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Wallis House is a prominent landmark building in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is located at the corner of Rideau Street and Charlotte Street. Today, after restoration, the building serves as a deluxe condominium complex.
Originally built to house the Carleton County Protestant General Hospital (This is not the Ottawa General that went from Sussex and Water to Smyth Road, now known as the Élisabeth Bruyère Hospital on Bruyere Street), this was the second hospital in the city, after the Catholic hospital run by the Grey Nuns. The hospital's first building was completed in 1851, but had become too small and Wallis House was built to replace it between 1873 and 1876. It was paid for and supported by the various Protestant churches in the area. The east wing was added to the hospital between 1887 and 1898. It remained a hospital until 1924, when it was merged with two others to create the Ottawa Civic Hospital.
The building served as a Catholic seminary until 1943, when the military took it over and used it to house members of the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service during the Second World War. The navy gave it the name Wallis House, after Provo Wallis, a hero of the War of 1812, who later rose to be an admiral in the Royal Navy.
After the war, it was left empty, leading to protests from returning veterans who faced a housing crisis. In 1946, a group of veterans and squatters occupied the building until they were forced out by the Governor General's Foot Guards. The event drew enough attention that Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King mandated that it be turned into subsidized housing.
In 1950, the military reoccupied the structure and it served a number of purposes over the next decades, eventually becoming the home of 28 Service battalion, 763 Communications Regiment (formerly 3 Signals Regiment RC Signals) and several minor Army reserve units. The aged building soon became a problem. Constant minor renovations left the interior a warren of hallways and rooms. The military inspectors also considered it to be a dangerous fire trap. There were problems with asbestos and PCBs that would require an expensive clean-up effort. It was thus abandoned by the armed forces and boarded up.
It remained vacant for several years and was threatened with demolition. This led to a number of squabbles. The city wanted the federal government to do something about the dangerous structure in the centre of town, heritage and veterans' groups protested the demolition, and the Government could find no one interested in buying the site. A number of proposals were advanced, perhaps the most unlikely was when the commission on the prostitution problem in the city proposed turning the building into a city run and regulated brothel.
The debate was finally resolved in May 1994 when L.A Sandy Smallwood, a heritage restorer, bought the structure for $320,000 and promised to restore it. Wallis House was turned into 47 high-end condominiums. The parking lot behind the building was converted into a group of town houses, while the land to the east was set aside for an apartment building. When the Wallis House condos went on sale in October 1995, they were all sold in fewer than twenty-four hours. This unprecedented event was the beginning of a long-lasting real estate boom in Ottawa.
The City of Ottawa erected brass plaques, which were unveiled in 1990 and 1997. The memorial is dedicated to Admiral of the Fleet Sir Provo William Perry Wallis, GCB (1791-1892), from Halifax, Nova Scotia. [1]
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Provo William Parry Wallis, was a Royal Navy officer. As a junior officer, following the capture of USS Chesapeake by the frigate HMS Shannon during the War of 1812, the wounding of HMS Shannon's captain and the death of her first lieutenant in the action, he served as the temporary captain of HMS Shannon as she returned to Halifax, Nova Scotia, with Chesapeake.
Riverview is a neighbourhood in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is southeast of the downtown adjacent to the Rideau River, its location on which is its namesake. The 2021 Census population of Riverview is 13,113.
Vimy House was a warehouse in the Centretown West neighbourhood of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada that was used to store the collections of the Canadian War Museum from 1983 to 2004. The building, originally known as Champagne Garage was built to house the streetcars of the Ottawa Electric Railway. After the railway's closure in 1959, the Ottawa Transportation Commission used the warehouse for storing their buses up until 1979. The building was later acquired by the Canadian War Museum to be used as a storage facility for its collections when its Sussex Drive facility ran out of space. The building, later renamed Vimy House, became filled with a vast array of aged military paraphernalia including the world's largest collection of Canadian war art. While items from the Vimy House collection would occasionally be put on display at the museum itself, the public could also visit Vimy House on special open house days and tour its collection. The last open house was held on September 6, 2003.
The National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers was established on March 3, 1865, in the United States by Congress to provide care for volunteer soldiers who had been disabled through loss of limb, wounds, disease, or injury during service in the Union forces in the American Civil War. Initially, the Asylum, later called the Home, was planned to have three branches: in the Northeast, in the central area north of the Ohio River, and in what was then considered the Northwest, the present upper Midwest.
The current Ottawa City Hall is the city hall of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The downtown complex consists of two connected buildings: a modern wing located on Laurier Avenue and a 19th-century heritage wing located on Elgin Street. Although City Hall has frontage on two major streets, the main entrance is on Laurier Avenue, and the municipal address is 110 Laurier Avenue West.
Francis Conroy Sullivan was a Canadian architect.
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LeBreton Flats known colloquially as The Flats is a neighbourhood in Somerset Ward in central Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It lies to the west of Centretown neighbourhood, and to the north of Centretown West. The Ottawa River forms the western and northern limit, with the western side being a wider area of the river known as Nepean Bay.
Élisabeth Bruyère was the founder of the Sisters of Charity of Bytown and opened the first hospital there and the first bilingual school in Ontario.
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National Park Seminary — later called National Park College — was a private girls' school open from 1894 to 1942. Located in Forest Glen Park, Maryland, its name alludes to nearby Rock Creek Park. The historic campus is to be preserved as the center of a new housing development.
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René G. Lépine was a Canadian real estate developer and philanthropist. Lépine was the chairman of Groupe Lépine, a real estate development and investment firm he founded in 1953. He is widely considered one of the most influential French Canadian real estate developers of his time. His companies developed over $5 billion of real estate in Canada and the United States since the 1960s. He also owned a portfolio of multifamily and retail properties in Montreal and Ottawa. Lépine developed many buildings considered landmarks in Montreal, including the Olympic Village and Le Sanctuaire du Mont-Royal. Lépine is also credited with having developed the first condominiums in Montreal in 1981.