Robert Smythe highlights three images of snowy Centretown winters from more than a century ago.
Heritage Skyline: The snows of yesteryear
Category: History
Bytown Museum reopens
The Bytown Museum recently reopened after a two-year closure because of the pandemic. We show several paintings from a new special exhibit.
Skyline: Home for printers, bookbinders, loose leaf, and card index systems
An unremarkable five-storey building on Nepean, just east of Bank, is actually a rare surviving remnant of Centretown’s industrial past.
Heritage Skyline: What’s behind St-Marc’s teetering tower?
Robert Smythe A catastrophic structural failure is threatening the Eglise Unie St-Marc’s stone tower. After cracks began to appear last year, an investigation revealed that it was in imminent danger of collapse. Heritage work orders were issued by the city…
Skyline: end of the line for the bus station… Next stop “hub of luxury”?
Robert Smythe The intercity bus terminal is leaving Catherine Street for good. The land has been sold to Brigil Construction, a Gatineau-based developer, who is planning a “prestigious project promoting urban densification.” At 2.55 acres, the site is uniquely large…
Skyline: The tortuous path of a development site. Was it worth the wait?
Robert Smythe Last month, The BUZZ exposed the vagaries of the city’s Landmark Buildings Policy which permits new developments of seemingly unlimited heights to be shoehorned into low-rise areas, in our story about 267 O’Connor. This month, we explore a…
Skyline: Heritage horsepower home deliveries
Robert Smythe Winter conditions usually halted the limited number of motor cars moving about Ottawa’s streets in the first decade of the twentieth century. That is when the horse regained its position as the undisputed king of the road. The…
It’s Centretown BUZZ Day!
The Centretown BUZZ turns 25!
This month marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of the BUZZ’s first issue in October 1995
The Centretown BUZZ: Our first five years
Robert Smythe The notion for a new community newspaper, with a progressive voice, was hatched around the big chipboard table in the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation’s (CCOC) meeting room during late summer 1995. Joining reps from the non-profit housing corporation…
Editors reminisce: Memorable stories & people in The BUZZ
Three former editors of the BUZZ tell us about the paper’s history while they were editor, the stories they covered, and why they think community news is important.
David Gladstone was an activist and bon vivant who left his mark on Centretown
David Gladstone–a longtime civic activist, Centretown BUZZ journalist, and research scientist–died in early June. He had many passions, and the biggest was for his home neighbourhood of Centretown.
Heritage Skyline: Moments from the City Archives
Staged and posed newspaper photos never reveal much about the sitters’ inner character but they do project a sense of relentless optimism. See a selection from the City of Ottawa Archives.
Four Weeks in October: The City of Ottawa and the pandemic of 1918
by Robert Smythe By now we are all too conscious of terms like “flattening the curve”, “social distancing”, and “self-quarantine”. A pandemic’s behaviour has become frighteningly familiar. In the final days of World War I the City of Ottawa was…
Skyline: Ottawa’s ice from blocks to sheets
by Robert Smythe Before the refrigerator, supplying Ottawa’s thousands of households and businesses with natural ice was a major undertaking. Every neighbourhood had its own ice house. Levi Booth started the Ottawa Independent Ice Co. at Percy and Cooper Streets…
Skyline: Clearing the Tracks
by Robert Smythe Ottawa’s new light rail trains have turned out to be winter wimps. Our rapid transit system of yore was made of sterner stuff. It operated in all but the most severe weather by employing a variety of…
