The Milo Court Apartments, 145 Echo Drive, Old Ottawa East

I don't have an exact build date for this house-turned-apartment-block, but between the limestone foundation, the brickwork and the squat, solid, bilateral massing, I'm going to say late Victorian to early Edwardian. Goad confirms that it was standing by 1912.

This is his sheet #159 for that year, showing the west end of the Archville sector of Ottawa East.

#145 Echo (green arrows, near the middle of the plan) appears as a 2½-storey all-brick house with a square footprint and a mansard roof. We see an appended wooden summer-kitchen, a small detached shed (for firewood perhaps) and a stable (grey again, the oblong with the X on it.)

Glance over at the upper-right corner and note the ingloriously bisected #97 Echo (blue arrows), a 2½-storey brick-veneer that we'll get back to shortly. Observe the J.&T. Ballantyne coal and lumber sheds flanking the Grand Trunk Railway tracks, again facing onto Echo Drive and finally, look across to the right to see a brick house (yellow arrows) just south of those tracks facing east onto Main Street — that was the home of James Ballantyne, the "J." in J.&T. Ballantyne. It no longer exists.

The "T." in the company name was Thomas, James' brother. He lived on Echo Drive. The question is where exactly. Documentation by Goad and in the City directories is a bit sparse prior to 1907, the year Ottawa East became part of the City proper. However we do find this listing from 1909 —

The preceding year's Directory shows Thomas Ballantyne at 97 Echo (as noted at the upper right corner of the Goad plan) and does not list #145, so it would be a reasonable guess that Ballantyne built latter house and moved in c. 1908-1909. We also see here that the lumber-yard was being called "The Stewarton Lumber Co." Stewarton was the informal name for a long, narrow strip of land owned by the Stewart family, running west to east from Bronson Avenue to Rideau River, of which Archville was part.

Thomas Ballantyne died in the spring of 1923. This Ottawa Citizen obituary from April 10 provides a nice biographical summary —

His son, Dr. Charles T. Ballantyne, moved into #145 with his wife and daughter — sadly, he died a mere two years later, in June of 1925, at the age of 49.

145 Echo saw a succession of occupants over the years. Shortly before WWII it was home to a private school for boys.

The street car mentioned in this 1937 ad was the line that ran down Elgin, crossed the Pretoria Bridge into Old Ottawa East at Hawthorne, then travelled south along Main Street to Clegg (the Children's Park on the SE corner of that intersection was originally the site of the turning loop at the end of the tracks.)

I do not know when #145 was converted to an apartment building, or when it was named the "Milo Court," though I have reason to suspect it occurred in 1947. It was in May of that year that someone ran an ad for a "fire escape in good condition" at the address. We can see in my photo that the conversion entailed the construction of an external stairwell to give private access to the upper floors. What we don't see is that the entire building was extended back into two symmetrical wings, roughly doubling its footprint. This arrangement is clearly visible in aerial photos from 1958. The fire escape in the ad had likely been attached to the rear of the building until the extension was built.

Here is the view from behind today ...

I can find no mentions of a Milo Court in the newspapers of the '40s or early '50s, but then housing was so scarce after the war that builders seldom needed to advertise apartments — hopeful tenants would fairly sniff out construction sites! The stained-glass "Milo Court" transom window disappeared from above the front door some time after 2019. Will we ever know who Milo was?