By Victoria Fulford
A trip to the bank isn’t what it used to be. Using automatic teller machines, telephones and the Internet are more convenient.
For Ottawa’s main branch of the Bank of Montreal, keeping up with the times in a federally designated heritage building is a balancing act between tradition and new technology.
Carol Hatoum is manager of branch services at the downtown branch and has worked there for 27 years. She says modern conveniences like extra automatic teller machines in the lobby sometimes have to take a back-seat to the building’s historical status.
“There are things we’d like to do that we’re not able to do because we have to go through heritage to do it.”
Built in 1932, the Wellington branch was purchased by the federal government in the 1980s along with other buildings on the north side of Sparks Street. They were to be part of a shelved plan to create a parliamentary district.
The building was federally protected in 1985 because it reflects an important aspect of Canada’s past. The Bank of Montreal is Canada’s oldest chartered bank and the first to set up a branch in Ottawa in 1842.
The federal classification is the highest heritage designation for a building. It places a building under the jurisdiction of the Federal Historical Building Review Office, which preserves and protects heritage buildings.
For the Bank of Montreal, which rents the space from the federal government, it means more red tape when the bank wants to make changes that affect the structure of the building.
Louise Proulx, senior communications officer with Public Works, says the Bank of Montreal proposed last fall for renovations to make room for bank machines in the lobby.
“We always work very closely with them to make sure (renovations) aren’t damaging to the heritage fabric of the building,” says Proulx.
Because of the permanent nature of the changes, the proposal was rejected in favor of minor, reversible changes to the customer service area. Public Works plans to restore masonry on the exterior, but Proulx says official plans haven’t been approved yet.
Another notable difference when doing business at the branch is an echo no mini-mall bank could ever duplicate.
This is what Ernest Barott, the architect who designed the bank, had in mind, says Dana Johnson an architectural historian with Parks Canada.
“That sense of being in a temple,” says Johnson was deliberately created to make going to the bank a sort of “quasi-religious experience.”
The classical design was created to convey the bank’s corporate message of reliability.
Johnson says it’s important for tenants to accept the heritage character of a building and work with it, rather than viewing it as a barrier.
He says it’s in the federal government’s best interest to maintain a tenant in the building because “alternative uses for large volume spaces are difficult to come up with.” A federally owned, former Bank of Nova Scotia building up the street has been empty for almost a decade.
Hatoum often asks people if they need any help only to find they’re browsing rather than banking.
“It’s not high tech, low tech or anything else. It’s aesthetic beauty [that] people want to see.”