This photo of Wellington Street looking east shows a much different street. The only two buildings that still remain nowadays are the St. Andrew Church at Kent Street and the Metropolitan Life Insurance building at Bank Street.

Since the creation of Ottawa, Wellington Street grew organically and exhibited 3 to 5 story buildings with most of them had commercial space on the ground floor. Jacques Gréber thought that the existing buildings on the south side of Wellington were not grandiose enough for the institutional and nation building vision for Wellington Street.

The Department for Veterans (now the Justice Department) took over all of the smaller, but well integrated buildings.