This page was created by Sean Fu.
Windows - Looking Into Keyes Block
Originally intended purely as a material to light up interiors while keeping out outdoor weather, shop owners and commercial units of the mid-19th century quickly picked up on its advertising abilities.¹ Publications such as the Canadian Grocer were continually publishing advice on window trimming and constructions, often lifting articles from British and American press to be disseminated to Canadian audiences. By the time of Keyes Block's construction, plate-glass windows were considered the hallmark of any modern commercial unit, with "an attractive façade of two 7-by-7 foot sheets facing the street and two 5-by-7 foot sheets beveled towards the doorway" being recommended as the ideal type, which Keyes Block closely adapted.
The window became the theatre for attracting leisurely passersby and potentially new clients, as well as encouraging impulse buying through advertising specialty items in visual fashion that traditional newspaper advertisements could not. New innovations that were initially met with wariness, from the factory-made footwear to the canned, packaged and pre-made grocery items of the many subsequent footwear salesmen and grocers that took up shop in Keyes Block throughout its history. The ability to allow a store's character to shine through in its windows was conversely a display of defiance, as the shop's transparent front became one of the only means of distinguishing it from the large-scale stores and manufacturers that were creeping towards Carleton Place².
As the plate-glass windows on the ground floor were a product of contemporary transformations in commercial space, the row of Tudor-style ogee arches on the second-storey residential units harken back to Gothic architectural history and injected a personal angle to the structure that was otherwise absent from the name alone.
George Keyes was formally George Keyes, Jr., the son of George Keyes, Sr. and Elizabeth Rose, immigrants from Ireland who moved to Huntley Township in Carleton County in the early 1830s. Hailing from County Wexford and County Kilkenny, respectively, both parents likely came into contact with ogee arches and other gothic elements in Ireland, where such style of church was prominent³. Given the early history of Irish settlement in Carleton Place alongside those coming in from the rest of the British Isles, the imagery of ogee arches would likely have resonated with catholic residents, on top of paying homage to the Keyes' ancestral roots, resulting in an ingenious expression of middle-class residential space.
