One60 Elgin (stylized as ONE60 Elgin), formerly Place Bell, is an office tower in

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

, Ontario, Canada. It is the 12th tallest building in Ottawa—Gatineau with a height of . The 27-storey building stands on Elgin Street in

downtown Ottawa Downtown Ottawa is the central area of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is sometimes referred to as the Central Business District and contains Ottawa's financial district. It is bordered by the Ottawa River to the north, the Rideau Canal to the ea ...

, and is distinguishable by its wide stature (the building is unusually large in dimensions considering its height, presumably to avoid having a 50+ storey building greatly overshadow the

Peace Tower The Peace Tower (french: link=no, Tour de la Paix) is a focal bell and clock tower sitting on the central axis of the Centre Block of the Canadian parliament buildings in Ottawa, Ontario. The present incarnation replaced the Victoria Tower af ...

). The building was built by

Olympia and York Olympia & York (also spelled as Olympia and York, abbreviated as O&Y) was a major international property development firm based in Toronto, Canada. The firm built major financial office complexes including Canary Wharf in London, the World Fina ...

in 1971 as the Ottawa headquarters of

Bell Canada Bell Canada (commonly referred to as Bell) is a Canadian telecommunications company headquartered at 1 Carrefour Alexander-Graham-Bell in the borough of Verdun in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is an ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier) in t ...

. The site originally contained a number of small commercial buildings and the large Gloucester Street Convent. Original plans called for the complex to be much larger and include the entire block to the north. This would have entailed demolishing several heritage buildings, including the First Baptist Church. The main level contains a shopping concourse with a number of businesses. The rear of the structure contains a

parking garage A multistorey car park (British and Singapore English) or parking garage (American English), also called a multistory, parking building, parking structure, parkade (mainly Canadian), parking ramp, parking deck or indoor parking, is a build ...

. In the 1980s the owners sued the city after

salt Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts; salt in the form of a natural crystalline mineral is known as rock salt or halite. Salt is present in vast quantitie ...

placed on the roads by the city

corroded Corroded is a heavy metal band from Ånge, Sweden. The band is best known for their song ''Time And Again'', which was the theme song for the Swedish 2009 ''Survivor'' television series on TV4. The band's second album ''Exit to Transfer'', rel ...

the steel structure of the garage and it had to be closed for several years. Bell, which remains the building's largest tenant, owned the building until 1998, when it was sold to TrizecHahn for $17 million. After the purchase, TrizecHahn conducted significant renovations. In 2002 it was bought by

H&R Real Estate Investment Trust H&R Real Estate Investment Trust is a Canadian open-ended real estate investment trust, specializing in commercial real estate, and based in Toronto, Ontario. It is the third largest REIT in Canada by market capitalization (after RioCan and Choi ...

for $21.1 million. The building underwent extensive renovations from 2015 to 2017 afterwhich it was renamed One60 Elgin. In 2019,

beehive A beehive is an enclosed structure in which some honey bee species of the subgenus '' Apis'' live and raise their young. Though the word ''beehive'' is commonly used to describe the nest of any bee colony, scientific and professional literature ...

s were installed on the building's roof in order to combat declining

honey bee A honey bee (also spelled honeybee) is a eusocial flying insect within the genus ''Apis'' of the bee clade, all native to Afro-Eurasia. After bees spread naturally throughout Africa and Eurasia, humans became responsible for the current co ...

populations. One60 Elgin is breifly featured in the opening title sequence of the Ottawa-made TV series ''

You Can't Do That On Television ''You Can't Do That on Television'' is a Canadian sketch comedy television series that first aired locally in 1979 before airing in the United States in 1981. It featured pre-teen and teenage actors in a sketch comedy format similar to that of ...

'' as a building labelled "Television Network", where a school bus pulls up to the front door and a number of children flood out and into the building, trampling the doorman (played by Les Lye).

References

''Exploring Ottawa: an architectural guide to the nation's capital.'' Harold Kalman and John Roaf. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983.

External links

{{coord, 45.419819, N, 75.692947, W, region:CA-ON_type:landmark, display=title Buildings and structures in Ottawa Modernist architecture in Canada

See also

References

External links