Full circle for 115 Church St.
The buildings in the accompanying old photo were part of a row of four houses that once stood along the north side of Church Street between Royal Canadian Legion Branch 24 and Court Street.
The most prominent of those houses shown in this photo was 115 Church St. Available records suggest it was built somewhere between 1901 and 1904. During the entire time that it was a residence (ca 1901 to 1953) it was occupied by just two families. Businessman and mayor J. T. Petrie and his family lived there from ca 1910 to 1940; Dr. William D. Macdonald lived there from 1941 to 1953.
After that, 115 Church St. provided office space for a variety of local businesses — credit bureaus and insurance companies and, in its later days, a yoga instructor.
The architectural style of that house is what is called the Queen Anne style. One architectural historian described that style as “most varied and decoratively rich” with an “asymmetrical composition . . . of a variety of forms textures, materials and colours” including “towers, turrets, tall chimneys, projecting pavilions, porches, bays and encircling verandahs” producing “an exuberant visual display.”
Much of that could be seen here in the 115 Church house — the variety of shapes (a familiar gable end roof with a turret on one corner) and textures (pressed brick on the first two floors, two varieties of shingle siding on the third, and the rough stones bases of the columns of the “encircling verandah (on the first floor) — all arranged asymmetrically.”
Unfortunately, in July 1989 115 Church St. was demolished, along with the three other houses that flanked it, to make way for a parking lot that would be shared by the adjacent Legion Branch 24 and the nearby Darte Funeral Home.
The epitaph for this row of distinguished old residences was written that summer by an anonymous graffiti artist. A picture in The St. Catharines Standard in July showed a workman hacking away at the shell of the old house, while the construction boarding in front of it bore the graffiti artist’s epitaph for the old building: “JUST WHAT WE NEED . . . ANOTHER PARKING LOT.”
Now 30-plus years from that demolition date that section of Church Street is about to become a residential area again. To be sure, the parking lot resulting from the 1989 demolition remains today, servicing the nearby Darte Funeral Home. But next to it, where the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 24 building stood until 2018, workmen are now putting the finishing touches on North Church Court, Bethlehem Housing and Supportive Service’s new permanent supportive housing development, at 111 Church Street. Eight storeys tall, containing 128 units, it will be opened later on this year.