The Globe and Mail

It's hard to tell whether the whooshing noise rising up from behind the stately homes on Yates Street in St. Catharines comes from the rushing water of Twelve Mile Creek or the incessant traffic along Highway 406. Perhaps it's the mournful cries from the ghosts of a thousand steamer ships, which, during the 1800s, carried wheat, lumber and iron along these waters. What is definitely evident, as architect Harald Ensslen and I pull up in front of a delicately composed home of brick and stone, is that some of the province's best examples of arts and crafts architecture are right here in this city of ancient — and current — canals. Mr. Ensslen has invited me here on this warm late-summer day to recreate part of a house tour the Niagara Society of Architects organized in 2002. The tour was in conjunction with a gallery exhibit at Brock University that featured the work of Arthur Edwin Nicholson and Robert Ian Macbeth, two of the Niagara region's most talented architects.