The 120-year-old residence at 54 ½ St. Patrick St. bears the scars of a development battle.

The Victorian row house was awkwardly severed from its neighbour in the 1970s when the owners refused to sell, and it lacks the symmetry of another side.

It is literally “half a house,” says its current owner, Albert Zikovitz, laughingly from his adjacent office in the Cottage Life Magazine building. “Everybody looks at it.”

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The house is one of a few single-family homes left on the densely packed street near Queen and University. But Zikovitz, who purchased the house last year after the owner went into a retirement home, says he won’t tear it down.

“I love the house,” says Zikovitz, who is president of the magazine. Plans are in the works this year to restore the exterior of the building and turn the interior into office space.

Once owned by the Valkos family, the house became the focus of a pitched battle in the 1970s as a developer bought up properties to build Village by the Grange, the massive condo development that spans half a city block between Queen and Dundas Sts., and from McCaul St. east to St. Patrick St.

As owner after owner sold, the Valkoses dug in.

But it wasn’t easy.

“They were being harassed like crazy to sell,” says Zikovitz, who became friends with their daughter, Emily Brown, and her husband, Eric Brown, when they moved back into the family home after her father died. “People were knocking on their door non-stop and making them offers.”

“Once the developers realized they weren’t going to sell, they began tearing down the building beside them, which caused them all sorts of headaches and problems,” he says.

And Zikovitz would know.

When he bought the house from Emily last year, she left behind the paperwork war she and her husband waged on behalf of her parents. (Eric, who worked at the Ford plant in Oakville, died in 2009.)

Letters to lawyers, developers and politicians — including former mayor David Crombie and, later, Art Eggleton — outline complaints about how the demolition of the adjoining house allowed rain to seep into hers, and of the “agony” of fighting with the developer over the insulation and finish that would now go on the exposed north wall of the house.

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In another letter, Emily complains about “harassment by different pushy real estate agents (by phone, door, mail) to sell the house for very low prices.”

The Browns had to go through it all again when a demolition permit was issued in the ’80s for the house adjoining theirs on the south side. It was eventually torn down and rebuilt and is now the site of the Cottage Life offices.

Zikovitch says Emily — a former private secretary for an Imperial Oil executive — was frail and moved into a nursing home last year. She recently passed away at the age of 82. The couple had no children.

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“They were wonderful neighbours to have,” says Zikovitch. Staff from the magazine, including office manager Dawn Yager, knew the couple well.

“Mr. Brown was a real gadabout in the neighbourhood. He used to go around and make friends in the convenience store and with people in the Grange,” she said. “He always had a story or a joke.”

After he died, Yager and other staff members visited Emily daily and often did her shopping. “She was absolutely lovely,” said Yager. “The kindest person.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the half-a-house scenario could happen again today.