URBAN LIFE: Things You Suspect...

[dewline]

Houses that used to be storefronts. There's ways to look for them, depending on the history of your neighbourhood. Dylan Reid discusses some of them - applicable in Ottawa and Gatineau as in Toronto - over at the Spacing Toronto blog:

http://spacing.ca/toronto/?p=61839

Comments

[basefinder]

That's interesting. Here in Denver, on Colfax Avenue in particular, we see what appear as older, large two-or-three story homes (probably late 1800s or early 1900s) with more recent single-story storefront additions (probably early to mid 1900s).

I haven't done any serious reading up on them, but they are fun to notice.

[kaffy_r]

I looked at the pictures and wondered how anyone could fail to see that they were once commercial buildings. In fact, I wonder if at least a goodly number weren't corner shops so much as they were dram shops or corner bars. That's the case in Chicago, where the corner shops still survive, as do many, many of the bars.

In fact the term "corner bar," or "corner tap," while they get used elsewhere, are used almost exclusively to mean "neighborhood bar," even if the bar's in the center of a block and not on a corner.

There aren't as many of either as there once were, or so I'm told. But since Chicago is still a true city of neighborhoods, you're going to see them dotting the landscape - and when someone decides to turn one into a residence or an office, not much is done to disguise what the building once housed.

[dewline]

I've seen at least one church in the northern end of Ottawa's New Edinburgh district that got turned into someone's personal house. There are likely more.

If/when the Pandemic restrictions are sufficiently lifted for such an expedition, I hope to take my camera round several of the older neighbourhoods to see how many converted ex-storefronts I can get imagery of. This, along with my ongoing quest to work up street name histories and the requisite imagery for that project.