the Elgin Apartments, #370

     The Elgin Apartments date to the first decade of the 20th century, though pinning down an exact year is a bit tricky. They don't appear in the 1901 Might Directory, but they are listed in the 1909 — without any mention of tenants. This odd state of affairs persists in the 1912 edition. Seven tenants are listed in 1913 while 1914 indicates eight units. This would make two apartments running front to back on each of the above-ground floors.
     The building appears here on Goad's May 1912 reprint, with Elgin Street on the right margin of the page...

     The Elgin Apartments building is at the upper right-hand corner of the plan. Notice the building immediately to its south, numbered 372-376. It predates the Elgin and appears on Goad's 1888 plan (sheet 54), simply labeled 376. Here it's shown as a double storefront, featuring a grocers and a barber shop, with an apartment(s?) upstairs. As best I can tell, this is the same building (today numbered 372) that houses the Elgin Street Diner.
     A curiosity depicted here is the row of six houses that fill out the rest of the block. The two south-most units were unceremoniously lopped off when Gladstone was widened in the early 1960s. The remaining four units were converted to shops and offices — all destroyed by fire on the night of Friday, February 16 1979. As Mike Strobel reported for the Ottawa Journal...

     The "small apartment making up the rest of the block" would have been the Elgin Apartments. #370 had its own brush with fire just two years previous — from an Ottawa Journal photo caption dated January 17 1977...

 "A fireman is framed in the charred window of one of the apartments on the top floor of the nine-unit building at 370 Elgin Street. Fire gutted that floor of the Elgin Apartments at about 10:30 a.m. leaving 40 people without shelter. There were no injuries but damage to the four-storey brick structure was estimated at $30,000."

     The basement of the Elgin Apartments is, of course, home to the most excellent Manx Pub,  http://manxpub.com/ — proudly "TV free since '93."