Joseph Hormisdas Gariepy's home is a beautiful example of a style or architecture brought to Canada in the mid-1800s from the Second Empire in France of Napoleon III.
Built at the corner of what was Victoria Avenue and Fourth Street by the prominent Edmonton brick company P. Anderson and Co., this two-storey brick mansion is impressice and ornate. It features a mansard-style roof- a ridged roof with a steeper lower slope and shallower upper slope on all sides. A corner octagonal tower, originally topped with a wooden spire, overlooks the street corner, and a balcony used to extend over the main entrance of the house. Both the roof and the tower were covered with green-painted wood shingles. Wooden brackets support a small cornice beneath the roofline which actually begins at the outer edge of the eaves, rather than being set back. The high elliptical dormer windows which extend into the mansard roof, as well as the small oxeye windows in the tower, brandish lavish moldings and decorative wooden ornaments. The verandah that originally traversed the west and south facades featured ornate corner scrolling, but this was removed in 1967. The windows on the first storey are linked by a brick stringcourse.
Born in Quebec, Gariepy arrived in Edmonton at the age of forty, ready to invest in the small fur trading settlement. he built the Gariepy Block on Jasper Avenue and started a general store making his fortune by outfitting gold-seekers on their way to the Klondike in 1898, then turning his attention to real estate. His commitment to the growing town is evidenced by his involvement as an alderman and separate school board trustee and with many other organizations. At his death in 1927, the Edmonton Bulletin stated that Gariepy was "of a genial disposition" and that "he had no foe".
John A. McDougall bouht the Gariepy Mansion in 1923 then sold it the next year to the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul. The sisters named the building Rosary Hall after one of their previous abodes, and doubled the floor area with an eighteen-room addition designed by the McLean Engineering Co. in 1925. With a mission to care for single women in need of a protective environment, the sisters housed up to 58 women at times, often relinquishing their own beds to allow for one more. By 1962, the role of Rosary Hall was evloving to become an out-patient transition facility for women released from psychiatric hospitals, although more than 100 transient men regularly attended Sunday dinners hosted by the sisters as well. Substantial renovations upgraded the buildding in 1983, and today the Gariepy Mansion/Rosary Hall is one of the few early grand mansions remaining in Edmonton. It is listedd on the Inventory of Historic Resources in Edmonton.