318 Rideau St - Sold!
The Essentials
A two-bedroom home on Rideau St opposite the Broom Factory. Which might mean the centre of the world pretty soon. A rare-as-auks sort of price too.
The Bigger Picture
I’m not going to lie to you.
Do I think that 103 years ago, when they finished building 318 Rideau St, people gathered from miles around to marvel at what had just risen from the Inner Harbour lowlands? Or that the Broom Factory workers stopped what they were doing and leaned wide-eyed in the front doorway with their suspenders hitched high? Did everyone water their horses for weeks afterwards in the back yard and then walk loops around the site, trying good-naturedly to figure out how in hell they had pulled it off? Nah.
And did everyone think that 318 Rideau, set down at the front of Lot 7 in Charlesville, just north of downtown Kingston, was an architecturally bracing home? A design for the ages? As inspirational as a good book? Not for a minute.
That distinction goes to the Bailey Broom Factory itself, erected across the street in 1894, or the Woolen Mill (1882), just down the street at the edge of the Cataraqui River. Those are the easy landmarks, along with a few discreetly handsome limestone homes put up on Charles St, just above Montreal. I still wander the streets casting admiring glances.
But do I think that the crew of framers and finishers, plasterers and stone workers thought the house here at 318 Rideau would last? That it would keep families warm and close to the action for a good long while? Yes, I do.
And do I think that they’d be surprised to learn that it was still doing its job more than a century later? Not really, no.
See I’ve been in the basement and the limestone foundation - to my uneducated eye - is as fine as any I’ve seen in the rarer, pricier air of Sydenham Ward. There is pride writ loud here, a blunt sort of art stacked both above and below the frostline.
I like the house, I really do. I admire its symmetry and its efficiencies. The price would shock the builders, of course. $329,900?! You can hear them falling all over themselves when that detail slips out, courting hilarity through inflation’s rich mud. But the thing is, that price is the most reasonable we’ve seen in these parts in a while now. We assume the house will draw a crowd. A hundred years late, maybe, but we’ll take it.
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The more down-to-earth details of this two bedroom detached home with parking and a run-down garage are right here, in the realtor.ca listing. The room sizes and the taxes, for instance. All the math of space and time. The pictures are down below, along with the floor plans, and perhaps that’s enough, although for a deeper dive the full iGuide tour is here.
The Gallery
