A former bread factory in Hintonburg is on track for heritage protection as the land around it prepares for major redevelopment.
The Hintonburg Community Association first asked the city to designate the 95-year-old concrete and brick building on Gladstone Avenue back in 2010, and renewed its request last year when Trinity Group applied to build three towers on the site, which sits beside the Trillium Line.
In its 2018 application, Trinity proposed restoring the building and incorporating it in the new development. An artist’s rendering of the proposal shows a glass walkway connecting the building to the future Gladstone LRT station.
Planner Lesley Collins said the city has always wanted to see the building incorporated into any future development.
“The building is a good and a rare example of an early-20th-century industrial building in Ottawa,” she told the city’s built heritage subcommittee Tuesday.
The building is a neighbourhood landmark and a reminder of Hintonburg’s original industrial character, she said.
The factory was built in 1924 for the Standard Bread Company, co-founded by Dick Lamothe and Cecil Morrison, father of the late MP and National Capital Commission chair Jean Pigott.
“Bread was baked and sold from the warehouse building and delivered around Ottawa by a horse and cart,” Collins said.
The stables are still there, around the corner on Loretta Avenue, but won’t be covered by the provincial heritage designation because they’ve been altered, Collins said.
It served as a bakery until the late 1960s, then sat vacant until the Enriched Bread Artists co-operative moved in nearly 30 years ago.
“We actually owe those artists. If they had not occupied this building … [it] might have been subject to demolition by neglect or possibly demolition,” said Linda Hoad of the Hintonburg Community Association.
The subcommittee expects to revisit the issue when Trinity proposes changes to the building in order to redevelop the site.
The former bakery’s heritage designation still needs the approval of planning committee and city council in January.
