Overgrown

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This is a shot of the wooded area at the north end of Hurdman Park, north of the transit station, taken in late 2020. We're looking towards the Queensway, along a path that's a favoured haunt for those who enjoy feeding the nuthatches and chickadees that live in the area pretty much year-round.

Curiously, this stretch of path is all that remains of part of the north end of "old" Riverside Drive. Consider this aerial comparison. In the upper image (2019) i've drawn a yellow oval around that part of the woods where the path runs.

The lower image (1928) shows what was then Riverside Drive (then just a dirt road) running to the east of the old Hurdman farmstead.

Here's the Old Riverside Drive (yellow arrows) on a 1906 top map (detail.) In fact, this roadway appears at least as far back as H. F. Walling's 1863 map of the area.

The now-overgrown section of Riverside Drive was cut off from traffic when the Queensway bridge was opened in the 1960s. The section south of Hurdman Station was repurposed as bus transitway. 

the sculpted landscape

 

Welcome to the north end of Hurdman Park, summer 1991. This aerial view (courtesy of geoOttawa) relates to my post-before-last and offers a glimpse of a landscape then-recently transformed. And yes, I've been at it with the crayons, gussying up those bare patches.

The blue patch is an expanse of dead ground left behind after years of city snow-dumping, a practice that continued here well through the 1970s. Recovery was slow, but the area now boasts a stand of mature Eastern Cottonwood (Populus tremuloides). Grasses dominate the open spaces, and there's rose bush growing in the middle of it all, please don't ask me how it got there.

The yellow patch is the man-made hill. This one in fact, rising some 12 metres (40 feet) above the surrounding landscape.

As I write this, I don't exactly know where this heap of soil came from. Did someone, on a whim, decide to build a sledding hill and then forget to use it? I think not. While I don't have an exact date for the hill's creation, I do seem to remember it appearing in the early '80s, a time-frame that corresponds with a lot of digging in the immediate area — the Lees Avenue Transit Station on the far side of the Rideau River, as well as several high-rise apartments (on both sides) with extensive underground parking. All that excavated dirt had to go somewhere. Btw, I say "dirt" — I also seem to remember this fill as being a sand/silt mixture, prone to being carried away by the wind before a cover of charlock, alfalfa, red clover, sweet-clover and various grasses took root to hold it down.

For a sense of scale, the red line along the long the hill's long axis marks a distance of almost exactly 360 metres, or a fifth of a mile.

Hurdman Park

 Just south of the Queensway, bounded by the Rideau River and Riverside Drive, lies a swath of former farmland that has never been otherwise developed. Curiously, we owe the existence of this now-lovely park to the fact that for some three decades following WWII, the acreage was a dumpsite — literally — first for Ottawa's garbage, then for our snow, and finally as a landfill, possibly associated with the excavation of the Lees Avenue rapid transit station on the opposite bank of the Rideau.

 Such landfill dumping was created an artificial hill which appeared circa 1982[?]. I'm standing on top of it. The myriad herringbone ski-tracks confirm that we're indeed looking down a slope. In the background we see the only buildings of significance in Hurdman Park, the Hurdman rapid transit bus station (early '80s) and behind it, the elevated tracks of the Hurdman LRT station, completed in 2019.

(D. Chouinard, iPhone 11 Pro)