It’s just a snippet of a park, only a sliver of land between Frank Street and Gladstone Avenue, but its history is bound up with some important milestones in Ottawa’s municipal past. Several times it has survived close escapes when either City Council wanted to be rid of it, or traffic engineers and urban planners have tried to devour it for other purposes. First, to explain the park's long and narrow dimensions, a shallow half-block that was cut short when the city’s street grid ran into the city’s southern boundary of the time. More significant is the origin of its name. From 1898 to 1925 ..read more

Experience has proven that at least 50% - no, make it somewhere between 60-80% of the new building construction news published in Ottawa's dailies during the 1960s and 70s never got built, or underwent some major transformation before going up. These breezy bulletins usually contained phrases like 'construction is set to begin within the month...' or 'completion of the new building is expected for.. (some unreasonable date)'. Here are three such pledges undertaken in the spring of 1970 - case studies in what could happen to those optimistic announcements. (Ottawa Journal, June  20, 1970 ..read more

E.D. Lowe and T.H. Martin established a small printing and bindery business on Bank Street in 1910, expanding steadily so that it would soon open satellite sales offices in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg. On May 14, 1913 the Contract Record and Engineering Review reported that Lowe-Martin Co. Limited was engaging the services of Ottawa architects Alan Keefer, Hugh Richards and William Abra to design a five-storey office and printing plant on Nepean Street. Two years later the Ottawa Journal extolled that this firm 'must not only be judged by a their finished work [mostly catalogues] and stead ..read more

This is a short prequel to an earlier posting on the noble Connaught Building, with a smattering of construction progress photos of excavation-digging, foundation-laying, and steel-erecting.  If you believe the LAC captions that accompanied these photos they were taken over six days in the mid-summers of 1913 and 1914, and were probably part of a much larger series that documented the Connaught's entire construction. They were likely bound together in a Department of Public Works album that is lost to time or yet to be discovered in DPW's vast archival holdings. These photos offer a part ..read more

On a blazing hot afternoon in August 1935 four hundred dogged protesters arrived in Ottawa after a 22-day, 290-mile walk from Toronto. They were attempting to finish the earlier cross Canada “On-to-Ottawa” trek that had been smashed up by deadly police violence in Regina.  Their objective was to present Prime Minister Bennett with a 7-point manifesto demanding financial relief for unemployed workers and other benefits. He rejected their request outright and refused any federal assistance for food or shelter. The City of Ottawa was left to deal with this dilemma. The trekkers who alterna ..read more

You wouldn't say that Walter Herbert George (1880-1959) was entirely forgotten, but with only eight identifiable buildings in Ottawa his recorded output is limited. It is apparent that he was responsible for many more projects that have yet to be discovered. W. Herbert George designed several of the luxurious Arts and Crafts, Tudor Revival, Spanish Colonial, and neo-Georgian houses on Clemow and Carling [now Glebe] Avenues and Linden Terrace.  This district east of Bank was part of an upper class subdivision then being jointly developed by the Clemow-Powell families and the Ottawa Improv ..read more

Francis Sullivan's subterranean public conveniences, once situated under the sidewalk at O'Connor and Sparks Street are an urban legend. They have been pictured as spooky spaces, lying silently underground, sealed up like a pharaoh's tomb. While the comfort stations were probably Sullivan's smallest commission, no other project generated so much controversy. Coming at the peak of his creativity, by the time that they were built his career had entered a downward spiral that ended in his early death. Paralleling Sullivan's own life story, the comfort stations met a fate as ignoble as their arc ..read more

  This post starts out with one of those wacky proposals that (thankfully) never came to pass, but then turns to a quick survey of the diverse and highly productive career of its architect, William Caven Beattie.  After attending the Toronto Technical School W.C. Beattie (1886-1945), the son of a Protestant minister from Guelph, Ontario was then trained at four prestigious architectural practices - John Lyle (1906-08), Darling and Pearson (1908-12), RAIC President Francis Baker (1913) and Alfred Chapman (1914). Beattie moved to Ottawa in 1918 becoming Superintendent of Building ..read more

Cheesy click-bait title I know, but it is intriguing to realize that this important little building's location has been so utterly erased from Centretown's collective memory. The Canada Atlantic Railway's Elgin Street station operated from a site near the corner of Catherine and Elgin Streets from 1882 to 1895. During that time it was one of Ottawa's primary passenger depots. For a more thorough history of this place I must guide you to David Jeanes' entry in the Railways in Canada pages. Railway lore can be arcane and I am bound to get something wrong, so this post is not really for the dieh ..read more

A previously unseen (at least by me) grainy photo of an old house on Metcalfe Street that was included in the official souvenir pamphlet distributed at the opening of the Public Service Alliance of Canada Building (Schoeler, Heaton, Harvor, Menendez Architects) on December 21, 1968 peaked my interest and opened up this rather discursive line of inquiry into the fate of such buildings. The site of that old house is now the home of the High Commission of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, a powerful reminder that the 1970s produced buildings both good and bad. This is what had been previou ..read more