Sandy Smallwood Preserves Wallis House and Women’s Military History
November 11th in Ottawa is a day of ceremony aimed at remembering the men and women who have served during times of war, conflict and peace. For residents of Lowertown, Wallis House serves as a daily reminder of a military presence in the community that spanned more than fifty years. While its first 75 years were dedicated to health care, after decades with the Department of National Defence, the building itself was in need of serious healing.

Wallis House at the corner of Rideau and Charlotte streets, pictured here in the 1940s, was built in the mid-1870sEnter Sandy Smallwood and his company, Andrex Holdings. In 1994, Public Works put the building up for sale to the highest bidder. Smallwood’s first bid of $1 was rejected and Public Works decided to demolish. However, supported by community groups, Smallwood had a chance to make a second bid of $320,000 – approximately $100,000 more than the $203,000 paid by National Defence Naval Service in 1943.
He recalls that the original multi-year plan to sell the units in phases turned into pandemonium when the first units went up for sale. “By lunch, they had sold out the first phase, which we had expected to take a year,” he says. “By the end of the weekend the whole building was sold out.”

Pronounced HEEney, this street was laid out in early surveys but was not named until after the four cemeteries were closed. Early reminiscences talk about the heap of sand that remained there after the bodies had been taken out for burial elsewhere. City and private contractors apparently used the sand for road-making purposes.

John and Mary Ann Heney with children, 1879The street is named after John Heney (1821-1909), a man with a long association with Lowertown.
He was married in 1849 at Notre Dame on Sussex and attended the meeting convened to create St Brigid’s Parish in 1888. Over the decades, he built a reputation as a prominent local entrepreneur. On arrival in Bytown in 1844, he produced shoes and boots in the York Street workshop of the Protestant John Heney. By 1849, he had his own business, eventually with a shop and a house on Sussex Street. In 1868 he started supplying cordwood to heat the Parliament Buildings and built a company that supplied coal and then oil for furnaces up to the 1970s. No surprise that he became an alderman for the City of Ottawa in 1857 and served in this capacity until 1887

For some Lowertown residents, the tall apartment building at 160 Chapel will always be associated with an era of hippies and “sex & drugs &  rock & roll.” But when construction of the 22-storey cooperative college and residence was announced in 1969, it was promoted as a positive social and educational experiment.
Named after Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), a Swiss educational reformer whose motto was “Learning by head, hand and heart”, the college’s aim was to support development of all aspects of a person. The emphasis was on group learning through participation in activities that supported intellectual, moral and physical improvement. In addition to providing housing, the facility provided spaces for subject matter such as history, literature and philosophy as well as artistic activities including photography, dance, ceramics, video and music.