By Robert Vineberg
When I was a kid, I knew it as “The Store”. Customers knew it as Larocque’s, but to me and my family, and to all of the employees of Larocque’s it was “The Store.” Its official postal address was 169 Rideau Street, but the store’s labels gave the address as “Rideau, Dalhousie and George Streets” because the big building covered the length of the entire block on Dalhousie and extended 70 feet on both Rideau and George. People walking down Rideau Street couldn’t help but notice the huge vertical “Larocque” sign on the corner of Rideau and Dalhousie: it was the largest neon sign in Ottawa. At night, the blue, red, green and white neon letters lit up one by one from top to bottom, like a beautiful waterfall of light.
The Larocque building was built in 1922-1923 by Joseph Alphonse Larocque, who had operated a general store at the corner of Dalhousie and Murray since 1909. Larocque took a huge gamble by building a big store on Rideau to compete directly with the English-owned department stores of the city. His big new three-storey store opened on May 19, 1923 to great acclaim. It was a fine example of Commercial Gothic architecture. M. Larocque operated the store on the ground floor and the basement. The government rented the two upper floors as the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Sadly for M. Larocque, his dream of competing with the other big Rideau Street stores was not realized. He was carrying too much debt, and on September 9, 1925, the company was taken over by a bankruptcy trustee. The trustee was looking for someone to liquidate the stock in the store prior to selling the building. My grandfather, Joseph Hirsch Vineberg, came from Montreal to run the liquidation sale. The sale was very successful and he realized that if it wasn’t carrying a lot of debt the store could be successful, so he bought the business in 1927 and, in 1931, moved his family to Ottawa.
Business was good because even during the Great Depression Ottawa, as a government town, remained prosperous. My grandfather purchased the adjoining property on Rideau Street and when the government no longer needed the upper floors, he expanded the store to fill the entire building. Later, my Uncle Nordeau and my dad, Lloyd, joined the business. The forties and fifties were boom years for the store and in the mid-fifties, a further addition was built on George Street to bring the building to about 50,000 square feet.
However, post-war prosperity led to the demise of community department stores everywhere. They could not compete with the buying power of national chains and most did not have the financial resources to open branches in suburban malls. Larocque’s also fell victim to another sad event: Lowertown redevelopment. Hundreds and hundreds of the families displaced by the expropriations in Lowertown in the late 1960s had accounts at Larocque’s. Without those loyal customers, the store was no longer profitable and my father and uncle concluded that they had to close the business. Its last day was December 31, 1971. As the sales area was reduced, floor by floor, during the closing-out sale, my father and uncle used their connections in the Ottawa business community so that every employee who wanted to continue to work found another job. The closing of “The Store” symbolized the end of a way of life in Lowertown brought on by its unfortunate redevelopment. My Dad and uncle continued to own the building and operated it for a number of years as The General Store, renting space out to other retailers. They sold the building to John Toth in the early 1980s and Mr. Toth engaged architect Barry Padolsky to restore the building. Mercury Court, crowned by the flying Mercury that once adorned the old Sun Life Building at Sparks and Bank, opened in 1989. Unlike so many other Lowertown landmarks, the beautiful Larocque’s building has survived, restored and reincarnated as Mercury Court.