190 CLERGY ST. E. - SOLD
The Essentials
A renovated four-bedroom brick and limestone home with attached garage and private courtyard just a deep breath from the southern limit of Skeleton Park.
The Bigger Picture
The temptation is to head this morning for the busiest intersection in town, and then jump up and down and wave my arms around. Hand out maps, and free T-shirts emblazoned with 190 Clergy St’s brick-red face. Because it really would be an awful shame if you missed out on this splendid semi-detached four-bedroom home just south of McBurney Park. It’s one of the finest around.
At some point, of course, you have to trust the groundwork - the sign’s been up for a week now, and the steady drip-drip on social media of photographs, the calls made, and texts sent, the early warnings. The videographers and stagers called in to work their magic. The patterns established over many years. It’ll work, it always works. I repeat that to myself that in the pre-dawn darkness (seriously), slot the affirmation into the AC’s slabs of white noise like filling knifed into a sandwich. It’ll work, I say again. It’s my meditation, my drawn out Om.
And it will here too. Of course it will. The house is remarkable. Not least in the way it presides in such elegant fashion over upper Clergy, next to the park. And yet this dumb urge persists - to don a clown suit and head for the traffic lights with a trunk’s worth of swag. I do it all for you, I guess that’s the bottom line. Whatever it takes to keep you in the loop. To draw your attention away from the extraneous noise, the suburban cookie-cut rowhouses, and send it arrowing into the heart of things.
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I read a blog post recently about a public speaker who had finally hired an assistant. The writer felt sheepish suddenly staying in better hotels than he would have booked for himself. He felt for a good while that he didn’t deserve the free time his assistant protected for him. It took him forever to realize that he “deserved the good towels”.
190 Clergy St. E. is the good towels. And if you’ve been looking for a downtown home loaded with all the practical advantages as well as the aesthetic flair you’d pretty much given up on, I find it hard to imagine that you’ll find better this season (or next).
There are quite a few red-brick townhouses in the downtown core. They are a good part of the reason I like the city so much. There is all the limestone, sure, those fossil-rich blocks piled like so much snow, but to my eye it is the clay bricks that fill the body with life, that give it colour. They populate the city is how it feels and I love the way the stand shoulder-to-shoulder next to the sidewalk, as if waiting for a bus, or just keeping watch.
Some have fallen on hard times. They were built as worker’s cottages, still serve that function, some of them, and the upkeep can be a challenge. Some need repointing and their chimneys slump drunkenly atop the steep roofs. Others are student rentals, and the pine floors have turned grey, the kitchen cabinets cling hopelessly, crookedly, to the walls. There is none of that here.
I made a list of what I’d want to find in a perfect home of this type. I lived in the 1980s in a nearly scarlet cottage on King St. It was adorable but there was barely room to breathe, let alone enough to position a sofa. And so it would need to be bigger than that. And when I had kids the wish list expanded still more. A family room on the ground floor would be nice. Some exposed limestone and brick too. And a skylight because - and you’ll think this is silly - I just love to stand in a rectangle of lemon-yellow sunlight and imagine myself held there in some sort of Star Trek tractor beam. In this version of the world William Shatner is usually leaning in the doorway laughing at me.
A main-floor bathroom too, please. I know, you think me greedy now, and I understand that, but that’s just going to have to be okay. And while I’ve got you on the line, how about four bedrooms, one of them with an ensuite? And a private courtyard behind the house that feels like some leafy extension of the Pig’s patio.
You’re laughing now. I understand that, shaking your head and wiping your nose because, well, it’s all getting away on you and you’ve got the giggles. Finally you say to me, “It’s a fool’s errand, there is no such house!” But I’m way past the point you can reason with me. I want cork in the kitchen too, damn it, because it’s softer underfoot when you’re in there working on dinner. Everywhere else I want pine floors gone the colour of UK toffee. And put a gas stove in that family room, while you’re at it, why don’t you? Also, attach a new garage to the house that’s deep enough to store the old Christmas ornaments as well as the art we’ve outgrown, and the kids’ old bikes, not to mention the car.
I know, I’m ridiculous.
But the thing is, 190 Clergy St E. is such a property. It is the dream made real, the form rendered perfectly, the reason for this luminous buzz I feel this morning in my bloodstream.
Call for more details. Or call your realtor for an appointment. If you don’t yet have one, we’d be pleased to help.
