Emilie Lapointe, Centretown News
Beyond the Pale Brewery co-owners Al Clark, Shane Clark and Rob McIsaac enjoy their new 8,000 square-foot brewing home in the City Centre Complex.Once bemoaned as one of Ottawa’s most prominent eyesores, Centretown’s City Centre complex is turning into a hot spot for up-and-coming small businesses.
Ten years ago, the building – originally built as a truck-loading and train-docking area between the western ends of Albert and Somerset streets – looked downtrodden and decrepit, and it was rumoured it was headed for demolition. But today it’s a magnet for vibrant business ventures – bike stores, breweries and bakeries alike.
“It’s a much maligned building,” says Eric Darwin, a community activist in Centretown and the former owner of Celio, a printing business that was once City Centre’s largest tenant. “People stuck up their noses . . . The stigma was slow to die.”
Built in the late ’50s, Darwin says over the last decade the complex – deemed a “dishonourable mention” in the Ottawa Citizen’s 2014 search for the city’s ugliest architecture – has been washed and repainted. A large, out-dated neon “City Centre” sign on the building’s office tower was also removed and replaced, he says.
Slowly, Darwin says, it transformed from a dull, purely industrial space to a busy retail plaza, giving new life to a structure he once called Ottawa’s “Ugly Betty Building.”
Charles Roy, the food and beverage manager at City Centre’s wildly successful Art Is In Bakery, says people don’t realize the amount of activity happening behind the building’s unassuming exterior.
“The kind of diversity of businesses that we have here now is quite strange. It’s such a fantastic mix,” he says.
Roy says his popular patisserie moved to City Centre five years ago and quickly outgrew its first rental space in the building – customers were, at one point, eating next to mixing pots.
Soon, he says, Art Is In Bakery had expanded into its second and third bays at the complex. Luckily, City Centre provided that space to grow.
Beyond the Pale Breweryco-owner Al Clark recently expanded his business into a new 8,000-square-foot space at City Centre.
He says a newly installed brew system, which started production this spring, is five times larger than the one at the brewery’s Hamilton Avenue location.
“We wanted a production facility, a large space,” says Clark. “City Centre is very unique in being able to give us a large industrial facility in almost downtown. I mean we couldn’t find anything else like this that has loading docks and all of these things that we need that’s this close to a residential and a downtown area.”
Meanwhile, redevelopment projects at LeBreton Flats and a new nearby LRT link under construction promise to bring more people through City Centre businesses’ doors, says Clark.
“This is why we’re here. The development on the Flats, whatever they come up with, is only going to accentuate what we do,” he says.
Changes at City Centre haven’t been lost on residents, either.
Ann Godbold has visited the complex for decades. She says the MS Society rented space at City Centre 20 years ago, and when she would arrive at its office for nighttime meetings, “the parking lot was empty, there was no lights in the neighbourhood and you’d almost be too scared to leave because it was so dark.”
“It’s so vibrant now with all these new stores,” she says.
Roy says there are some drawbacks to doing business in the big, drafty industrial spaces at City Centre.
“It’s got its ups and its downs. We have a lot of people that complain that it’s too noisy or that it’s too gritty and ‘why can’t they just, like, paint the roof’ and all that stuff,” he says.
“It is noisy and it is ugly, I’m not going to lie to you, but it is what it is and we like it.”