by Robert Smythe There is a yellow brick structure anchoring the corner of Bank and Laurier that once played a distinctive role in Ottawa’s commercial development. That building is now about to turn 100 years old. Here is a centennial…
Category: Heritage
The real ‘Somerset House’: Ottawa’s first apartment building
The tangled story of the Somerset House disaster has taken another turn, with the City promising more action to provoke the building’s owner into completing his plans to redevelop it. They also intend to order the stabilization of the surviving…
The Heritage Skyline: Sparks Street old and new
by Robert Smythe To herald its long-awaited makeover, this summer the Sparks Street Mall’s management furnished the blocks with hammocks and bean bag chairs. More importantly, they’ve installed anti-vehicle bollards to barricade the mall from the cars and trucks that…
The Skyline: Taking a seat at the Chaudière
by Robert Smythe For generations, one of Ottawa’s most powerful marvels has been hidden from public view, only visible in the distance when squinting through the steel girders in the noisy traffic on the wrong side of the Chaudière Bridge.…
Vanished Centretown: Ghost houses at the bend in the Deep Cut
by Robert Smythe Do you know where Neville’s Creek, Neville’s Point, and Neville Street were? Today we might call this area the tip of the Golden Triangle. Previous generations would have called it the bend in the Deep Cut. It…
Château Laurier expansion: getting it right
by Heather McArthur Director, Heritage Ottawa In early February, the architects for Larco Investment Ltd. quietly unveiled a revised proposal for expansion of the iconic Château Laurier Hotel. On February 28, a public open house was hosted at City Hall.…
It’s Back to School! Remembering the old Percy Street Public School
by Robert Smythe On a bitterly cold morning in early January 1968, a bare-kneed piper led a column of 450 students bundling books down the few short blocks from their old school building to their new one. It was the…
Heritage Skyline: The bells of St. Jean Baptiste… will they ring again?
by Robert Smythe The first St. Jean Baptiste Church was constructed in 1872 on Queen Street West in LeBreton Flats. Originally, its parish extended westward to Britannia Bay and ultimately encompassed close to 5,000 souls. As the size of the…
What to do about the wall: Fate of historic Bronson Avenue retaining wall in dispute
by Kathryn Hunt The limestone wall on Bronson Avenue, north of Laurier, is in trouble. The Bronson Rehabilitation Project and its implications for traffic patterns north of Laurier, as well as the deterioration of the wall itself, have caused serious…