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| 315 Somerset East, Ottawa ON |
This oddity seems to have less floor-space than my own modest one-bedroom flat. The facade bespeaks a career in retail, the siding is recent and, I am confident, vinyl. I am less sure whether someone actually lives here. This house, if we can call it that, sits on the eastern, downhill stretch of Somerset East between Chapel St and Blackburn Ave — that little valley in the heart of what we aren't supposed to call the Ottawa U "student ghetto."
The valley is actually a fluvial channel, cut by the proto-Ottawa River, between two sandy terraces — "old" Sandy Hill to the north and the smaller Mann Avenue ridge to the south. This happened a very long time ago. Later, when the Rideau Canal was being built, a stream called Neville's Creek ran from a swampy patch of ground near Elgin St, eastward to the southern end of the Rideau Canal's "Deep Cut" at the southern tip of what is now the Ottawa U campus. It cascaded down to the now-corner of Mann and King Edward, thence toward now-Somerset, following the valley to now-Strathcona Park, emptying into what continues to be the Rideau River.
The topography on this portion of the Charles E. Goad fire insurance map (1902-'09) shows part of the ancient channel (Colonel By's "natural gully") as it crosses the chart from the southwest to the northeast. Anyone who has walked or driven the length of Somerset East will recognise the spectacular drop between Henderson and Sweetland, as Somerset dives into the channel. In this view, the roads of southern Sandy Hill have been surveyed but not necessarily built upon, and Mann Ave is still considered to be part of Gladstone.
The portion of Sandy Hill south of Laurier (then-Theodore) saw scant development before 1900, but experienced a building boom which spread roughly downhill from the northwest to the southeast during the first three decades of the 20th Century. By mid-century, the southward sprawl back uphill to Mann Ave was complete.
The large buildings to either side of #315 are visible in aerial photos from 1928, but poor resolution precludes a clear sighting of the little shop itself (for indeed, that's what it was.) We can see it in an image from thirty years later (highlighted here in green, image via geoOttawa.) The shop seems to cling to it's neighbour — in fact the two are separated by an air-gap of no more than a foot.
#315 made local news during January of 1945, when on the 19th of that month, the Ottawa Journal reported that...
"Pleading not guilty to a charge of breaking and entering the shop of Hiram Atcheson, 315 Somerset street east, and stealing $3 worth of of cigarettes, Raymond Allen, 18, of no fixed address, was remanded to January 26 for hearing, by Magistrate Strike this morning."Exactly three days later, the Journal would note that one Angelo Sirna, age 17, of nearby 31 Greenfield Ave had been arrested on the same charge having allegedly broken into the same store and stolen cigarettes in the same amount. I'm thinking that a) the two crimes were somehow related and b) Raymond ratted on Angelo.
And then there's this, from November of 1974...
Yes, some guys really did dress like that in 1974.
The Ottawa City Directories confirm that Hiram Atcheson operated a barbershop at #315 as early as 1941. It was then common enough for such shops to double as convenience-stores, selling candy, tobacco, sodas and such non-perishable doodads as lighters, pocket knives and nail clippers. For much of the '40s, Hiram and his wife Edna lived next to the shop at #313, actually a ground-floor rear apartment in the adjacent building at Somerset East and Chapel.
Atcheson moved out of #313 some time around 1950 but continued to cut hair at #315 until 1971, a tenure of at least thirty years. The shop sat vacant for a year or two until Gerard Levesque, his sideburns and his double-knits, briefly converted the shop into their campaign headquarters. A courier service assumed an equally short tenancy in 1975 and then a "home care"[?] company moved in and stayed until 1990. Thereafter, the Directories simply stop listing #315 altogether, up to the year 2000, the most recent edition held by the Ottawa Public Library.
