Primrose at Cambridge

 If 72-74 Cambridge Street North seems to loom at an especially gangly angle, don't blame my camera-work. The house was built on a wedge-shaped foundation, giving it that "cyclopean" air.

The present siding is about ten years old and dates to a renovation that saw this historical corner store converted for residential use. Google Street View imagery from spring 2009 shows the Cambridge Food Mart when it still served the St. Vincent Hospital neighbourhood, clad in what may well have been the original, wooden siding, painted a cheery turquoise, with over a century of paint-jobs underneath.

The store appears on Goad's 1888 sheet #58, labeled "Groc." — a wooden (yellow) build, its wonky footprint evident, its corner mounted door proclaiming its function.

The City Directory for the same year lists the building's Cambridge Street address thus...

Chinatown, side-view

 The lot at 681 Somerset West sat vacant for most of the 20th Century. Then, at some point during the 1990s, this boxy little affair popped up. I've shot it from the side to show off its unabashed reliance on cinder-block construction.

The front (south) facade features modern window treatments, inset balconies, and a brick veneer. The ground floor hosts two shops, a herbalist and a gift shop, the upper two storeys are residential. Scale is entirely in keeping with the neighbourhood.

Ashburnham sunrise

 Looking west — warmer days ahead, we hope.

Insofar as Bytown was a preplanned community (1826), Upper Town, especially north of Wellington, was the designated enclave of the "haves." Soon enough, the monied class expanded their range southward, into the cliff-top Ashburnham district.

Even as this was happening, Bytown became Ottawa (1855), the Capital of Canada (1857), and an influx of civil servants turned the area immediatley west of the downtown core into something rather different — the middle-class sprawl of Centretown and beyond.

2 Robinson Avenue

 Here's an eye-grabber from the Ottawa Business Journal...

"A Montreal company wants to build more than 1,600 residential units as part of a five-tower development at the former site of the Iranian Cultural Centre in Sandy Hill.

Place Dor​ée Real Estate Holdings has filed an application with the city for a plan that would see four highrises of 30 storeys each as well as a nine-storey building at 2 Robinson Ave.  

Located near the intersection of Nicholas Street and the Queensway, the wedge-shaped, 5.7-acre plot of land used to be the home of the Iranian Cultural Centre. The facility closed in 2012 after the federal government under then-prime minister Stephen Harper expelled Iranian diplomats from Canada..."

Full article here.

"Place Dor​ée" has approximately zero web presence.

flood here often?

 Here's a treat for homeowners living on or near the Rideau River floodplain, or indeed for anyone who enjoys a good natural calamity.

The map comes from the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority and shows projected flooding in the Brantwood Park and Hurdman Woods areas for a once-in-a-hundred-year high-water event. The image combines historical flood-level records with modern topologic and built landscape data. The map, and many more like it, can be accessed on the RVCA website at https://www.rvca.ca/watershed-conditions/neighbourhood-flood-maps.

As described by the RVCA...

"Within the RVCA’s regulated floodplain, staff have identified a number of Flood Vulnerable Areas throughout the watershed where flood events may have an impact on nearby properties... A series of new Neighbourhood Flood Maps for 20 vulnerable City of Ottawa communities along the Ottawa and Rideau Rivers shows the potential extent of flooding for 1:2, 1:5, 1:10, 1:20, 1:50 and 1:100 year return period floods for these neighbourhoods."

Ottawa residents will be especially interested in the maps for areas downstream from Hog's Back Falls — Brewer Park (who remembers Nordic Circle?), Windsor Avenue, Rideau Gardens, Brantwood Park, Kingsview Park, and New Edinburgh.

Yes, New Edinburgh.

This would be Creighton Street, perhaps during the great flood of March, 1898 (there were quite a few.) I can't find the photographer's name, but Messers Jarvis and Pittaway took pictures of the event and displayed them at their studios. I'm sure Topley would have swung by as well.

(1898-3-18, Ottawa Journal)

Christ Church Cathedral

(D. Chouinard, iPhone 11 Pro) 

In my carefully maintained ignorance of things ecclesiastical, I assumed, safely I thought, that a cathedral was an especially large and ornate church, just as surely as a basilica is where priests keep their pet basilisks.

Well, size does count, up to a point, but there's more. There's always more. Wikipedia explains...

"A cathedral is a church that contains the cathedra (Latin for 'seat') of a bishop, thus serving as the central church of a diocese, conference, or episcopate. Churches with the function of "cathedral" are usually specific to those Christian denominations with an episcopal hierarchy, such as the Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, and some Lutheran churches..."

May we never stop learning. 

The site at (now) 414 Sparks Street, perched on a bluff overlooking LeBreton Flats, was donated to the Anglican Church by Nicolas Sparks in 1832. A small church was erected, and saw its first service on July 21 1833. A stone rectory was built next door in 1865. The original church was replaced by the larger, present, Gothic structure (King McCord Arnoldi, architect), which opened in September 1873.

King M. Arnoldi — dashing fellow, wot? (1895-1-23, Ottawa Journal)

Here's how Charles Goad depicted the cathedral precinct in 1878... (sheet #43, detail)

At the bottom-leftish, we see Christ Church and its rectory — both in blue, indicating stone construction. Back in the day, the western extremity of Sparks Street split in two, one half running along the top of the escarpment to Concession Street (now Bronson), the other cleaving to its base.

The area bounded by Sparks, Wellington and Bay is now the Garden of the Provinces. In 1878 it was a mixed-use block, with a handful of stone dwellings to the east and Alexander Fleck's Vulcan Foundry (pink, brick) at its west end.

(1873-10-7, Ottawa Citizen)

Indeed, Goad's drawing from some five years later confirms that Fleck's improved building, draped over a sloping landscape, consists of one storey facing Sparks Street, but two storeys looking onto Wellington.

The rectory must have been a charming little house, tending toward the stolid, squarish footprint these buildings so often favour. It succumbed to "progress" some time between 1945 and 1965.