562 Balmoral Street - Rooming House (R.I.P.)

 

362 (left) and 364 Balmoral Street (2017 Google Street View)

Two houses on Balmoral Street were destroyed by fire yesterday.

I feel bad for that stretch of Balmoral. There are many early 1890s houses along it as this was the unofficial western limit for the city until neighbourhoods like the West End and Wolseley were subdivided between 1904 and 1910.

It would have been a nice neighbourhood for a time. It was out of the constant traffic and belching smokestacks of what we now call the Exchange District, yet offered easy access to both the Exchange and downtown. It was also just a block from the urban oasis of Central Park.

In the 1950s, more people began moving to the suburbs and Balmoral Street would have become a major thoroughfare for these folks to get to and from downtown. Many of these large, old homes became rooming houses and rental properties.

The house that seems to have been the focus of the fire was 562 Balmoral Street which was built in 1905. It was boarded up in 2018 and sitting vacant. (Neighbouring 564 Balmoral, built in 1891, was still lived in as of May 2021.)

It appears the first owner of 562 Balmoral was James Love and family. James ran the Love Skirt and Blouse factory on Gertie Street. As an extra source of income, they rented out a room. In 1906, the tenant was Laurie Wilson, a clerk at Robinson and Co. department store.

A couple of years later, Orrin E Jones and family moved in. They greatly expanded the number of rooms for rent to six or seven. Mr. Jones ran the family butcher shop on Logan Avenue while Mrs. Jones raised the children and ran the boarding house.

The Jones family relocated to Eriksdale around 1912.

The house changed hands often over the next few years but the renting out of rooms, which reduced to a more manageable three or four through he 19-teens and 1920s, remained. By the 1950s it was back to a half dozen rooms or more.

Around 2007, the house became vacant and was partially boarded up. In 2010, the city gave the owner the ultimatum to properly board it up or it would seize it under the vacant buildings bylaw. It is unclear if that happened but from 2012 to 2017 the house was again operating as a room house.