Calgary's Hart House, a three-storey mansion, formerly owned by pro wrestling's famous Hart clan, is for sale at $5 million,Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Ever dreamed of owning a big piece of wrestling history, complete with more than two acres of land and a view of the Calgary skyline?
It can all be yours for a little under $5-million in the form of the Hart House, the legendary abode of Alberta's first family of wrestling.
The mansion where Stu Hart and his wife, Helen, raised 12 children, seven of whom would become professional wrestlers, is back on the market. The place includes a basement room nicknamed "the dungeon," where Mr. Hart schooled generations of men in tights in the finer points of submission holds and body blows.
In its heyday, everyone from Muhammad Ali to Hulk Hogan visited, and the house even played host to a WWF-sanctioned match.
"If you walked into it, it didn't look like much or seem like much," said Bret (The Hitman) Hart, Stu's son, in an interview with IGN Sports. He described holes in the ceiling and even cracks in the walls from wrestlers slamming each other into them.
"I can tell you, what made the room was the presence and knowledge of knowing what men had suffered on that mat," he said.
The late Chris Benoit, who was among the wrestlers to be thrown around by the senior Mr. Hart, reportedly said of the experience that "going to the Hart family for training was kind of like, if you're a very religious person, going to the Vatican."
The stately brick house was built in 1905 in what was then open countryside west of the city by Edward Crandell, who owned a nearby brick factory.
In the 1920s, it was used as a Red Cross hospital for convalescing First World War soldiers, and also housed children orphaned by the war.
Stu Hart, who founded the Stampede Wrestling organization, bought it in 1951. After Mr. Hart's death in 2003 at age 88, the home was sold to a local businessman who restored its woodwork and renovated the kitchen. The dungeon, however, was left partly intact, with bars on the wall and a punching bag hanging from the ceiling.
To the disappointment of wrestling fans hoping to get a peek inside Calgary's ultimate school of hard knocks, there won't be an open house. The only people who can get in are those interested in buying, said real estate agent Gary Cronin.
The 5,500-square-foot, six-bedroom home sits atop a hill on 2.5 acres of land, which the new owner will have the option to develop.
And the dungeon isn't the only piece of Hart family history left here, Mr. Cronin said: many of the bricks in the house bear messages carved by family members over the years.
"They've got things like 'Happy Birthday, 1958' or 'Third Child Born.' You can spend an hour going around the whole house and just finding these," he said.
With a report from The Canadian Press