c_speed3108
06-15-2008, 03:49 AM
Saving the Eastern Ontario look
As new development rolls through the region, a group of planners is documenting the special places, landscapes and buildings that make Eastern Ontario unique -- and worth protecting
Maria Cook, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, June 14, 2008
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
-- Big Yellow Taxi,
Joni Mitchell
- - -
The Rideau Canal, Almonte's main street, the farms of Prescott-Russell, even the relatively new Nortel campus, are all places that help define Eastern Ontario.
But as growing cities continue to plough under the countryside, a fear is growing that these elemental places may be lost or disfigured by the on-rush of development.
So how do we preserve these places? One first step is being taken by 16 members of the Eastern Ontario chapter of the Ontario Professional Planners Institute. They are compiling an inventory of buildings and landscapes, rural and urban, that captures what is special about Eastern Ontario. These volunteers believe that being able to articulate why these places have value is a first step toward preserving them.
The Eastern Ontario Visual Character Project identifies key features under the headings of natural areas and waterways, agricultural landscapes, special places, military places, main streets, scenic routes, and architecture.
The group warns that the region's unique landscapes and character could be altered utterly if inappropriate and unchecked development continues to gobble farm fields and intrude upon historic towns.
"It boils down to this," they write. "If the visual environment is deteriorating, how much are we, as planners and society, willing to accept?"
Already, large swaths of countryside look like giant suburbs and palatial summer homes are invading cottage country.
"There is a rich character to Eastern Ontario that sets it apart from other districts in Ontario and Canada," says Donald Morse, chairman of the institute's Eastern Ontario chapter and a City of Ottawa planner.
"Let's document what we have that's really good here and what will be missing if we jeopardize those things. The intention is to help raise awareness about visual character and to engage in a dialogue about the importance of creating a design culture in Eastern Ontario."
The visual character project encompasses a wide variety of places, including the Opeongo Line with its ghost towns and pioneer log fences, the Larose Forest (the second largest man-made forest in North America and home to a moose herd) and Kingston's Royal Military College.
It ranges from the stone bridge in Pakenham to the University of Ottawa campus, and the Frontenac Arch, evocatively described as "rolling, heavily forested landscape with lakes, swamps, bogs, rock ridges and barrens ... small pockets of productive farm land ... vacant dairy barns, stone houses, old farmhouses."
Louise Sweet-Lindsay, a City of Ottawa planner who is part of the project team, notes the diversity of landscapes compared to other parts of the province.
"We have very good agricultural land, Canadian Shield rock outcroppings, rolling hills, significant wooded areas and many lakes and rivers," she says. Proximity to Quebec has added French culture to the mix, while the three major waterways, the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa River, and the Rideau Canal, help tell the area's history.
Eastern Ontario, adds Mr. Morse, is a "quieter place" in which to live.
"People are generally happy to be here and seldom restless to leave," he says. "We have the best of both worlds. We are part of a modern, connected society yet we are able to live in any way imaginable," including in a village, a farmhouse, by the water, or in a city.
The group presented the project
recently at a planning workshop in Gananoque. It aims to make images and information available on the Internet by the end of the year. The material is meant for planners, urban designers, municipalities and the public.
Doug Thompson, Osgoode ward councillor and vice chairman of Ottawa's agriculture and rural affairs committee, says the inventory reflects concerns of rural residents.
"We want to keep the areas outside of the villages in their own rural character. How long we'll be be able to continue that I don't know," he says. "A lot of the big developers are buying up land along Bank Street between Mitch Owens Drive and Leitrim expecting that in 15 years the residential explosion will continue from( Osgoode) to Greely."
Meanwhile, rural tourism is thriving, he says, with city dwellers flocking to country fairs, farmers' markets and farms offering maple syrup and berry picking.
"The rural character is a huge sell, especially for Chinese and Japanese tourists," he adds. "They want to come out and enjoy the land and the trees. We have seven forests within the rural area of Ottawa. That's sort of unheard of."
Project participants fanned out across the region last fall photographing the distinctive and prized. None brought back images of big-box malls. Instead, they photographed the traditional main streets of Merrickville, Vankleek Hill, Almonte and Kingston and the Glebe, where continuous two- and three-storey buildings close to the street provide a mix of uses to serve the local community.
Mr. Morse says that main streets are among Eastern Ontario's best features. "They have survived relatively intact and function pretty well," he says. "But there are signs of deterioration.
"A lot of modern businesses are not finding a place in our main streets," he says. "They're not revitalizing that older fabric and they suck a lot of energy from the main street. The (building) fabric they create in those new areas isn't very good. It isn't very pedestrian-friendly, it's car-oriented."
The provincial Ministry of Municipal Affairs used to fund main street improvements.
"You could get $750,000 or $2 million from the province and you'd get Hydro to chip in half a million or a million to bury the wires. This is how the streetscape improvements were done along Montreal Road in Vanier.
"That doesn't happen anymore," he says. "If you don't invest, what signals are you sending?"
The sale of marginal agricultural land for estate lots (typically half an acre to 10 acres and used for a single large house) presents another issue.
"Farming small parcels is not economic and there are no incentives or tax breaks like in the United States to encourage landowners to keep their lands natural," says Ms. Sweet-Lindsay. "So, one of the easiest and best returns for these lands is to subdivide it into estate lots. It's a real dilemma."
Mr. Thompson, who has nothing against estate lots, adds "the developers can't develop them fast enough. There is a huge demand."
Urban guru Richard Florida has spoken of the potential for a renaissance of small towns and villages in Canada as city houses become increasingly expensive.
Manotick is a case in point. It could expand, and planned to do so in keeping with its established patterns. But, instead, large-scale development risks absorbing Manotick into the expanding suburbia of Ottawa.
"We do have some very good, very interesting rural villages; the core of Manotick is one of them," says Mr. Morse. "We have to ask ourselves, is the new development plugging in to that? Is it extending that good stuff, or is it doing something else?
"There's this view that the city should expand outwards like a water spill," he says. "That scares the hell out of the rural people. We could certainly do it in a much more contextual way. Why can't we do finger development out along rail corridors and start new villages along the way?"
What the visual character inventory brings to these debates is the ability to view proposals for individual sites in the context of larger patterns of rural or urban development.
Looked at in isolation, the construction of a subdivision or shopping centre may seem a reasonable use of a given piece of land. However, if understood within a larger landscape, then a big box store or suburb dominating the view would appear out of place. New houses or stores developed elsewhere, in a form sympathetic to context, could reinforce visual character. For example, a new winery would be a plus on the Prince Edward County Taste Trail but could blight another setting.
Increasingly, the term cultural landscape is used in preservation. UNESCO's world heritage committee, which last year designated the Rideau Canal as a world heritage site, defines cultural landscapes as distinct geographical areas or properties representing the combined work of nature and of man.
Buildings can be preserved as heritage. Nature can be protected in federal and provincial parks. But what of lived-in places, like the Lake Country (Golden Lake, Cranberry Lake, Mink Lake, Buck Lake) or the Franco-Ontarian towns of Alfred and L'Orignal, which have history, beauty and ongoing economic life?
The Eastern Ontario group is not seeking UNESCO status for their list, but hope that a visual character inventory can help to clarify issues for future planning. Without awareness of the big picture, important elements risk being lost.
"It's important to invest in the areas you like," says Mr. Morse
Among the planners' suggestions:
- Preserve Class 1 agricultural land to meet expected increases in demand for fuel and energy products such as ethanol.
- Put marginal farmland to better use than estate lot development.
- Develop new villages connected by a district-wide transit system
- Encourage reforestation and alternate forms of agriculture.
- Expand trails, pathways and corridors for recreational use, protection and appreciation.
- - -
Natural areas
Frontenac Arch Shield Farms
Rolling, heavily forested landscape with lakes, swamps, bogs, rock ridges and barrens. Small pockets of productive farmland. Abandoned fields and vacant dairy barns, stone houses, old farmhouses.
The Thousand Islands
The southernmost extension of the Canadian Shield, site of international shipping, seasonal dwellings, tourism (including more than 200 shipwrecks), protected park areas and farming.
Lake Country
Lakes, mainly in the Precambrian Shield and along the Rideau River, provide seasonal homes and places for summer recreation.
Alfred Bog, Mer Bleue, Larose Forest
n The Alfred Bog covers 4,200 hectares and features a large number of rare species of plants and animals.
n Mer Bleue has flora typical of wetlands found further north in the boreal forest. The bog is unique in that it is a remnant of what existed in this area after the last ice age.
n The Larose Forest is the second largest man-made forest in North America. It has white and red pine, original wooded areas and wetlands. It is home to a significant moose herd.
Waterways
Rideau Canal
A 202-kilometre navigable waterway connecting the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario at Kingston, it has a remarkable diversity of natural and cultural landscapes. The canal links large lakes in a Precambrian landscape to an agricultural and urban landscape.
This UNESCO World Heritage Site is a recreational treasure, with uses including traditional cottages, boating facilities and camping.
St. Lawrence River and Seaway System
A deep draft waterway, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened to navigation in 1959. Construction of the 306-km stretch of the Seaway between Montreal and Lake Ontario is recognized as one of the most challenging engineering feats in history.
The Ottawa River Valley/The Ottawa-Bonnechère Escarpment
The Ottawa River was first explored in the late 1600s by Samuel de Champlain. The river became one of the most important fur trading routes in Upper Canada. With the industrial revolution, it became an important timber route. Eastern Ontario owes much of its growth to this significant transportation corridor.
Farming Areas
Prescott-Russell
A prairie-like, world-class dairy farming area based on the flat clay plains deposited by the post-glacial Champlain Sea. The lands, buildings and towns are generally well-kept and are home to many cultures, including Eastern Ontario's francophone community.
The Beachburg Area
The most easterly portion of the flat clay lands formed by the post-glacial Champlain Sea. Good soils have been a platform for a thriving and older farming community sprinkled with interesting villages and hamlets such as Beachburg, Westmeath and Pleasant Valley.
Scenic routeS
The Rideau Canal Heritage Route
A varied landscape featuring urban development at north and south ends; extensive agrarian lands throughout; historic towns, villages and hamlets; undisturbed Canadian Shield wilderness and modest cottage development.
Opeongo Line
Opened in the 1850s, the Opeongo Line follows a westward climb from the Ottawa River to the Madawaska Highlands. The once-harvested forests have reclaimed many of the primitive homesteads. The remnants of the great hardwood forest still cloak the hills and stand cheek by jowl with areas of cultivated land separated by stone fences. And while many of the once- bustling communities are now relative ghost towns, the spirit of adventure that attracted the pioneers remains.
Prince Edward County Taste Trail
Situated on an island in Lake Ontario, the Taste Trail follows meandering back roads featuring unique wineries set in pastoral or storied settings, with historical, loyalist style, or high-tech modern buildings; charming country inns and B&Bs; inviting shops and cafes, bistros and resorts.
Main streets
Main streets are the spines of most communities. Made up of buildings in a continuous built form, located close to the street, they provide a mix of uses to serve the local community. Examples include Merrickville, Vankleek Hill, Almonte, and Princess Street in Kingston.
See an online map and photos for more on main streets.
Architecture
Residential
Victorian mansions in Belleville, Kingston, Brockville and Perth are evident. More humble pioneer log homes, French Canadian style houses or red brick houses are also found. Gilnockie is a typical limestone house of Eastern Ontario.
Commercial and mixed use
Many communities have streetscapes representative of our built heritage such as those in Merrickville, Almonte and Vankleek Hill, or more urban streetscapes of downtown Kingston or Sussex Drive in Ottawa.
Rural industrial and agriculture
Upper Canada Village typifies rural buildings and structures of Eastern Ontario. Elsewhere, old stone mills, such as those in Carleton Place, Smiths Falls and Manotick, show the history of water power in our area. Rural fairgrounds, old general stores and farm houses reflect the agricultural past and present.
Other examples include Almonte, Delta Mill, Ottawa's Aberdeen Pavilion, Bedford Mill and Kars
Special Places
From the very old to the very new, the project identifies dozens of notable places that are unique to the history and culture of Easter Ontario:
Churches
Eastern Ontario is fortunate to include a wide selection of beautiful examples of church architecture in a variety of styles (Gothic, Georgian, and Victorian) and materials (stone, wood, brick). Almost every community includes a noteworthy example.
French Roman Catholic churches
Roman Catholic churches, particularly the French Catholic churches, are generally characterized by a towering central steeple and two lesser corner steeples. These buildings are usually large in scale, indicative of the importance the church played in the community and in the political sphere.
University Campus
The University of Ottawa campus is a blend of new and historic buildings successfully woven into the original urban grid.
Historic Military Precinct
Fort Henry
A UNESCO World Heritage Site and a National Historic Site that is a living monument to the important military role that Kingston and the St. Lawrence played in the evolution of Canada.
The Royal Military College
in Kingston is a nationally significant military college and the first of its kind in Canada.
Modern institutional buildings
Examples include the hexagonal National Arts Centre, the Macdonald-Cartier International Airport terminal, the Canadian War Museum, the Morton Octagonal School, the Eganville church, the Vankleek Hill firehall.
Transportation facilities
The Rideau Canal is uniquely associated with Eastern Ontario, including lockmaster houses such as Upper Nicholson's. Other notable bridges include the stone bridge in Pakenham, the Minto Bridges near Rideau Falls and the Alexandria Bridge.
Military monuments
Old Fort Henry, the Martello towers, Forces Bases in Petawawa and Trenton, war memorials, town cenotaphs, the National War Memorial and the Cartier Square Drill Hall in Ottawa have played an important role in their communities.
Historic towns and neighbourhoods
L'Orignal and Alfred are Franco-Ontarian settlements featuring buildings and settlement patterns that reflect a French and Québécois influence.
Perth
Perth is an older English-grid town. It is home to numerous festivals and has a large inventory of colonial heritage buildings, many of which have been restored and improved. Uses in this area include mixed farming and seasonal recreation.
Brockville
Originally settled along the St. Lawrence River, and now extending north of Highway 401, Brockville is re-inventing itself as a tourist and retirement community following the decline of its shipping and manufacturing heritage. Brockville's main street is beginning to re-develop with mixed-use infill projects.
The Glebe
A complete community, including low-medium residential uses, religious, and educational institutions, as well as green space and public lands, all bisected by an active commercial main street.
High-tech campus
Nortel's Carling campus was built in the early 1990s at the height of the high-tech boom in Ottawa. It was modelled after similar facilities in California. The Carling campus has served to raise the profile of Ottawa as a world centre for computer technology.
Historic Institutional Buildings
Numerous fine examples of older institutional buildings exist, be they courthouses, city halls, schools or post offices. They vary from the Kingston Penitentiary to Parliament Hill to the Brockville Courthouse and Westboro post office.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008.
As new development rolls through the region, a group of planners is documenting the special places, landscapes and buildings that make Eastern Ontario unique -- and worth protecting
Maria Cook, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, June 14, 2008
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
-- Big Yellow Taxi,
Joni Mitchell
- - -
The Rideau Canal, Almonte's main street, the farms of Prescott-Russell, even the relatively new Nortel campus, are all places that help define Eastern Ontario.
But as growing cities continue to plough under the countryside, a fear is growing that these elemental places may be lost or disfigured by the on-rush of development.
So how do we preserve these places? One first step is being taken by 16 members of the Eastern Ontario chapter of the Ontario Professional Planners Institute. They are compiling an inventory of buildings and landscapes, rural and urban, that captures what is special about Eastern Ontario. These volunteers believe that being able to articulate why these places have value is a first step toward preserving them.
The Eastern Ontario Visual Character Project identifies key features under the headings of natural areas and waterways, agricultural landscapes, special places, military places, main streets, scenic routes, and architecture.
The group warns that the region's unique landscapes and character could be altered utterly if inappropriate and unchecked development continues to gobble farm fields and intrude upon historic towns.
"It boils down to this," they write. "If the visual environment is deteriorating, how much are we, as planners and society, willing to accept?"
Already, large swaths of countryside look like giant suburbs and palatial summer homes are invading cottage country.
"There is a rich character to Eastern Ontario that sets it apart from other districts in Ontario and Canada," says Donald Morse, chairman of the institute's Eastern Ontario chapter and a City of Ottawa planner.
"Let's document what we have that's really good here and what will be missing if we jeopardize those things. The intention is to help raise awareness about visual character and to engage in a dialogue about the importance of creating a design culture in Eastern Ontario."
The visual character project encompasses a wide variety of places, including the Opeongo Line with its ghost towns and pioneer log fences, the Larose Forest (the second largest man-made forest in North America and home to a moose herd) and Kingston's Royal Military College.
It ranges from the stone bridge in Pakenham to the University of Ottawa campus, and the Frontenac Arch, evocatively described as "rolling, heavily forested landscape with lakes, swamps, bogs, rock ridges and barrens ... small pockets of productive farm land ... vacant dairy barns, stone houses, old farmhouses."
Louise Sweet-Lindsay, a City of Ottawa planner who is part of the project team, notes the diversity of landscapes compared to other parts of the province.
"We have very good agricultural land, Canadian Shield rock outcroppings, rolling hills, significant wooded areas and many lakes and rivers," she says. Proximity to Quebec has added French culture to the mix, while the three major waterways, the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa River, and the Rideau Canal, help tell the area's history.
Eastern Ontario, adds Mr. Morse, is a "quieter place" in which to live.
"People are generally happy to be here and seldom restless to leave," he says. "We have the best of both worlds. We are part of a modern, connected society yet we are able to live in any way imaginable," including in a village, a farmhouse, by the water, or in a city.
The group presented the project
recently at a planning workshop in Gananoque. It aims to make images and information available on the Internet by the end of the year. The material is meant for planners, urban designers, municipalities and the public.
Doug Thompson, Osgoode ward councillor and vice chairman of Ottawa's agriculture and rural affairs committee, says the inventory reflects concerns of rural residents.
"We want to keep the areas outside of the villages in their own rural character. How long we'll be be able to continue that I don't know," he says. "A lot of the big developers are buying up land along Bank Street between Mitch Owens Drive and Leitrim expecting that in 15 years the residential explosion will continue from( Osgoode) to Greely."
Meanwhile, rural tourism is thriving, he says, with city dwellers flocking to country fairs, farmers' markets and farms offering maple syrup and berry picking.
"The rural character is a huge sell, especially for Chinese and Japanese tourists," he adds. "They want to come out and enjoy the land and the trees. We have seven forests within the rural area of Ottawa. That's sort of unheard of."
Project participants fanned out across the region last fall photographing the distinctive and prized. None brought back images of big-box malls. Instead, they photographed the traditional main streets of Merrickville, Vankleek Hill, Almonte and Kingston and the Glebe, where continuous two- and three-storey buildings close to the street provide a mix of uses to serve the local community.
Mr. Morse says that main streets are among Eastern Ontario's best features. "They have survived relatively intact and function pretty well," he says. "But there are signs of deterioration.
"A lot of modern businesses are not finding a place in our main streets," he says. "They're not revitalizing that older fabric and they suck a lot of energy from the main street. The (building) fabric they create in those new areas isn't very good. It isn't very pedestrian-friendly, it's car-oriented."
The provincial Ministry of Municipal Affairs used to fund main street improvements.
"You could get $750,000 or $2 million from the province and you'd get Hydro to chip in half a million or a million to bury the wires. This is how the streetscape improvements were done along Montreal Road in Vanier.
"That doesn't happen anymore," he says. "If you don't invest, what signals are you sending?"
The sale of marginal agricultural land for estate lots (typically half an acre to 10 acres and used for a single large house) presents another issue.
"Farming small parcels is not economic and there are no incentives or tax breaks like in the United States to encourage landowners to keep their lands natural," says Ms. Sweet-Lindsay. "So, one of the easiest and best returns for these lands is to subdivide it into estate lots. It's a real dilemma."
Mr. Thompson, who has nothing against estate lots, adds "the developers can't develop them fast enough. There is a huge demand."
Urban guru Richard Florida has spoken of the potential for a renaissance of small towns and villages in Canada as city houses become increasingly expensive.
Manotick is a case in point. It could expand, and planned to do so in keeping with its established patterns. But, instead, large-scale development risks absorbing Manotick into the expanding suburbia of Ottawa.
"We do have some very good, very interesting rural villages; the core of Manotick is one of them," says Mr. Morse. "We have to ask ourselves, is the new development plugging in to that? Is it extending that good stuff, or is it doing something else?
"There's this view that the city should expand outwards like a water spill," he says. "That scares the hell out of the rural people. We could certainly do it in a much more contextual way. Why can't we do finger development out along rail corridors and start new villages along the way?"
What the visual character inventory brings to these debates is the ability to view proposals for individual sites in the context of larger patterns of rural or urban development.
Looked at in isolation, the construction of a subdivision or shopping centre may seem a reasonable use of a given piece of land. However, if understood within a larger landscape, then a big box store or suburb dominating the view would appear out of place. New houses or stores developed elsewhere, in a form sympathetic to context, could reinforce visual character. For example, a new winery would be a plus on the Prince Edward County Taste Trail but could blight another setting.
Increasingly, the term cultural landscape is used in preservation. UNESCO's world heritage committee, which last year designated the Rideau Canal as a world heritage site, defines cultural landscapes as distinct geographical areas or properties representing the combined work of nature and of man.
Buildings can be preserved as heritage. Nature can be protected in federal and provincial parks. But what of lived-in places, like the Lake Country (Golden Lake, Cranberry Lake, Mink Lake, Buck Lake) or the Franco-Ontarian towns of Alfred and L'Orignal, which have history, beauty and ongoing economic life?
The Eastern Ontario group is not seeking UNESCO status for their list, but hope that a visual character inventory can help to clarify issues for future planning. Without awareness of the big picture, important elements risk being lost.
"It's important to invest in the areas you like," says Mr. Morse
Among the planners' suggestions:
- Preserve Class 1 agricultural land to meet expected increases in demand for fuel and energy products such as ethanol.
- Put marginal farmland to better use than estate lot development.
- Develop new villages connected by a district-wide transit system
- Encourage reforestation and alternate forms of agriculture.
- Expand trails, pathways and corridors for recreational use, protection and appreciation.
- - -
Natural areas
Frontenac Arch Shield Farms
Rolling, heavily forested landscape with lakes, swamps, bogs, rock ridges and barrens. Small pockets of productive farmland. Abandoned fields and vacant dairy barns, stone houses, old farmhouses.
The Thousand Islands
The southernmost extension of the Canadian Shield, site of international shipping, seasonal dwellings, tourism (including more than 200 shipwrecks), protected park areas and farming.
Lake Country
Lakes, mainly in the Precambrian Shield and along the Rideau River, provide seasonal homes and places for summer recreation.
Alfred Bog, Mer Bleue, Larose Forest
n The Alfred Bog covers 4,200 hectares and features a large number of rare species of plants and animals.
n Mer Bleue has flora typical of wetlands found further north in the boreal forest. The bog is unique in that it is a remnant of what existed in this area after the last ice age.
n The Larose Forest is the second largest man-made forest in North America. It has white and red pine, original wooded areas and wetlands. It is home to a significant moose herd.
Waterways
Rideau Canal
A 202-kilometre navigable waterway connecting the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario at Kingston, it has a remarkable diversity of natural and cultural landscapes. The canal links large lakes in a Precambrian landscape to an agricultural and urban landscape.
This UNESCO World Heritage Site is a recreational treasure, with uses including traditional cottages, boating facilities and camping.
St. Lawrence River and Seaway System
A deep draft waterway, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened to navigation in 1959. Construction of the 306-km stretch of the Seaway between Montreal and Lake Ontario is recognized as one of the most challenging engineering feats in history.
The Ottawa River Valley/The Ottawa-Bonnechère Escarpment
The Ottawa River was first explored in the late 1600s by Samuel de Champlain. The river became one of the most important fur trading routes in Upper Canada. With the industrial revolution, it became an important timber route. Eastern Ontario owes much of its growth to this significant transportation corridor.
Farming Areas
Prescott-Russell
A prairie-like, world-class dairy farming area based on the flat clay plains deposited by the post-glacial Champlain Sea. The lands, buildings and towns are generally well-kept and are home to many cultures, including Eastern Ontario's francophone community.
The Beachburg Area
The most easterly portion of the flat clay lands formed by the post-glacial Champlain Sea. Good soils have been a platform for a thriving and older farming community sprinkled with interesting villages and hamlets such as Beachburg, Westmeath and Pleasant Valley.
Scenic routeS
The Rideau Canal Heritage Route
A varied landscape featuring urban development at north and south ends; extensive agrarian lands throughout; historic towns, villages and hamlets; undisturbed Canadian Shield wilderness and modest cottage development.
Opeongo Line
Opened in the 1850s, the Opeongo Line follows a westward climb from the Ottawa River to the Madawaska Highlands. The once-harvested forests have reclaimed many of the primitive homesteads. The remnants of the great hardwood forest still cloak the hills and stand cheek by jowl with areas of cultivated land separated by stone fences. And while many of the once- bustling communities are now relative ghost towns, the spirit of adventure that attracted the pioneers remains.
Prince Edward County Taste Trail
Situated on an island in Lake Ontario, the Taste Trail follows meandering back roads featuring unique wineries set in pastoral or storied settings, with historical, loyalist style, or high-tech modern buildings; charming country inns and B&Bs; inviting shops and cafes, bistros and resorts.
Main streets
Main streets are the spines of most communities. Made up of buildings in a continuous built form, located close to the street, they provide a mix of uses to serve the local community. Examples include Merrickville, Vankleek Hill, Almonte, and Princess Street in Kingston.
See an online map and photos for more on main streets.
Architecture
Residential
Victorian mansions in Belleville, Kingston, Brockville and Perth are evident. More humble pioneer log homes, French Canadian style houses or red brick houses are also found. Gilnockie is a typical limestone house of Eastern Ontario.
Commercial and mixed use
Many communities have streetscapes representative of our built heritage such as those in Merrickville, Almonte and Vankleek Hill, or more urban streetscapes of downtown Kingston or Sussex Drive in Ottawa.
Rural industrial and agriculture
Upper Canada Village typifies rural buildings and structures of Eastern Ontario. Elsewhere, old stone mills, such as those in Carleton Place, Smiths Falls and Manotick, show the history of water power in our area. Rural fairgrounds, old general stores and farm houses reflect the agricultural past and present.
Other examples include Almonte, Delta Mill, Ottawa's Aberdeen Pavilion, Bedford Mill and Kars
Special Places
From the very old to the very new, the project identifies dozens of notable places that are unique to the history and culture of Easter Ontario:
Churches
Eastern Ontario is fortunate to include a wide selection of beautiful examples of church architecture in a variety of styles (Gothic, Georgian, and Victorian) and materials (stone, wood, brick). Almost every community includes a noteworthy example.
French Roman Catholic churches
Roman Catholic churches, particularly the French Catholic churches, are generally characterized by a towering central steeple and two lesser corner steeples. These buildings are usually large in scale, indicative of the importance the church played in the community and in the political sphere.
University Campus
The University of Ottawa campus is a blend of new and historic buildings successfully woven into the original urban grid.
Historic Military Precinct
Fort Henry
A UNESCO World Heritage Site and a National Historic Site that is a living monument to the important military role that Kingston and the St. Lawrence played in the evolution of Canada.
The Royal Military College
in Kingston is a nationally significant military college and the first of its kind in Canada.
Modern institutional buildings
Examples include the hexagonal National Arts Centre, the Macdonald-Cartier International Airport terminal, the Canadian War Museum, the Morton Octagonal School, the Eganville church, the Vankleek Hill firehall.
Transportation facilities
The Rideau Canal is uniquely associated with Eastern Ontario, including lockmaster houses such as Upper Nicholson's. Other notable bridges include the stone bridge in Pakenham, the Minto Bridges near Rideau Falls and the Alexandria Bridge.
Military monuments
Old Fort Henry, the Martello towers, Forces Bases in Petawawa and Trenton, war memorials, town cenotaphs, the National War Memorial and the Cartier Square Drill Hall in Ottawa have played an important role in their communities.
Historic towns and neighbourhoods
L'Orignal and Alfred are Franco-Ontarian settlements featuring buildings and settlement patterns that reflect a French and Québécois influence.
Perth
Perth is an older English-grid town. It is home to numerous festivals and has a large inventory of colonial heritage buildings, many of which have been restored and improved. Uses in this area include mixed farming and seasonal recreation.
Brockville
Originally settled along the St. Lawrence River, and now extending north of Highway 401, Brockville is re-inventing itself as a tourist and retirement community following the decline of its shipping and manufacturing heritage. Brockville's main street is beginning to re-develop with mixed-use infill projects.
The Glebe
A complete community, including low-medium residential uses, religious, and educational institutions, as well as green space and public lands, all bisected by an active commercial main street.
High-tech campus
Nortel's Carling campus was built in the early 1990s at the height of the high-tech boom in Ottawa. It was modelled after similar facilities in California. The Carling campus has served to raise the profile of Ottawa as a world centre for computer technology.
Historic Institutional Buildings
Numerous fine examples of older institutional buildings exist, be they courthouses, city halls, schools or post offices. They vary from the Kingston Penitentiary to Parliament Hill to the Brockville Courthouse and Westboro post office.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008.
