

Horsey's commercial projects included several hotels like the Union House Hotel (1874) across from the City Hall.

The Union House at the corner of Queen and Elgin was on site of the British High Commission - although Horsey probably didn't design that addition on the left, above the streetcar.

An aerial view of the Union House from across Queen Street - again not Horsey but I have been wanting to use this picture for ages.

Prior to the opening of the Chateau Laurier the Russell House was Ottawa's biggest and best hotel. It's seen here just before a massive alteration and expansion by Horsey and Sheard (1875). Matthew Sheard, who was based in Toronto, was an occasional partner with H.H. Horsey.

The Russell House filled the south side of Sparks Street, east of Elgin (now the southern half of Confederation Square). This is The Russell in its final years of operation. In 1925 the hotel closed and sat empty for two years until it was gutted by fire, and expropriated by the Government of Canada.

From the Canadian Illustrated News (incidentally started by Desbarats with the profits from the sale of his Ottawa house) we can read that 'The hotel has been entirely re-built and re-furnished and now has 250 rooms elegantly furnished from the workshops of London and Bowmanville, and carpeted with Manchester importations. The hotel boasts all of the latest improvements, viz. two elevators, bathrooms, patent oral annunciators [!] and fire escapes on the outside of the building.'

Although The Russell had burned mid-winter, the site was still being cleared the following summer. Nearby were two other Horsey and Sheard buildings awaiting a similar fate.

DOMINION UNITED FIRE

2011-05-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

A hose still played over the smoking walls of the Dominion United Church twenty-four hours after fire had broken out. The church was located at the north-west corner of Queen and O'Connor Streets.

The fire had started on Saturday, February 4, 1961. Mayor Charlotte Whitton was quickly on the scene, her face displaying the the severity of the disaster. They feared that the blaze could spread to engulf a block of Sparks Street.

It was Ottawa's largest Protestant Church. The Dominion Methodist Church (1875-76) was designed by architects Horsey and Sheard.

The same architects designed Ottawa's second City Hall in 1877. It was located on the site of the National Arts Centre and was also destroyed by fire, in 1931.

By the mid-1950s the church, which had been renamed the Dominion United Church, had lost both the elaborate cupola on top of the corner tower, and the finials on the chimneys. At the left is the rear of the Centre Theatre, and the Queen Street side of Murphy Gamble's department store.

The theatre was demolished in the early 1970s and is a parking lot to this day. The corner was redeveloped for the Canada Permanent Life Insurance building (Marani and Morris, 1965).

The Dominion United Church fire attracted a huge crowd, many of whom gathered on the roof of the new Queen Street Carpark (lower left).

For those who have never seen this thing, the carpark was Ottawa's first modern parking structure, fabricated from thin decks on top of pre-cast beams and wrapped in turquoise and yellow panels.

Although the church had at first determined to rebuild on the site, by late 1961 the congregation voted to sell the property and merge with the Chalmers United Church at O'Connor and Cooper Streets. They carried their name with them.

The HARDY ARCADE

2011-05-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

The Hardy Arcade was commissioned by Senator Arthur Charles Hardy in 1936. The architect was Arthur C. Davison. This undated photographs shows the original Sparks Street storefronts and the deeply recessed entrance to the arcade.

The Hardy's facade was restored as part of the 131 Queen Street development. The storefront were unified into one plane of glass and the entranceway moved out closer to the street.

Judging by his 1939 picture, Senator Hardy was as stylish as his arcade building. He lived at Fulford Place in Brockville, the town where architect Davison had his practice.

The open stairwell and nickle-plated railings were sacrificed to the reconstruction - as was much of the floor and wall geometric terrazzo pattern.

The Hardy Arcade was not the first through-block passage on Sparks. There was the Arcade Building (on the site of the former Toronto Dominion Bank), a department store which advertised 'Straight Through from Sparks to Queen'; Murphy-Gambles and the Ottawa Hydro-Electric Building at 56 Sparks, all of which accommodated the change in street level with staircases.

The Hardy Arcade's most famous tenant was photographer Yousef Karsh, who set up here shortly after the building was opened.

There's a permanent exhibition on the Karsh Studio in one of the new arcade's display windows.

You can see the studio's top floor skylight in this 1938 self portrait by Karsh.

The historic Hardy Arcade had one continuous ramp. It was too step for modern building codes, and had to be broken up with these flat landings.

More Art Moderne than Art Deco, the arcade used flattened out simplified classic elements like fluting and dentils. Four thin slices of fluted column sit across the top.

The interior of the arcade is a fairly faithful replica of the 1936 design. As on the exterior, isolated classic decoration like the grooved pilaster and incised frieze are attached like abstract elements.

The display cabinet doors, which used to be metallic, were painted bubblegum pink in the 1980s. The architects chose not to reverse this.

Although thoroughly up-to-the-minute in the mid-1930s, the Hardy paid a small gesture to Bowles Lunch next door.

The exact curve of the Bowles' ground floor window is quoted in shallow relief under which hang scallops and tassels - like a curtain going up.

The plainer Queen Street elevation was also preserved as a shallow facade hanging on the office building.

The Home Bank of Canada's (1919) upper stories were also re-incorporated in the 131 Queen Street development. A new ground floor on Sparks reproduced some of the bank's appearance, like the Tuscan columns. The street level had been entirely destroyed in the 1950s, and the architects worked from an historic photo.

The oldest preserved wall is a section of the Bryson Graham Department Store, where the cornice was rebuilt and wood frame sash windows (they actually open) were fitted. Saving old building fronts is often dismissed as facadism, a reluctant gesture, or something forced upon developers. In this case it's none of the above. These designers went at it with some gusto. For a more provocative view on how preservation might be distorting our view of the past ('creating tasteful scenery for docile consumers') see the recent New York Times review of 'Cronocaos', an exhibition organized by Rem Koolhaus for the New Museum.

BOWLES LUNCH

2011-05-19T19:36:00.001-07:00

Bowles (132 Sparks Street) was the home of the 'Quick Lunch' concept that had spread across North American cities after 1900. Primarily an all-male preserve, Bowles Lunch was a Sparks Street institution/hangout/landmark serving everyone from Mayors and Prime Ministers to salesmen, reporters and cops on the beat.

Bowles was open 24 hours a day for pure food, quick service and at the time of this photo (May 1917), billiards upstairs. There was a second Bowles Lunch on Rideau Street near Union Station. They were redolent of hard-boiled urban camaraderie. I wish that I'd been there.

The Ottawa Bowles on Sparks was likely designed by architects Hand, Harris and Merritt who had designed the chain's three Toronto lunchrooms. It's a notable example of architectural terra-cotta. For more information on this building, and other examples of terra-cotta decoration in Ottawa see Barbara McMullen's guidebook published by Heritage Ottawa. The restored facade now forms part of the Sparks Street frontage of a new mixed-use building at 131 Queen Street (Bregman+Hamman Architects; Robertson Martin Architects, Inc.; William Greer, Heritage Consultant).

The barrel-vaulted ceiling of Bowles' lunchroom echoed the curve of the arched window over the entrance. Originally there were no tables. Men picked up their meals at steam tables and carried the food to one-armed chairs arranged in straight rows against the walls. You could eat quickly and alone, or for more sociable gatherings the chairs could be pulled together in a square, facing each other.

Resembling classroom chairs, the wide arms contained a hole into which you could set a mug of coffee. The walls and ceilings were covered with glazed tiles for easy maintenance.

The quick lunch was the progenitor of today's fast-food outlets, a chain providing a limited menu - but not burgers and fries. Hot breakfast cereal with milk, eggs, ham sandwiches, oysters, and coffee were the favourites.

A large coffee urn was available for self service, and pieces of pie and piles of fresh fruit were displayed on the marble tables. There was also a cigar counter. In 1936 Bowles Lunch advertised that it had brought in tables and comfortable chairs, hired uniformed waitresses and added a bakery. They advised that it was time to bring in your wife or sister, suggesting that they were now looking for a more family-oriented clientele. The new regime didn't last long. By the 1940s Bowles was once again a political and business cockpit.

The chain was headquartered at the H.L. Bowles Co. in Springfield, Mass. Bowles' Canadian branches operated until the 1950s, when they was taken over by Scotts Restaurants. This is one of the Toronto stores.

In 1960, Scotts brought Kentucky Fried Chicken to Canada and converted the Bowles Lunch into a Scotts Chicken Villa. The exterior of the lower floor was chopped up for a new sign, and the terra cotta parged over. When the recent restoration was undertaken the third floor and its terra-cotta parapet walls were removed. The clay roof tiles were carefully salvaged for re-installation. The new roof is a simple mansard that doesn't replicate the bell-cast, or flared-out, profile of the original. Three new dormer windows were added to bring light into the residential units behind. And the new parapet walls were simply reconstructed with parging and covered on top with metal flashing.

Fortunately the delicately molded cream coloured tiles on the second floor survived. The undersides of the window lintels and cornice were decorated with a della Robbia blue glaze.

The same polychromed molding had once appeared under the ground floor arch, and when the facade was being readied for restoration pieces of it still remained. The architects recreated the curve of the arch, but didn't attempt a reproduction of the decorated tiles. In 2008 the project received the Ottawa Architectural Conservation Award of Excellence.

The CITIZEN BUILDING

2011-05-17T19:25:00.000-07:00

The Citizen Building (1902-03) on Sparks Street was a thin slice of textbook-perfect Edwardian revivalism. It was a little gem.

Using the same Indiana limestone and classical vocabulary as his Carnegie Library (above), architect Edgar Horwood took the facade of the Citizen Building from base to capital with three arch-and-spandrel stacks of windows in the mid-section, crowning the whole composition with a robust entablature of a plain frieze and a dentilated architrave.

The metal spandrel panels were festooned with swags and wreaths in high relief. For a final flourish the roofline was finished off with flowery projections. To get even more pedantic, these anthemions or palmettes of splayed fronds were another favourite Greek revival device. Here they were interspersed with sprigs of something.

This construction shot from an anniversary edition of The Citizen reveals a light weight steel frame being clad with masonry.

The paper had started out on Sparks Street as the Ottawa Free Press. Originally built for income, the Ottawa Citizen used only the lower floors of their new headquarters.

The new building put the paper into the busiest section of Sparks, next door to the 24-hour Bowles Lunch and a block from Parliament Hill. As circulation grew The Citizen expanded to fill the building and bought up a lot at O'Connor and Queen for a modern printing plant.

The upper floors had been leased to lawyers, insurance brokers, banks, and architects. The Citizen Building had two public meeting rooms that could be rented out for free.

Either through modernization or for safety reasons, because these things tended to fall off, in the course of time the Citizen lost its fine cornice. By the early 1950s their building was terminated with just a truncated top. Although the article claimed that the new mechanical building on O'Connor had been designed for future expansion, in the 1970s the paper sold the properties for redevelopment and decamped to the west end. Both buildings were demolished and the site was left vacant for 25 years. The land was eventually purchased by the National Capital Commission for a companion project that was to be connected to the Canlands development in the block to the south (the World Exchange Plaza). These plans fell through and the land was developed by Morguard as a mixed use office, retail, and residential building that re-incorporated the remaining Sparks Street facades.

90 ELGIN STREET

2011-05-15T10:06:00.000-07:00

It's official. The Government of Canada has announced plans to proceed with new headquarters for the Department of Finance on Elgin Street. The developers are Ron Engineering and GWL. David McRobie is the project's architect.

Here's the setting. The site is flanked by the Lord Elgin Hotel on the left and the British High Commission to the right. The much maligned Lorne Building which was the National Gallery of Canada's temporary home for thirty years, is to be totally demolished for the new 90 Elgin Street.

It is challenged by a steep change in grade from Albert to Slater Street. The Lorne Building had adjusted to this with a forbidding podium at the sidewalk edge. 90 Elgin's main entrance will be more accessible from the street with a ramp along its front plaza.

The new tower will match the heights of the Lord Elgin Plaza at 66 Slater, and 60 Queen behind the High Commission. The bumped out portion of 90 Elgin Street is the current height of the Lorne Building.

The tower building will be essentially T-shaped. There are at-grade retail stores along Albert Street.

Slater, which is one floor lower will also have storefronts. A mid-block crossing through the building is promised.

Seen from Confederation Park, the lower half of 90 Elgin Street is H-shaped. It's punctuated by two vertical piers clad in a yet to be determined stone.

This view of the back is conjectual since it will butt right up against the old Beacon Arms Hotel and the 91 Metcalfe Building.

I am not sure if this is what I would have imagined for this block, but nobody asked. The plane of building heights on Elgin Street established by Greber has been forcefully perpetuated. I'll leave it to others to analyze the results.

90 Elgin sits on 100 years of planning intentions. And the Lorne Building, while flawed, has a really interesting past. A middling work by the pioneers of prairie modernism, Green, Blankstein and Russell of Winnipeg, it deserves a fulsome obituary. The architects of its replacement intend to preserve the cornerstone laid by Vincent Massey in 1959 for re-use somewhere in the new building. I am gathering a collection of vintage GBR photos for a future send-off.

I neglected to mention the nod to oxidized copper roofs - that symbol of Ottawa's federal architecture. The thin vertical panels on the tower and the deep cornice overhanging the ghost of Lorne will be coloured green.

FLORIDA WATER

2011-05-15T10:02:00.001-07:00

LOOKIT what I found - buried treasure from a trench.

The blue bottle was lying at the edge of a pile of dirt behind the Lorne Building, which is being prepared for demolition.

Took my find home for some photo documentation, but forgot to include the obligatory measuring stick in the shot. It's 23cm (just over 9 inches) tall.

After a quick rinse I was hoping to find an original cork stopper still in the neck. There was also some dark residue in the bottom of the bottle.

Just visible through the mud was 'DRUGGISTS - NEW YORK'. One of those cure-all 19th century patent medicines?

The complete inscription reads 'FLORIDA WATER - MURRAY & LANMAN - DRUGGISTS - NEW YORK'. The cork turned out to be just a plug of mud and the contents were dark damp dirt. What was Florida Water?

The bottle contained a popular eau de cologne. Florida Water was a citrus and oil of bergamot based unisex scent that was liberally applied to mask the odours of a less hygienic era. The company was established by Dr. Murray in New York in 1808. In 1835 it merged with Lanman, and traded under that name until 1861.

The name of Florida was chosen to associate the toilette water the Ponce de Leon's famous 'Fountain of Youth' in Florida. It is still available today.

I'll be keeping an eye on the dig for any further discoveries.

RIDEAU STREET - Then & Now

2011-05-13T11:17:00.001-07:00

The Rideau Centre is getting refaced and those square indentations above these storefronts reveal something of the street's past.

In the early 1970s, before the mall, Rideau Street was wide and dull but full of lively retail. Five department stores (Freiman's, Ogilvy's, Caplan's, Larocque's and The Metropolitan) held sway.

Forty years later apart from the wall of the Rideau Centre (Crang and Boake, Architects) the scale of the street is remarkably unchanged. And the retail? It's gone indoors.

Of course something else happened during the intervening years - the bus mall. Associated with the rerouting of major arterial roads around and beneath the Rideau Centre was the Rideau Street Transit Mall. In November 1979 Mayor Marion Dewar inspected a model of the proposed mall (Lloyd Sankey and Associates). Rideau Street was closed to all but bus traffic and the sidewalks from Sussex to Dalhousie were covered with a continuous glass and steel enclosure.

The model prepared for the Eaton Co.'s approval (they were partners in the mall) portrayed the mall as light and crystalline. Because the transit mall was built during the centre's construction, its roof anchors were sunk into the concrete frame. Hence the square holes. In reality the covered sidewalks were dark, stuffy and heavy-handed. Heated in the winters (!) they were magnets for the homeless, post bar-closing urinaters, and general grunge. The Rideau Street bus mall was a wretched smelly failure. Built for $6.5 million, the shelters cost almost as much to dismantle and dispose of.

Pieces of the mall were sold to Perth, Ontario for a farmers' market - where its glass canopy (sans some of the sliding glass walls) serves a much happier purpose.

The ELEPHANT and PYTHON Fountain

2011-05-10T18:24:00.000-07:00

This crazy statue has been haunting me for years. The photograph is from the Archives of Ontario, captioned 'Elephant and Python Fountain - Major's Hill Park - Ottawa 1919'. I'd never heard of it. Must be a mistake. And that rose window in the distance? It doesn't match any building near the park that I could think of.

But two recent finds have brought it all home. First, an aerial view of Lowertown looking south. You can zoom in by clicking it. The construction of the Mackenzie Avenue wing of the Chateau Laurier dates it to around 1929. The elaborate pathway layout in the park to the right of the old Government Printing Bureau was new to me. In the centre there's a large circular area. Was this the original location of Samuel de Champlain's statue? I noticed a few more interesting items; the hooked up connection of Lady Grey Drive to Mackenzie, and Parent Street used to run through the old Ottawa General Hospital.

And then I stumbled upon a late 1950s newspaper article. 'NCC Relocates Park Fountain - An oriental, sculptured fountain presented by Baron Strathcona to the city in 1909 and long a feature of the Nepean Point Park is being relocated by the National Capital Commission. A site has yet to be determined. The fountain, an urn supported by four elephants and decorated with serpents was bought in Osaka Japan by Sir Henry Bate, then chairman of the Ottawa Improvement Commission, on behalf of the donor. It was removed last year for repair and relocation.'

Returning to the aerial for a closer inspection of Nepean Point Park confirmed the elephant and python fountain's last known address. But the question remains, where did this weird thing go? Maybe it was too grotesque (those droopy snakes devouring birds) for modern sensibilities. The rose window was in Hull's cathedral, which burned down in the 1970s.

A BRASH BROTHER IN VINCENT MASSEY

2011-05-07T18:55:00.000-07:00

In case you have not yet been to the picnic grounds in Vincent Massey Park this is a field report. The new pavilion is near completion and its landmark predecessor has been resurrected.

I hiked out to get a look before the new building disappeared into the foliage. It's a soaring white clam shell in the woods.

Anyone for Saarinen? The roof structure shelters two buildings for public restrooms.

The spine is anchored to two chunky concrete wishbones.

An oculus brings light into the area below and highlights the roof trusses.

I am not sure of the stylistic relationship between the roof and the (neo-Japanese?) buildings beneath, but they work well against one another.

And it's wonderful to see agencies like the National Capital Commission go a little bit over the top to give us bold and generous public facilities like these.

There was no tip of the folded sombrero to its historic brother pavilion nearby but that makes the new addition all the more bracing.

The old refreshment pavilion (Hart Massey, Architect 1958) has been stripped back to its original state.

The outdoor eating area at the food concession stand, which used to seem dark and confining, now feels open and airy.

Massey's hexagonal tree-form canopies have been carefully restored, and repainted in their 1950s orange and red colour scheme.

The old pavilion serves as clean procession way to the new structure set closer to the Rideau River.

One might says that it's never looked better. Here's a vintage postcard to remind you how it appeared over fifty years ago.

A highly acclaimed modernist masterwork has been restored, and something really good has landed in the trees beyond.

CORRY's BACK: Update

2011-05-07T18:04:00.000-07:00

Here's a brief update on the Corry Block - from the CNR photo collection at the Museum of Science and Technology a view of Corry's back, the tip of the triangle. The building to the right of the smoke stack is Postal Station B (Cecil Burgess, 1933) which was demolished for the Rideau Centre.

The Corry is nestled right up against Union Station, and there appears to be a large sign on the top floor facing east.

UNION STATION wins Prix du XXe siecle

2011-05-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

Architecture Canada/RAIC has announced the recipients of the 2011 Prix du XXe siecle - an award recognizing nationally significant landmark buildings. Among those honoured is the Ottawa Union Station, John. B. Parkin Architects(1966). In posting the announcement they have used stunning period photographs by Hugh Robertson of the Panda Photography agency. Enjoy these views of the station in its primal state.

Ahh, those concrete pylons with the shuttering marks; the uncluttered drop-off entrance court; and that luminous ceiling - all now sadly mucked up.

The other winners of the 2011 Prix are: the Heating and Cooling Plant, University of Regina, Clifford Wiens (1967); Robson Square, Vancouver BC, Arthur Erickson Architects (1973-83); and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Vancouver, BC, Arthur Erickson Architects 1971-76).

Jane's Walk on BANK STREET - May 8

2011-05-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

The Mid-Mod's going to be leading a Jane's Walk down Bank Street this Sunday (May 8th). Start time is 11:00am at the HotDiggityDog corner, Bank and Laurier.

JUSTICE UNDER CONSTRUCTION

2011-05-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

Looking at the Library and Archives Canada photos that document the progress of construction at the Justice Building is like getting historic X-ray vision.

The Justice Building stands alongside its older brother the Confederation Building. Prior to Greber's 1937-38 intervention all of Wellington Street west Bank was intended to look like this.

A Depression-era project, the Justice Building (T.W. Fuller, Chief Dominion Architect) was a stripped down version of the more flamboyant Confederation. It was also cheaper. In 1929 the final contract price for the Confederation was $2,538,670. In 1935-37 the Justice cost $1,223,000.

The Dominion Government had begun to acquire all of the land west of Bank and north of Wellington after the 1913 Holt Commission Report had recommended this site for a massive federal complex overlooking the Ottawa River. This had been Ottawa's Upper Town, an enclave of large houses and some commercial buildings like the Bank of British North America, seen above in the lower left.

Excavation for the Justice, which was also referred to as the R.C.M.P Building in its first years, began in early 1935. The small stone building adjacent is a side view of the BNA Bank, which had closed when it was absorbed by the Bank of Montreal. The gap across Wellington Street was being readied for another future federal building, then undetermined but ultimately given to the Bank of Canada.

The ca. 1919 Wellington Street west of Bank was wide, but not handsome. The tallest building in the centre is the Norlite Building (an upcoming URBSite post).

It was lying in wait for a powerful ensemble of federal institutions. The Norlite, which is the only carry-over from the historic view is just right of the crane.

Within six months of breaking ground the south wing had taken shape. Sandwiched between Justice and Confederation the little BNA Bank, then being used by the Dominion Elections Officer, hung on through the whole construction period. When it was demolished in late 1936 Prime Minister Mackenzie King, back in office fresh from his 1935 election victory, asked the Department of Public work to salvage the bank's entrance way for the Arc de Triomphe ruin at Kingsmere.

Here is the wing today clad in its Nepean sandstone skin. The BNA gap now frames the view across Wellington to the Bank of Canada.

Erecting the steel frame moved forward at a furious pace. The building had reached five storeys only five weeks after breaking grade level.

It's impossible to replicate the same view because the last Temporary Building is in the way.

By July 1935 the frame was essentially complete and the floors were being poured.

The Justice is simple U-shape, with a light court facing east.

March 23, 1935 - looking north down Vittoria Street (the extension of Kent north of Wellington) pre-steel, with some of the site's grading issues being resolved. St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church spire is in the middle distance and the vacant houses at the right sat on what would eventually be the Supreme Court's front lawn.

One month later a wide trench was being laid - probably to connect the building to the Central Heating Plant which was located on the Ottawa River shore below the cliffs.

The Department of Justice has since moved across Wellington Street, and it is now used for Parliamentary Offices.

BANK & LAURIER

2011-04-30T17:28:00.001-07:00

Some streets do heal themselves. In the early 1970s this block of Bank between Laurier and Slater was seriously degraded by modernizations and applications of paint.

Today the brick has been revealed, the cornices replaced, and the window openings returned to something more historically appropriate.

The oldest building in the group is the S.S. Slinn Block (1885) - Slinn was a baker.

Next door the white fins covering over the facade were taken down, and the picture window openings on the second floor tamed with wooden frames and mullions.

In 1965 the whole block had been scheduled for redevelopment with a 900-car parking structure topped by an office building and hotel. At the time Mayor Don Reid had declared to project to be a 'Shot in the arm'. Luckily Bank Street dodged that shot. The block is now designated as part of the Bank Street Heritage Conservation District.

The CORRY BLOCK

2011-04-27T18:40:00.000-07:00

I am going to call this triangular tower Ottawa's first modern office building (1903). The Corry Block was named for its developer James A. Corry, who had made his mark in the 1890s by building large Queen Anne style homes like the Butterworth House in Somerset Village and the exotic Hollywood Parade on James Street.

Edgar L. Horwood was the Corry's architect. All three of the Horwood buildings illustrated in this plate from Anson Gard's guide to Ottawa ('The Hub and Spokes') has been lost.

The building was likely steel-framed, as was Moses Edey's Thos. Lindsay Department Store across Rideau Street, both seen here in the pre-Chateau Laurier years when Major's Hill Park extended all the way to the Dufferin Bridge.

Nestled on a small wedge of land right up against the site planned for the Grand Trunk Railway's Central Depot, the Corry might have been short-lived had the railway managed to acquire the property for its new station. This is told in a series of 1907 newspaper articles: 'GRAND TRUNK STILL BUYING - Have Acquired or Got Options on Most Round Central Depot - May also get the Corry Block' -February 3, 1907 ; 'The Grand Truck has an option on the Corry Block but owing to the hgh prices demanded for adjoining properties has abandoned for the present at least the scheme of acquiring them' - April 2, 1907. Demolition of the Corry Block was deemed so essential that Ottawa City Council had moved to expropriate: 'There was a time when 'no Corry Block purchase, no Central Depot' just about epitomized the ominous situation' -December 2, 1907. Eventually the GTR gave up, and the young Corry was spared.

Nearing the end of its life, the Corry Block peaks out from behind the Union Station in a late 1950s shot of an Ottawa streetcar (which also captured the Daly and Plaza Buildings' cornices shortly before they were removed).

A genuine flatiron building should probably stand with the pointy-side out, but until it was hemmed in the Corry's angles were dramatically acute. This is a 1949 aerial of Rideau Street.

The electrified Beach Foundry sign (seen at the right under the spreading elm tree) blazed red from the top of the buiding for many years. Being next to the railway, the Corry witnessed many events: 'Thousands of Ottawans turned out to welcome their distinguished fellow-citizen Sir Wilfrid Laurier on his return from the Imperial Conference in London. The old Central Depot, so-called, was gaily dressed up in flags and bunting. While the Corry Block on Rideau Street was illuminated with a large 'Welcome to the Chief' in electric lights being displayed in front with many flags.' Ottawa Citizen, July 2, 1907

The site of the demolished Corry Block was temporarily landscaped by the National Capital Commission as plans for the removal and redevelopment of the Union Station were being debated. The kiosk is to advertize 'Ottawa: Perspectives from the Past' - a groundbreaking exhibit of historic photographs that was contemporary with Ottawa's emerging heritage movement.

Steve's Music

2011-04-26T17:58:00.000-07:00

Capello Audio (1963, architect unknown) at 306 Rideau Street was the place for Ottawans who wanted their stereophonic hi-fi from sleek components instead of walnut cabinets. Recently stripped of its accumulation of signs and advertising, this little building has re-emerged with all of its balanced, tasteful early-1960s clarity in tact - nearing 50, and holding.

A little ratty to be sure, and nothing more than a competent commercial project, it's a rational exercise in greys, brushed aluminum, and dark sepia glazed bricks. I was struck by how it still carried its weight in this blasted block of Rideau Street. No faux-Main Street storefronts here (viz. its new neighbour) - it's still pretty hip, like those Uher tape decks and early Dual turntables.

SUSSEX DRIVE: Mile of History

2011-04-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

With 35 years of patina on these buildings, the casual observer could assume that those facades are as old as their neighbours. But they're not. After an early 1970s fire which destroyed the building at the right, the National Capital Commission demolished the survivor and replaced both with one new building and two facsimile fronts.

The post-fire photo of 533-39 Sussex shows how cheap and cheerful the NCC's earliest 'Mile of History' projects had been. Missing cornices were covered up with flat panels, and the storefronts looked like two-dimensional stage sets. Ironically 539 Sussex Drive had once been the offices of the Ottawa Fireproof Supply Co.

Claiming to be working from historic plans, the NCC architects nonetheless adjusted the actual windows to 'better match' the building, and likely harmonize the floor plates between the two. And they also abandoned the charming round headed windows above the Rose Cafe for segmentally arched ones. It was an innovative mixed-use development. The through floor retail premises had direct access to the future Sussex Drive courtyards at the rear. Upstairs are double height loft apartments with sleeping platforms. Adjacent building to the left and right were also renovated. The flat roofed fourth floor addition on the left was removed and replaced with a mansard roof and dormers. The British Hotel to the right was similarly shorn of an extra storey, and given a more historically accurate roofline.

Further north along Sussex the NCC continued to replicate rather than restore. The sagging old le Castor/Beaver Hotel was demolished and replaced with another mixed-use building. The Murray to St. Patrick block, which had been partially damaged by fire, was totally removed and
rebuilt as a modern replica. COMING SOON: The 'Mile of History' at 60.

Bank and Slater - TELUS House

2011-01-09T16:55:00.000-08:00

Until Telus House (Richard Chmiel Architect and Associates) the corner at Bank and Slater harboured downtown Ottawa's last clutch of little brick houses - although they had survived in a dilapidated state.

Above: Bank and Slater around 1906 when the block was mostly residential, and below: 100 years later just before these buildings were demolished for Telus House. The art deco building behind the former Second Cup was a fur storage vault for Burkholder's, which was in the grey building third from the right.

Telus's street elevations have a shallow swoosh set above recessed lower floors. The five storey freestanding colonnade is a rhetorical flourish for displaying the company name.

Three bays on Bank Street have been pulled out to the sidewalk edge to create storefront units.

Telus' regional headquarters was designed during the company's 'green gecko' phase, and in the early renderings their corporate mascot was shown wriggling up the wall. Because the building is located in the Bank Street Heritage Conservation it was governed by a conservation agreement requiring preservation of a part of one of the historic facades.

The mansard roof with the large dormers (third from the right) was meant to be retained.

The metal roof would have been hung on the building as a sculptural element.

The developers applied for relief from this provision, and instead just offered up a precast triumvirate arch.

The building has been well received, although that clam shell suspended over the front door is a dubious addition - maybe because its segmented fabrication is a little clunky. Opened in 2008, Telus House was the first office building to be certified LEED Silver by the City of Ottawa.

2011 - A Prime New Year

2010-12-31T18:28:00.000-08:00

I have been living off the grid for the past few weeks, but will be returning to regular posts shortly. Happy New Year!

BANK of CANADA

2010-12-11T18:34:00.000-08:00

The Bank of Canada is (IMHO) a pompous little building - but it was much admired in its day and played an important supporting role in the story of Wellington Street's transformation from modest to monumental.

Mackenzie King is often the go-to source for pre-1950 federal office buildings. His view on this view was given in an address at the Bank of Canada's cornerstone laying. 'I am glad that the district is to be beautified and improved by the Bank of Canada's head office, and that care has been taken to centre it on the axis of the space between the buildings opposite. Thus, at some future date, passers-by on the Mall which is to be extended west from Parliament Hill behind the new departmental buildings [Confederation and Justice] will be able to see this building in the proper perspective.' - King's speech at the Bank of Canada cornerstone laying ceremony, August 10, 1937.

August 1937 was eventful month in the development of Ottawa. Among the dignitaries present at the ceremony was Jacques Greber, who had spent the previous week surveying the city in preparation for his 1938 plan. Bi-axial symmetry was important to Greber as well. For Wellington Street he would ultimately envision a row of public buildings controlled by the height of the Bank's attic storey. To accommodate its future expansion the Bank could be extended by the addition of a mirror image of the Metropolitan Insurance Company to the east, and a replica of the bank building itself to the west - all three buildings to be linked by a colonnade.

Architects Marani, Lawson and Morris had designed a chilly granite vault that broke away from the recently established tradition of neo-Gothic chateau style federal buildings. They had also planned for expansion - the rear wall could be removed and put back on when the rear of the building was extended to Sparks Street. In 1976 Arthur Erickson ignored both the Greber and Marani directives by enveloping the 1937 structure in an atrium and flanking towers. He also replaced the original penthouse with a steeply pitched copper roof - thereby reintroducing the Bank to Wellington Street's family of chateau style buildings.

The Bank of Canada bears a passing resemblance to a slice of the Federal Reserve Board building in Washington DC. Franklin Roosevelt laid its cornerstone on October 10, 1937. It was designed by Paul-Phillipe Cret, a French architect who had co-incidentally been working with Jacques Greber on several public buildings in Philadelphia.

Along the balance of Wellington Street Greber had wanted to impose a strict height control, requiring removal of the offending Victoria and Norlite buildings - shown as dotted lines in this full street elevation.

The Bank's cornerstone is a one-ton block of Stanstead granite. In it was buried a time capsule - a copper box containing 1935 and 1937 bank notes, a coin set, the Bank of Canada Act, a copy of the 1933 Royal Commission Report on Banking and Currency, and the bank's statistical summary for July 1937. After the cornerstone was laid King mused in his diary that 'I feel the vision of years are at last being realized, from the Harper Monument on Wellington St. to the Bank of Canada and the [War] Memorial at the head of Elgin Street. It marks a long & great period of Canadian History, Elgin having pardoned Grandfather Mackenzie. It is fine to think that his grandson has succeeded in having the War Memorial crown the street - the great avenue that bears his name.'

The Bank of Canada's first offices were located in the too-tall Victoria Building.

It could have been replaced with an enlarged American Embassy - another copy building on the site of the Victoria Building.

The Bank of Canada maintains its own library and archives. Although not a retail bank, the marble banking hall contained tellers' windows. I am not sure of their purpose. Similar windows were built in the lobby of the 1976 bank, but they have since been removed.

In the mid-195os the Bank documented its workings - this the Public Debt Department.

The Telecommunications office had a Telex machine - a keyboard operated telegraph network.

The Bank's library maintained its voluminous statistical records.

The Secretaries' Office was bright and spacious - oh, for the days of natural light.

Paper money issued by the Bank was tracked at the Currency Department, where worn-out bills were counted before being taken out of circulation. An off-site incinerator disposed of the old ones.