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.

closed on Bank

 

(Top to bottom, 152, 156-158, 160 Bank Street, D. Chouinard, iPhone 11 Pro)

These three storefronts occupy the ground floor of a 19th century, 3-storey block built in the commercial-Italianate style. 

The block actually comprises two buildings, each with its own fenestration scheme. 160 is older, built over 1871 to 1873 (Enoch Walkley), extending farther back on its lot. 152-158 dates to 1894-1895.

 

The present state of disuse relates, somehow, to heritage restoration efforts. You can view a detailed City of Ottawa document that includes a discussion of the properties here. Note that the authors of this document describe the facade of #160 as consisting of "(artificial?) stone panel storefront at the ground level." I gave the thing a knock and a poke and trust me, it is artificial — textured plastic on a wood-and-styrofoam armature. The other two facades are brick veneer over the original brick.

Faux stone at #160

a brutalist bodega

Corner store, dépanneur, whatever — #380 Laurier Avenue West was originally a row of four 2½-storey wooden houses (370-378 Maria), built before 1875. Aerial photos show that these were demolished at some point between 1945 and 1958, after which the property served as a parking lot until at least 1976, possibly until the mid-1980s when the Kent Towers apartments (background, 1986) were built.

The original row-houses appear in the upper left-hand corner of this detail of Charles Goad's 1878 insurance plan, sheet #38, at Kent and Maria (now Laurier West.)

(photo David Chouinard)

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.

mining the Gatineau Hills, an introduction

Ottawa's bedrock is sedimentary — mostly limestone, some shale, and sandstone if you know where to look. Limestone and sandstone make great building materials, shale less so. To our north, across the Ottawa River, metamorphic bedrock, rich in mineral ores, serve different functions. 

Of the history of mining in the Gatineau Hills, Dr. Shawn Graham observes...

"The same geology that makes Gatineau Park a stunning panorama, from the Eardley Escarpment to the rolling landscape of the Meech Creek Valley, also made the area attractive to miners in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There is a certain romance in mines named "Eva" or "Pink," and their ruins and tailings can be spotted underneath the dense underbrush which has, for the most part, reclaimed them. The names recall some of the earliest landowners and entrepreneurs: Forsythe, Baldwin, Lawless, Pink, Morris, Headley, Eva, Fortin-Gravelle, Laurentide, Wallingford, Cliff, Fleury, Chaput-Payne and McCloskey..."

Graham then describes the mining of mica, iron, and molybdenum in the area. Read his full article here.

(photo of the Pink's Lake mica mine via Capital Gems)