Welcome to Hollywood North, please excuse our snow. The Might Directory didn't list 233 Nepean in 1923 but some dodgy aerial photography seems to have captured it in '28, so let's say mid-twenties, inter bella and all that jazz.*
As walk-ups shrank, they shed their Edwardian encumbrances. Two and three-storey apartment blocks popped up all over Ottawa, often with minimal styling save some combination of glass-block to light the stairwell, and nods to deco/moderne in the form of corner windows and/or decorative brick courses, kept very clean and simple.
The Hollywood took a different tack, name-checking southern California's nexus of glamour, and appending mission-style fixtures (clay[?] tile, a rounded door arch) to what is otherwise a brick shoe-box. Was the stepped parapet meant to be read as an Aztec shout-out? Fusty window lintels are long gone, while the concrete sills echo the building's foundation, faux sandstone rebranded as faux adobe. Even the paving-stone effect surrounding the door frame is, on close inspection, thoroughly modern concrete, molded and dyed.
The Hollywood seems to have been the first house built on this spot, a saucy piece of infill tucked between two 19th century dwellings.
*Caveat to self — I'm finding ever more instances whereby not being listed in the City Directory isn't the same as not existing. The next post will offer an example.
