Welcome to my April 2017 Great and Powerful 2017 Blogging from A to Z Challenge!

I’ve revealed my theme (Welcome to James Bay!), and true to form, I am going to be blogging my theme letters more on the fly than I originally planned 🙂

Anyway, here we go…A is for Avalon Road!

Here is a Google map showing where Avalon Road is located in James Bay.  You can see the street view by clicking on the little box in the bottom left-hand corner

Avalon Road is only a couple of blocks, and one of those blocks is covered in apartment buildings, but the second block – that block is full of old heritage houses. I have some links to the Victoria Heritage Foundation pages on some of these houses below.

• 613 Avalon Road:  http://www.victoriaheritagefoundation.ca/HReg/JamesB/Avalon613.html
• 614 Avalon Road:  http://www.victoriaheritagefoundation.ca/HReg/JamesB/Avalon614.html
• 623 Avalon Road:  http://www.victoriaheritagefoundation.ca/HReg/JamesB/Avalon623.html (This is the one being fixed up in the picture below)
• 624 Avalon Road:  http://www.victoriaheritagefoundation.ca/HReg/JamesB/Avalon624.html

What I could find out about Avalon Road:

From the reading I’ve done, specifically on the heritage houses, it seems like Avalon Road came into being in the 1890s, with houses built for working and middle class people.   The block of Avalon Road closest to Douglas (near Beacon Hill Park) became home to apartment buildings very likely in the 1970s, before preserving its heritage houses became a going concern in Victoria.

As you look down Avalon Road towards Government Street, you see the James Bay Inn, which opened in 1911.  I really like that this one block of Avalon is “no exit” onto Government.  It makes it a nice, quiet block.

Here are some pictures I took of Avalon Road, just the other day

On the block with apartments

Just for perspective, here is a picture from 1913, looking down Avalon towards Beacon Hill Park (where the apartment buildings are now) that I took from my This Old House: James Bay book (http://www.victoriaheritagefoundation.ca/TOH/tohvol2.html), on page 22 (trying to cite as best I can!!).  I tried to find this picture in the digital archives, but no luck..sigh…

Looking towards the block with the houses.  Note that I did not take a lot of pictures of specific houses.  I always feel a bit creepy taking pictures of people’s houses, and you can see the houses by clicking on the Heritage links above 🙂

A pretty typical street in James Bay.

What else do you want to know about Avalon Road?  Ask away, and I will see what I can find out for you!

Thanks for visiting my first A to Z Challenge post of 2017.  You can find more A posts at http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/2017/03/atozchallenge-4-1-2017-letter-a.html.  Stay tuned for B is for… on Monday!!