On Augusta just north of Queen, there’s a beautiful Victorian house amid all the surrounding grunge. What’s the story? —Erica Berman, Annex

The house was built in 1876 by Edward Leadlay, a local industrialist who specialized in an assortment of sheep by-products (wool, tallow, lanolin, hides). Surrounded by a factory, Leadlay’s palace was just as out of place then as it is now. Seven years after the ovine oligarch’s death in 1899, the property became a Sally Ann home for elderly men. In 1937, it was purchased by the Felician Sisters, a Polish order of nuns that has been there ever since. The Sisters use the mansion as a convent and oversee a community centre in the back (catering to children and the homeless, as per the order’s traditions), thus tending the flocks in a different way than their predecessors.

• Categories: Architecture