Open Wide

198 Gladstone, south side, between Elgin and Metcalfe

   No, really, it's the pole.

   My last post tried to make sense of what happened to the north side of Gladstone between Bank and Elgin that made it look the way it does today. I'd like to think I did a passable job of barely scratching the surface.

   My claim that the avenue was widened between 1960 and 1965 was based on four pieces of evidence, all gleaned from the Ottawa Journal. First came this short article dated February 11 1960.

Widening of Gladstone avenue from Bank to Elgin street will begin April 30, City Solicitor Medcalf said today. The street will be widened 30 feet on the north side. The project will cost the city about $450,000. There are 26 properties affected with 64 housing units. Many of the people have been moving out since January.

   A lengthy article from October 1961 discussed downtown traffic congestion and included this snippet, quoting then traffic director Thor Nielsen.

...This would necessitate a ban on downtown street parking, more one-way thoroughfares and widening or improving roads. However, here wouldn't be too much road-widening done because of the prohibitive costs. The city today is spending close to $600,000 to widen a relatively small section of Gladstone Avenue — a lot of money spent on property acquisition...

   The next mention would take the form of a photo caption (May 28 1965). A messy view of Gladstone, looking east from Bank bore this explanation.

A $200,000 project to widen Gladstone Avenue from Bank Street to Elgin Street is well underway. That section of the Avenue, an old one-way narrow lane, is to be widened to 44 feet, which would allow for four lanes. The widened three blocks are expected to be ready in mid-July.

   Finally (and right on schedule) the July 21 1965 edition of the Journal would announce that...

...Reconstruction and widening of Gladstone Avenue between Bank and Elgin Streets is now complete and the street will be open for two-way traffic at 10 a.m. tomorrow. The street, very narrow prior to the $200,000 widening project, has been one-way eastbound in the past...

   I know, those little inconsistencies make my head hurt too.

   It's not often that the cost of a city infrastructure project drops by two-thirds over the course of five years. Perhaps the bizarre cost under-run indicated by the 1965 articles appeared because the project was divided into separately budgeted phases. Or did those later quotes fail to include expropriation costs? I can only guess.

   Also, how does widening a 30-foot wide road by 30 feet yield a 44 foot wide road? I can only blame sidewalks — they're long, flat and unpredictable. Indeed, the sidewalks on Gladstone were themselves recently widened, narrowing traffic flow between Bank and Elgin once again.

   What remains important is that the three-block widening of Gladstone began in the spring of 1960 and ended in the summer of 1965, during which time certain widths of land were cleared and various monies spent.

   And this raises a bit of a temporal conundrum.

   We've seen how a project executed in the 1960s occasioned the clearance of properties along the north side of Gladstone. So how can it be that this very stretch of road feature three substantial apartment blocks, sitting in perfect alignment with the widened road, but built in the early 1930s?  Consider the buildings labeled 2, 3 and 4 in the aerial photo below.

It's an acre, trust me.

(A and B on the image are the twin blocks of the Metcalfe Terrace apartments, C is Blair House.)  

   The six apartment buildings bounded by the yellow box were built some three decades before Gladstone was widened.  Their names and addresses, for the record, are...

1.  333 Metcalfe, the Chamberlain (a significant name as we shall see)
2.  335 Metcalfe, the Trafalgar
3.  221 Gladstone, the Glademere
4.  215 Gladstone, the Bessbourgh
5.  252 Frank, the Aitken (formerly the Labelle)
6.  250 Frank, the Victoria.

   All six buildings were built in the first half of the 1930s, They rise three storeys above their basements and all are finished in brick. The Metcalfe Street addresses sport Art Deco faux-sandstone accents and door treatments. The Gladstone buildings are more perfunctory while the smaller pair facing onto Frank Street share their own, less modernist charm. The fact that the east sides of the Bessborough and the Victoria are flush strongly argues that all six apartment buildings were built on what was once a single plot of land, occupying a single acre, sitting at the southern edge of Ottawa's original city limits.

another "Chamberlain House" — NW corner of Metcalfe & Lochiel (now Frank)

   Chris Ryan has written an excellent history of these buildings, and his research vindicates the "single plot" theory. The land originally belonged to Edson Joseph Chamberlain (1852-1924), general manager of the CAR and eventual president of the Grand Trunk Railway. Chamberlain built himself a beautiful, 15-room Victorian brick house on the property (lower center of above image) surrounded by gardens and trees — indeed, the trees made the house almost impossible to photograph! In 1929, some five years after Edson's death, the Chamberlain estate sold the property to a local developer, Wolf Shenkman, who planned to build a large apartment building on the land. However, as Chris explains...

... Ottawa’s plan to widen Gladstone avenue ... served to delay Shenkman’s project. The specifics of the then prospective widening of Gladstone between Elgin and Bank had not yet been settled in 1929 and the Board of Control decided to hold off issuing Shenkman a building permit. It would not be until November 1930 that the expropriation plan had been solidified and the Board decided that it was safe to issue Shenkman a building permit, so long as it would not interfere with the widening plan. In the meantime Shenkman’s vision had become considerably more significant: rather than the “large apartment house” he mentioned to the Journal‘s reporter in 1929, a total of six buildings would be erected on the site. The Town Planning Commission approved the subdivision plan on June 5, 1931 ... [my emphasis]

   Back in 1930 the plan to widen Gladstone seems to have been fraught with urgency, but as we have seen, this magnum opus would simmer at the rear of the city's athanor for three full decades before being realized. I would have to guess that between the Great Depression and WWII, peoples' priorities lay elsewhere. No matter, Shenkman built his apartments as if Gladstone might be torn up at any minute. The largest of the six would bear the name of the original property owner.

   This is where the sacrificial lawn came in — or that's how I like to think of it. Not a precinct of brazen Molochs, but a simple strip of curb-appeal running the length of the south side of the property. Here it is in 1958 — I've even coloured it in as I need the therapy.

   The idea was simplicity itself. Festoon the front of the buildings with an inviting expanse of green, knowing full well that one day it would be paved over — whether in 1930 or 1960.  Temporal weirdness resolved.

   Of course, the motley cluster of houses directly to the east of the Chamberlain property would have to be razed. Can't be helped, must be done... and so they were, soon after this picture was taken.

*     *     *

  If you look closely at the above image (click to enlarge) you'll notice a house with a little yellow X on its roof — it's near the right-hand edge of the picture. That's the house whose portrait appears at the beginning of this post, 198 Gladstone. Being on the south side of the street, it was spared the worst traumas of the Great Widening. You can see that it was originally one of two identical houses, both pleased as punch to be showing off their matching gambrel roofs.

   #198's concrete foundation tells us that it's not one of the oldest houses on Gladstone. The lot had first been taken up by a cluster of sheds, making eyesores of themselves when Edson Chamberlain was still living across the street. The little house has no bearing on this story, I took its picture because it was there. And if it looks crooked, please, blame the utility pole — they're never straight.