GLASGOW–In a grimy lane in central Glasgow stand an abandoned brothel and a boarded-up saloon. Partners in hopelessness, they face the dismal thoroughfare. The building that houses them, like all its neighbours, is slated for demolition, and standing there you think: the sooner the better.

Yet from this doomed street in 1820, a failed businessman began a journey that ended in the creation of a country. He left his place of work in Brunswick Lane for the last time. A ship was waiting in the River Clyde, and he boarded with his family. Among them was his eldest surviving son, a 5-year-old.

The boy was John A. Macdonald.

"And you'd never know this place had anything to do with him," said Douglas Pritchard, a Winnipeg-born architect, as he stood in the Glasgow lane and looked at the hoardings and the flaking paint and the green weeds growing in the cracks.

"If this was connected to George Washington, the Americans would have covered it in gold. There'd be arrows pointing the way from miles around," Pritchard said.

"Not even a plaque."

"It's a crying shame," said John McNamee, a local politician who has been agitating for a memorial to Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister. "It's a shame and a scandal. Macdonald was a great man and he founded a great country – one of the beacons of hope for immigrants from everywhere in the world."

McNamee is a councillor in the sprawling municipality of South Lanarkshire that borders Glasgow to the east. An unabashed admirer of Canada, three years ago he tried to interest Ottawa in his plan.

The Prime Minister's Office bounced McNamee's query to Canadian Heritage, which took 2 1/2 months to tell him they'd be sure to keep it in mind.

The Brunswick Lane site is owned by Selfridges, a high-end British department store. Selfridges in turn is owned by Toronto billionaire Galen Weston. This week, learning that their Glasgow site was connected to Macdonald, Selfridges agreed to include a memorial in its development plans.

Veteran Glasgow city councillor Colin Deans, born in Scotland but raised in Nova Scotia, is a proponent of a Macdonald memorial, as is councillor Catherine McMaster.

"I can assure you," McMaster said in an email, "that I will be active and robust in my promotion of the memorial to Sir John A. Macdonald."

Part of the problem with remembering Macdonald in Glasgow is deciding where to do it. It is not certain that he was born in Brunswick Lane. Records show his father worked there, at two addresses, and families often lived in rooms attached to the breadwinner's business.

In a black-and-white documentary shot in a crowded pub in Brunswick Lane 40 years ago, Saskatchewan's Hugh Gainsford, who claims to be Macdonald's only living descendant, says his great-grandfather was born on the top floor.

A commemorative tablet put up by the Ontario government on a church wall two blocks away asserts that Macdonald was born in the local parish.

But some believe Macdonald was born on the other side of the River Clyde, where the birth was registered. An early Macdonald biography also puts the birthplace there, "in a row of stone tenement houses near the ferry landing," an area razed long ago.

Wherever he was born, the only address in Glasgow incontestably connected to him is the shabby street now waiting for the wrecker.

"He may not have been born there," said Graham MacDonell, a Canadian-born genealogist who lives in Scotland and has amassed an archive on Macdonald, "but he would have played there as a boy.

"He'd have gone there with his father. He knew the street."

McNamee recalled that when he heard the news that Selfridges had agreed to include a memorial in its development plans, he said, "Businesses are more agile than government. In this economic climate, that's what it takes."

Final development will not take place until the economy picks up, but Steve Inch, Glasgow's top planner, says demolition will go ahead in about six months, probably to make a parking lot.

Fortunately, there is a way to preserve the Brunwick Lane property – digitally. Pritchard, who now works at the Glasgow School of Art, has pioneered a technique of laser-scanning buildings to create three-dimensional images. In Scotland, he has scanned and modelled such sites as Stirling Castle.

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Once the hoardings have been pulled off in Brunswick Lane, Pritchard, in an afternoon of scanning that will cost Selfridges about $1,500, will capture an image of the building, down to the finest detail.

The street may be rubble but the building will remain – on a disk.