Images of Gladstone

I'm taking a little break before I sit down and hash out the last in the "Down, Down, Down" series to post some vignettes of Gladstone Avenue.

One of the first posts on this blog was a Before & After of the building that now houses the re-Cycles Bicycle Co-op. Well there was another shot from the series in the photo where I got that "then" photo that looked familiar. This one (qualifying this post to be in the Centretown Heritage Project series).

Though the roads and buildings have changed (for example, the patio on the foregound building and the windows on the background building), they are all still there. You can compare the pattern between the second-storey windows on the middle building to confirm it's the same building.

That building is, of course, the Majestic Cleaners on Gladstone at Bay, where once stood Dey's Skating Rink. A plaque had been erected on the corner to commemorate it, but it was destroyed in April '08:

Funds were raised and a new podium was installed, with the engraving,

Patinoire Dey's Skating Rink

1896 ~ 1920

The Ottawa Hockey Club defeated the Montreal Victorias at this site on March 10, 1903to bring Ottawa its first Stanley Cup / C'est sur ce site que le club de hockey d'Ottawa a remporté sa première coupe Stanley après avoir défait les Victorias de Montréal le 10 mars 1903

As seen here:

On the same block is a house with a ground-level retail space that has been vacant for some time, formerly housing the Overseas Electronics store. For some reason, I really like this photo (in fact, this whole post started because I wanted to post this one photo):

And a couple of houses down, these gentlemen were repairing a porch:

If we continue Westward, we get to the former Pawn-Da-Rosa pawn store, across from Cambridge Street Elementary. Better known as the Yellow House:

As I first found out from David Reevely, this house had been slated to be demolished "next month" in July 2008 and replaced with some townhouses, but evidently that fell through. The City told the building owner that he had to clean up the graffiti on the outside of the house a month before it was slated to be demolished. So Gary Stunden, agent for the building's owner, Ali Shafiei, decided to paint it yellow, partly as a gimmick, and partly to tease the City for doing something as silly as ordering him to clean it up with only a month left until it was demolished. Almost a year later, who's laughing now?

Ralitsa Doncheva created a short film called "This House Will Not Be Here Tomorrow," which you can watch below, or follow the link to watch it on Youtube in High Quality:

While we're on the topic of Yellow + Gladstone, here's a shot of the yellow Auto-Mini folding bike with a child seat that is also an institution on Gladstone, at Bank Street:

That's in the same neighbourhood as Gladstone and Kent, which I photographed in This post leading up to a CCCA meeting.

Moving further West from the Yellow House, we get to the Gladstone theatre. I had previously posted about the Facade reconstruction of the Gladstone, and the Light Rail Now! event at the Gladstone, which features a nice shot of the building with "Light Rail Now!" in the marquee.

Continuing past the O-Train tracks, we get to the 1924 Enriched Bread Company building. The Enriched Bread Artists have a good writeup on the history of this building on their website.

And lastly we come to Sherbrooke Street, at the former Sherbrooke Grocery, which closed after many years. I vividly recall a story in the Citizen where the owner announced his retirement, but I can't for the life of me find it. If you have a link, I'd appreciate it. The closest I can find is this reference in Miss Vicky's Offhand Remarks, where she says that the ground floor will be converted to offices:

So that's a little taste of Gladstone!