- Wallis House
Wallis House is a prominent
Ottawa ,Canada landmark. It was built to house the Carleton County Protestant General Hospital. This was the second hospital in the city, after the Catholic hospital run by theGrey Nuns . The hospital's first building was completed in1851 , but had become too small and Wallis House was built to replace it between1873 and1876 . It was paid for and supported by the variousProtestant churches in the area. The east wing was added to the hospital between1887 and1898 . It remained a hospital until1924 , when it was merged with two others to create theOttawa Civic Hospital .The building served as a Catholic
seminary until1943 when the military took it over and used it to house members of theWomen's Royal Canadian Naval Service during the Second World War. The navy gave it the name Wallis House, afterWilliam Parry Wallis a hero of theWar of 1812 who later rose to be anadmiral in theRoyal 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 theGovernor General's Foot Guards . The event drew enough attention that Prime MinisterWilliam 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 headquarters of an army battalion. 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 withasbestos 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 regulatedbrothel .The debate was finally resolved in May
1994 when a developer bought the structure for $320,000 and promised to restore it. Wallis House was turned into 47 high-endcondominiums . 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 October1995 , they were all sold in fewer than twenty-four hours. This unprecedented event was the beginning of long-lasting real estate boom in Ottawa. Today the condos are worth far more than they were sold for in 1995.:"There is also a "Wallis House", an
Art Deco building on the Golden Mile, TheGreat West Road ,Brentford ,England ."
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