Old Eastview — time travel

 In my April 7 post I described a house in what is now Vanier, and mentioned its near-rural setting back in the 1930s when it was first built. I pointed out that McArthur Avenue was still a two-lane roadway at the time, and I've come across a photo that illustrates the fact. I honestly can't remember where I found this image. The typewritten caption has been partly cut off, but it clearly pertains to a report on a traffic accident...

"Re J. Connolly, truck damaged on McA[rthur]... Ont., on June 5th, 1931.  Photograph taken 100 feet East of cr[ossing]... standing on switch.  The switch... crossing."

An arrow labeled "truck" invites us into the landscape — let's have a look around.

Definitely rural-ish. We're looking west, down McArthur Avenue, indeed a narrow two-lane affair — dirt, possibly macadam. One hundred feet distant, a train track crosses the road. This is Ottawa's oldest railway line, opened as the Bytown & Prescott in the dying days of 1854. An already old-looking house sits just beyond the tracks. A wooden house appears at this exact spot on my oldest Ottawa top-map, dated 1906. Of course, the house could be older.

I assume the car belongs to the man on the tracks. I assume the man on the tracks is involved in the accident investigation. I assume there were two people in the car — the man on the tracks and the photographer. Evidently, the person in the passenger seat left (his?) car door open.

Now here's something odd. Notice the concrete sidewalk on the north side of the road, ending at the tracks. If you look carefully, you'll see that it seems to duck into the trees at an angle, a short way down the road. We can confirm this arrangement — it appears in an aerial photograph from 1933, two years after the accident.

The yellow X (lower right) marks the spot where we stepped into the picture. The photographer stood in the north lane of McArthur, just behind the maple tree that appears as a roadside smudge on the aerial.

The the train tracks (Canadian Pacific by this time) are clearly visible. The "switch" mentioned in the caption would have shunted trains onto the siding that splits off of the main track in the upper right.

And there's the sidewalk. It probably helps to know that the road running up to the left at an angle is Montgomery Street, which at the time connected McArthur to Montreal Road about 80 yards (remember yards?) from the Cummings Bridge. So the sidewalk wasn't just hiding in the trees, it had places to go. As for ending at the tracks, well it to end somewhere, didn't it? McArthur was heading east into farmland, and farmland doesn't have sidewalks.

Notice the yellow T on what looks like a pale market-garden plot. The T isn't for garden, it's for tennis. I count five courts. Shortly after the aerial was taken, the darkish square immediately to the north would become even more courts. That property is now the Selkirk and Mayfield apartments. In the upper left corner, what is (for the moment) the loading dock behind the Emerald Buffet was, as of 1933, a lumber yard.

I've highlighted two other features. S is for school. Eastview Public School opened in 1910. It became the J. O. Swerdfager (a former principal) Public School in 1956 and since 1980 has changed names more often than I can count. The building still stands.

H is for house, tucked into a wedge-shaped lot on the southeast corner of Montgomery and Selkirk. This dwelling, with its signature truncated pyramid roof may date to the 1910s, it may have been associated with J. H. White, one of Eastview's first mayors, and it may once have been home to the Plouffe family of local barbering renown. Research want's doing.

McArthur, as you might have guessed, was eventually paved and widened. The train tracks were replaced by the Vanier Parkway.

I never did find out anything more about the accident.