Our new home dates back to circa 1897, and was for nearly fifty years the headquarters of the Victorian Order of Nurses. Built for the Blackburn family, the house stands at the corner of Laurier Avenue East and the street that bears the family name, Blackburn Avenue. The Blackburn family occupied the house until the 1950s, then deeded it to the V.O.N., which has grown too large for the building and has moved to bigger premises. The next edition of our magazine will feature an article on our new home, with accompanying photographs. Our new address is 5 Blackburn Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 8A2.
Visitors are more than welcome, so do plan to drop in when next in the neighbourhood.
It will be a pleasure to greet you and give you a guided tour of the new home for the Heritage Canada Foundation. Our recently published conference program indicated that we would be holding our annual awards ceremony on October 12th in the Design Exchange, and this understandably resulted in a number of calls and e-mails. I want to reassure members and readers that we cannot and will not hold a national heritage awards ceremony in a heritage structure that is to be unnecessarily and inappropriately altered. The ceremony will now be held at the Steam Whistle, formerly the Railway Roundhouse, a once-endangered heritage structure that, thankfully, has found new life. Part of that privilege is being able to explore historic sites and areas in communities across Canada and to come to understand the local heritage issues.