[Confusion alert — This article contains references to a man called Shirley and a woman called Andrew.]
If one were to say anything unkind about the newspaper scans at Google (
The Ottawa Citizen) or Newspapers.com (
The Ottawa Journal), it might be that the quality of the photographs is horrible — each newspaper being horrible in its own way. Those of the
Citizen are sketchy and over-contrasted, like Xeroxes of old, while the
Journal's are blobby, murky and dark.
Still. we must be grateful for the information they provide. Here's an example of something (sketchy and over-contrasted) that appeared in the March 2nd edition of
The Ottawa Citizen in the year 1910.
To say that 381 Stewart was "beautifully situated" was an understatement. The house stood second to last on the north side of the street, on the eastern edge of the Sandy Hill plateau, on a cliff overlooking the Rideau River. The "country beyond" would have been the Janeville section of Eastview, plus a handful of houses claiming to be Overbrook. Which is to say it was mostly meadows and hay-fields, marked by meandering streams and dotted with woodlots.
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| Scrolley (scrolly?) things | |
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Picture quality notwithstanding, we can make out a late-Victorian cross-gabled
confection of gambrel roof, dormer window and sun-catching bays, nicely tarted up with decorative trim and festive awnings. The front of the house boasts a two-tiered verandah in the classical style, properly pedimented, held up by four bold columns, each topped (it would seem, if you squint) with an Ionic volute (scrolley thing.)
At a time when some Ottawa realtors were lying through their teeth to sell their "high and dry" floodplain lots, the guileless copy of this ad is refreshing — no frantic appeals to the reader's vanity, no outrageous claims — (the walk from #381 to the Charlotte "car [streetcar] lines" was indeed less than two minutes, probably closer to one.)
This wasn't just any real estate ad — integrity of wording was requisite. Appearing as it did on page 10 of 12, nested amid a motley grab-bag of news stories and ads for spring tonics (it was nearly spring, after all), this placement announced the sale of the house of Wilson Mills Southam, son of the
Citizen's owner, newspaper magnate William Southam.
* * *
The history of Sandy Hill plateau during the 1800s can be oversimplified thus...
1) Early decades (yes, I'm being vague), logging.
2) Mid-century, farming (mostly by squatter market-gardeners) and
3) Closing decades, real estate development, including a lot of high-end stuff.
The last-mentioned home-building spread southward and eastward away from the city core, across the plateau to reach its limits (Laurier Avenue and the Rideau River) around the end of the 19th century. The 20th would watch as two World Wars, the Great Depression and the expansion of Ottawa University conspired to divide many of the once great Sandy Hill homes into multi-unit rentals, while others were demolished to make way for apartment buildings — or in the case of #381, to be reduced to a patch of grass and pavement.
But now we are ahead of ourselves.
I won't pretend to know why Wilson M. and Henrietta (Cargill) Southam decided to sell. Had a demon moved into their basement? Did it smell bad? Did visions of their children falling off the nearby cliff haunt their dreams? Or had they foreseen their once-stellar neighbourhood slouching toward mere charm?
On pages 205-207 of Martha Edmond's
Rockcliffe Park: A History of the Village we find this...
"Two of [architect] Allan Keefer's houses, Lindenelm and Casa Loma, are now the residences of the ambassadors of Spain and Austria respectively. They were built adjacent to each other in 1911 for two brothers, Wilson and Harry Southam. Their father, founder of the Southam publishing dynasty bought the Ottawa Citizen in 1896 and sent his two sons to run the paper. Wilson, the eldest son, came to Ottawa in 1897 to take over as managing director. Harry followed in 1901, to become Secretary-Treasurer. In 1909, they bought adjoining land from the Keefer Estate and put in a private road."
So there you have it. The Wilson Southams were early-adopters, part of a vanguard abandoning Sandy Hill for "the Village." They left their quaint but stale-dated Queen Anne house with its killer cliff, its shallow Rideau River and its view of proto-Vanier for "
Lindenelm," a Tudor Revival manse atop a
gentle cliff, overlooking the
mighty Ottawa River with a breathtaking view of the Gatineau Hills.
But didn't Wilson, with his downtown newspaper job, miss being less than two minutes walk from the streetcar? Not at all — the Southam families had access to the extended Rockcliffe line which ran past the very bottoms of their respective gardens (now the Rockeries) and shared a dedicated, sheltered "Southam stop" — indeed, a shorter walk than the old Stewart Street slog.
* * *
Well then, bully for the Southams I say. With their money and foresight I'd have done the same. But what of 381 Stewart and its whimsied charms? To our eyes, the
Citizen's photo reveals a lost treasure. To the Southams the house likely reeked of
demons 19th century fussiness. Hey, it's not easy staying hip.
Here's a view of #381's immediate neighbourhood, per Goad 1912, roughly the time of the Southam's move to Rockcliffe. I've boxed their house and property in red.
(Notice the old Cummings Bridge, still connecting to the island with its general store, post office and outlying sheds. I waded out to Cummings Island this summer, hoping to find any remaining foundations but was promptly chased off by nesting Canada geese. Thankfully I was drunk, otherwise I might well have panicked.)
In the above plan, the Southam house is sited on a block designated #105. The Goad directory plan for 1895 (seventeen years previous) shows
no construction on block 105 nor on any of the adjoining blocks. This refines our understanding of the rate and extent of home-building on the east end of the plateau.
The Might Directory for 1901 does not list #381, though the Southam's neighbour-to-be, one William L. Scott, was already installed at #383. Might 1909
does list the Southams at 381. Martha Edmond gives us 1897 as the year of Wilson's arrival in Ottawa — thus a possible timeline takes shape, with Wilson Southam perhaps taking an apartment while his house was being built in Sandy Hill, a house his family would live in for at most a decade.
The house was bought by one Robert M. Cox, "pioneer lumberman," originally from Liverpool. Mr. Cox died in the house in the summer of 1919 at the age of 83. He had married his second wife little more than a year previous. His name survived him through his business — for example, Robert Cox & Co. at Hope Chambers supplied "birnut" wood (patented process cured Quebec birch made to look like walnut) for the floors, doors and trim of the Duncannon Apartments (1931.) As a respected businessman, he contributed generously to the War Effort and was seen at all the right funerals.
I don't know how the widow Cox fared after her husband's death, but by 1923, the house was occupied by the Conservative politician Sir Henry Lumley Drayton (1869-1950.) He served as minister of finance under two prime ministers and then ran for Conservative leadership (but came in last.) You can read about him
here.
One might think that Sir Henry's tenure would have been enough to earn 381 Stewart the title "Drayton House," but by the thick of World War II it was being called Wolsley House. The name may have been conferred, for whatever reason, by the military who had taken over the place. Here is a patchy chronology gleaned from the pages of the
Ottawa Journal.
1926, February 20 "Burnham Boilers are Good Boilers — The residence of Sir Henry Drayton is heated by two Burnham Boilers," etc.
1936, July 17 Madame Jan Pawlica[1] held a party for her guest Miss Mary Nixon Bull of Winnipeg. The afternoon's entertainments ran "delightfully late" and were attended by "members of Ottawa's younger set."
1940, July 23 "Juliana Renting Shirley Woods' Home — ...Shirley Woods[2] confirmed a story in The Journal [that] the Princess was moving into his home on the shores of McKay Lake[3]. He is vacating the premises shortly and will live at one of his houses, 381 Stewart street, now occupied by Victor Podoski, Consul General for Poland..."
1942, Nov 28 "...the Navy Minister... [has] authorized the acquiring of the former Shirley Woods home at 381 Stewart... as quarters for the Wrens, girls of the Women's Royal Naval Service."
1943, March 2 ".. $20.000 was paid the estate of Col J.W. Woods for a property at 381 Stewart street, also for the use of the W.R.C.N.S. [the Wrens]."
1945, September 18 "...Council also approved a Board of Control recommendation that the city take over Wolsley House, 381 Stewart street, occupied by Wrens, to house veterans and their families."[4]
1948, February 23 "Betty Jane Dixon, 381 Stewart street" is crowned in a skating competition.[5]
1949, May 6 "War Assets... for sale at Ottawa, Ontario... [including] 381 Stewart Street"
1955, October 13 "Mrs. Herbert A. McDougall[6], 381 Stewart street died at home after a long illness..."
and finally,
1961, February 22 "Fire Calls, Tuesday [Feb. 21] ... 5:30 PM — 381 Stewart, pot of grease on stove, no damage..."
[1] wife of the Polish Consul-General
[2] a dude
[3] limestone construction on 10 acres, built 1938 — and that (as my mother would say every spring) is why we have tulips.
[4] This happened to several houses in Sandy Hill. The post-war housing boom would make these efforts look quaint.
[5] a serviceman's daughter?
[6] wife of the Lt.-Col., mother of Nadine (a woman, styled Princess Andrew of Russia)
Say what you will, 381 Stewart Street was, in its time, a storied address.
After the great kitchen fire of 1961, #381 faded from public attention. At some point during that decade it was demolished to accommodate the Rio Vista Apartments at 400 Stewart Street.
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| the Rio Vista, Ottawa Journal, February 1971 (check the swans) |
All that remains of lot 381 is a small parking area in front of the apartment building...
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| via Google Maps/ Street View |
By my estimation, the house stood on the spot here occupied by a row of parked cars, just below the middle of the picture. An audacious 2013 proposal to fill this gap with an even taller apartment/condo building has yet to see fruition. I reproduce an article from the Ottawa Citizen in its entirety
"By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN December 3, 2013 6:00 PM
OTTAWA — A Montreal developer’s proposed 31-storey building in east
Sandy Hill overlooking the Rideau River would be the first of a new
generation of towers in the area.
The local councillor called the plan the latest brick in a wall of buildings blocking off the view of the river.
Rio Vista Apartments Inc. already owns a luxury apartment just east of
the proposed new tower at 400 Stewart St. That tower rises 25 storeys
from the nearby riverbank but only 21 storeys from street level.
The new 226-unit building — Rio Vista’s application calls it an
“apartment,” though in planning jargon that can mean condominiums or
rental units — would look 10 floors taller than its nearest neighbour,
already one of the tallest buildings in the area...
They’d be joined by an underground garage, six storeys deep, to form one
complex. The hundreds of extra parking spots would doubtless lead to
more traffic in Sandy Hill, but it would be divided between Stewart and
Daly Avenue on the property’s north side, thanks to two entrances and
exists.
“I’m not happy with it,” said Coun. Mathieu Fleury. “We’re building a
wall against the water.” There’s no path along the riverbank there, no
practical access to the Rideau, and this’ll make things worse, he said.
He’s glad to see plans to build on a surface parking lot, but not just
anything will do.
“There could be a nice [building] within the existing development
rules,” he said, which max out at about 12 storeys. “Thirty-one storeys
is massive, no matter how you look at it.”
The new glassy spire would be more like the modern condos in Centretown
and Hintonburg than its heavier-looking concrete neighbours from the
1960s and ’70s. Rio Vista’s application says politely: “Aside from
providing a more contemporary architecture and built form, the proposal
will also provide a better relationship with the existing slab
buildings, by allowing many advantages (i.e. improved light, air and
views).”
But that comes at a cost, mainly in allowing Rio Vista to build a tower
nearly three times as high as the zoning on the property allows.
It also means giving up the prospect of a small park on the property,
which is officially in the city’s plans but has never happened. Rio
Vista says it’s waited for more than 10 years for the city to make an
offer and it’s never come, so it’s time to get on with a development.
The city generally favour putting tall buildings up against natural
edges, like major roads, rail tracks and rivers, where they have fewer
neighbours. That makes sites like this one, on a dead end and next to
the Rideau, an attractive spot. Developers’ interest in sites like this
has also grown as parking lots and rundown buildings in the downtown
core have been snapped up and built on: there’s already a proposal for
24- and 27-storey buildings just across the river in Vanier.
The steep slope up from the Rideau on its west bank will make the
31-storey building look even taller, Fleury said. There appears to be
nothing special about the site that warrants the extra height. It’s not
close to a transit station, not in a redevelopment district. It is in a
residential area two blocks south of Rideau Street, right next to Sandy
Hill houses.
The application is new so there is no date set for planning committee to consider it."
