Robert Smythe
Were Centretown’s forebears a hardier lot in the winter months?
Living in what were often draft-prone uninsulated dwellings and forced to travel snow-clogged streets in unheated conveyances, they were probably forced to be.
Yet the images of the neighbourhood from 125+ years ago also speak of pristine snow and a muffled silence unsullied by the roar of motorized vehicles. At least that’s the romantic view of winters past.
All photos from Library and Archives Canada.
Almost mired in some mighty snowbanks, Ottawa Electric Railway’s streetcar number 17 is trying manfully to perform its regular shuttle between the CPR Station on Broad Street in LeBreton Flats and Rideau Street.
Interestingly, for a time the route ran right down Wellington Street past the Parliament Buildings, which raises comparisons with the City of Gatineau’s current attempt for a similar cross-river tram.
The photo’s caption suggests that this was photographed in the early 1890s at Queen and Kent Streets before reaching Bank and the turn onto Wellington. The unheated and largely open interiors of these early cars would have offered its freezing passengers very few creature comforts. However, unlike some vehicles on our current rapid transit system, its trailing pantograph seems to be firmly attached to the wires overhead.
The wards of the Protestant Orphans’ Home at play around their newly constructed snow fort during the cold winter of 1898, with what appears to be a flooded ice-skating surface in the distance. This was a moment of joy in what would have been a very bleak existence dictated by the stern group of society matrons who ran the place.
The Orphans’ Home stood at the southwest corner of Elgin and Lisgar Streets between 1885 and 1929, when it was transformed into the less ominous-sounding Protestant Children’s Village on Carling Avenue.
This grimly institutional building was abandoned and demolished for a block of commercial buildings facing Elgin and the Manhattan and Royal York Apartments.
The Ottawa Normal School, pictured from a corner of the orphans’ playground under a heavy blanket of snow in December of 1893.
Today, this is the Heritage Wing of Ottawa City Hall containing the mayor’s and city manager’s offices. When it was built in 1874-75, it was situated at what was then the edge of the city’s built-up district.
Ontario’s Normal School system was established to give its student teachers a consistent province-wide grounding in the methods of education, all in one year.
After graduation, they could move into the classrooms at the rear of the building: the Ottawa Model School where their teaching skills could be further observed before being dispatched to the city’s growing network of public schools.
The keen-eyed may observe that snow-plowing was very limited – just enough to keep Elgin’s streetcars running. Sidewalks were hand-shoveled in spots.