Chelsea Club bids fond adieu to

venerable home

Pressing renovations and a costly mortgage have spelled the end of the storied social club’s tenure in a 19th-century mansion. Kate Jaimet reports.

The Ottawa CitizenMay 23, 2009Be the first to post a comment

Chelsea Club

Housed in the stately brick mansion at the corner of Metcalfe Street and Somerset Avenue West, the Chelsea Club was founded in 1926 by a group of 227 well-heeled women, including future Ottawa mayor Charlotte Whitton. At the end of June, the building will belong to The Properties Group.

Photograph by: Bruno Schlumberger, The Ottawa

OTTAWA - The Chelsea Club has no hot running water. That’s why Tuesday morning found Dalma French cheerfully washing dozens of dishes with water heated in an electric coffee urn, as she prepared for Thursday’s farewell party to the historic house the club has owned since 1926.

Mortgaged to the tune of $600,000 - and needing several hundred thousand more in renovations - the stately brick mansion at the corner of Metcalfe Street and Somerset Avenue West has become a luxury that the once-affluent Chelsea Club can no longer afford.

“The house needed a lot of renovation, fixing. It was becoming overwhelming,” said French, who along with fellow-member Pat Lockwood decorated the gracious double-parlour with roses and lilacs this week, to give the old club house the kind of send-off it deserved.

“It’s rickety and falling apart, but everyone who comes in here falls in love with it.”

The house - which was built in 1883 and first belonged Sir Alexander Campbell, a cabinet minister under Sir John A. Macdonald - has an air of faded splendour. Its soaring twelve-foot ceilings, dark wood trim and sweeping central staircase give it grandeur; but the foundation is sinking at one corner, the roof leaks, the wallpaper is peeling in the upstairs bedrooms, the plaster is cracked and crumbling in places.

At the end of June, the sale will be finalized and the house transferred to The Properties Group, an Ottawa company that acquires and manages real estate.

Brian Lahey, one of the co-owners of The Properties Group, said his company plans on spending “many hundreds of thousands” to restore the house and - in a concession to modern comforts - install a discreet air-conditioning system. Following the renovations, it will probably be rented out as office space to one or several tenants.

“It’s grand,” said Lahey. “It’s architecture that you wouldn’t see today. You don’t build 12-foot ceilings and grand trim. I think it’ll be very beautiful when it’s done.”

Though it is some consolation to the Chelsea Club members that the old building will be well taken care of, the sale of the house is a sad moment for a club that was described at its 1926 founding as the “quite the finest achievement yet in Ottawa for women and by women;” that once held annual tea-parties for the wife of the Governor General; and whose membership has included prominent women senators, members of Parliament, lawyers and university Chancellors.

“Although we’re very unhappy that we have to leave this beautiful house, we feel that we can now concentrate on what the club should do, which is really not to run a house or keep it standing, but to provide social atmosphere and social community for its members and have events and have a good time together,” said Chelsea Club President Beverley Rix. “It took a lot of our money and an enormous amount of energy and worry to maintain this house.”

The Chelsea Club was founded in 1926 by a group of 227 well-heeled women, including future Ottawa Mayor Charlotte Whitton, who each bought a $100 share, and by the Women’s Canadian Club, which contributed $1500. The house was purchased for $13,000 and, as a harbinger of future challenges, the club immediately put $8,000 into renovations.

The opening on April 15 was a grand affair: the wife of the Governor General, Lady Byng of Vimy, cut the ribbon, while Lady Borden (wife of former Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden) and Lady Perley (wife of lumber baron and politician Sir George H. Perley) presided at the tea table.

According to Whitton’s later recollections, the club was meant to be “a sort of Rideau Club for females” - referring to the exclusive, male-only club founded in 1865 by Sir John A. Macdonald, which welcomed the elite of Ottawa’s political and business class.

Annual reports through the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, show the Chelsea Club was a prominent residential club and social gathering-place for Ottawa’s women: Senators like Cairine Wilson and Josie Quart, wives of prominent men like Hamilton Southam, wives of diplomats, and also working women - specifically, in the 1940s, women who came to Ottawa to work on the war effort - became members.

The reports also detail ongoing worries about upkeep to the house, including a plea in 1932 that “something be done in regard to modernizing the present heating system. The furnace with soft coal and man power requires incessant attention.” (The furnace was finally upgraded to oil in the 1950s).

In the 1970s, a greying membership and financial deficit began to pose problems for the club. By the 1980s the Chelsea Club was no longer a prominent part of Ottawa’s social scene, said Margo Roston, a society columnist who wrote the Citizen’s Around Town column for more than 20 years.

“In all those years I never was invited there. I never knew anyone there,” said Roston. “The day the Rideau Club finally accepted women (in 1979), that’s where everyone wanted to be. A lot of business women wanted to be where the men were. The power brokers.”

Rix disputes this, saying the Chelsea Club, which began admitting men in the 1970s, was less expensive and had a different, more social and less business-like atmosphere than the Rideau Club. Still, she says it suffered from a declining membership as social clubs fell out of fashion. And the bills necessary to keep up the house only grew.

Over the past few decades, the house was kept standing mainly thanks to a generous benefactress. Agnes Benidickson, a Chelsea Club member, the first woman chancellor of Queen’s University and daughter of Winnipeg’s wealthy Richardson family, loaned the club hundreds of thousands of dollars for repairs and upkeep. In 2004, those loans were consolidated into mortgages totalling $568,469 and registered to Senga Limited, a family company of which Benidickson was one director.

Around 2004, the club had an infusion of new blood when a group of 25 young professionals who were looking for a place to hold a monthly speakers’ series discovered the Chelsea club and became members.

Scott Gilmore, the 37-year-old executive director of Peace Dividend Trust, said the club was ideal because it offered a central location for people to meet, have dinner, play cards, or debate public policy issues.

“The house has some great potential. We had wanted to create much more of a clubby, modern atmosphere,” he said.

But the revenues didn’t exist to put the dreams into action. “The reality is Ottawa is a city of a million people and most of them don’t live in the city core. So your pool of members is much smaller.”

When Benidickson died in 2007, the Chelsea Club had no way to pay the mortgages still owed to Senga, much less fund new repairs or upgrades. Selling the property was the only option.

The party Thursday night drew a crowd of members, former members and friends who gathered to reminisce, while nibbling strawberries and chocolate from the buffet and listening, one last time, to the tinkling of the club’s 1931 Nordheimer piano. The hall table, a gift from Lady Byng on the Chelsea Club’s opening day in 1926, was bedecked with vases of flowers, and the club’s silver tea service was polished to a shine and set on display for the occasion.

Sally Carling and her daughter Louisa, who attended the party, have a special connection to the house. They are descendants of the brewery magnate, Sir John Carling, who owned the home from 1887 to 1897, before it became a women’s club. Sally’s mother Mary Carling also lived in the club after she was widowed, in the 1970s. 

“The benefit of a club, when they existed, was you had meals and company and it was very respectable,” Louisa Carling said. “There was a window of time when this sort of thing existed. Then it became a thing of the past, from a bygone era.”

The Chelsea Club is not disbanding, however.

“We still have a pretty vibrant membership,” said Gilmore. “What we’re going to decide over the summer is: Do we want a smaller house? We’ve had a couple offers to move into a more corporate setting, like a hotel. We’re not sure. I think the club has been around for a very long time. It’ll be around for a while yet.”

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